Armies of Helper Robots Keep Amazon's Warehouses Running Smoothly

jones_supa writes Amazon is continuing to maintain its vision of an automatic warehouse. Since acquiring robot-maker Kiva, a Massachusetts company, for $775 million in cash in 2012, the e-commerce retailer has been increasingly implementing automation at its gargantuan fulfillment centers. This holiday season, Amazon's little helper is an orange, 320-pound robot. The 15,000 robots are part of the company's high-tech effort to serve customers faster. By lifting shelves of Amazon products off the ground and speedily delivering them to employee stations, the robots dramatically reduce the manual labor to locate and carry items. The Kiva robots, which resemble overgrown Roombas, are capable of lifting as much as 750 pounds and glide across Amazon's warehouse floors by following rows of sensors. Because Kiva-equipped facilities eliminate the need for wide aisles for humans to walk down, eighth-generation centers can also hold 50% more inventory than older warehouses. As Amazon is doing well, the company says that increase of automation hasn't yet led to staff reduction.

Comments

Re:So instead

[MrL0G1C]

Why didn't you google it you lazy ****

My week as an Amazon insider | Technology | The Guardian

I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave | Mother Jones

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Re:So instead

[dryeo]

That hasn't been consistent. After the Luddites there was 70 years of chronic unemployment which society met by executing people who stole a loaf of bread. Then it became necessary for the whole family to work to make ends meet, your kid is now 5 years old? Better put the kid to work. Then as the need for workers fell due to automation, things like compulsory education were introduced to cut down the labour force, then expanded to even more education needed for most jobs until today where kids are expected to stay in school until almost 30 years old. Women were also removed from the work force about the same time with the idea of the stay at home mom. This wasn't so bad as wages did go up for a while due to the efforts of unions and the threat of socialist revolution. Eventually the population was convinced that socialist meant bad and wages stopped going up, women returned to the workforce so the family didn't fall too far behind and whole classes of people were created that were unemployable (felon) to keep the unemployment numbers looking good.
Now we live in a time where the middle class is shrinking, most people have massive debt while production is at an all time high. Meanwhile there are businesses such as Amazon who cater to the more well off (need good internet and a credit card to take advantage of those low prices) which push up the costs of other businesses due to less economics of scale.
Today the people who are doing well are doing very well while the majority are scraping by.