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Robots In Amazon's Warehouses Are Already Making a Huge Difference (qz.com)
Amazon acquired Kiva, a robotics company for a sum of $775 million in 2012, and started to use robots in its warehouses in late 2014. At the time, the idea was that it will make inventory management more efficient. It's actually doing an impressive job. The "clip to ship" process used to take around 60-75 minutes when human employees were taking care of things, now the robots are doing the same job in 15 minutes. From a Quartz report: These robots are not only more efficient but they also take up less space than their human counterparts. That means warehouse design can eventually be modified to have more shelf space and less wide aisles. At the end of the third quarter of 2015, Amazon was using 30,000 Kiva robots across 13 warehouses. Each Kiva-equipped warehouse can hold 50% more inventory per square foot than centers without robots. In turn, the company's operating costs have been sliced by 20% -- or almost $22 million -- per warehouse. If Kiva robots are dispatched to the rest of the 110 Amazon warehouses, the tech giant could save almost $2.5 billion, according to Deutsche Bank. However, since it takes $15-$20 million to install robots in each warehouse, the one-time savings is expected to be closer to $800 million.
We must at all costs keep them from having access to rifle emojis!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Next step should be to design robots to buy stuff online, otherwise with all jobs automated who is going to buy from Amazon?
How many employees can they fire in the process? I assume they're not keeping the same amount of employees as before as some tasks are be relegated to robots.
I don't think they fired anyone - the business is still growing, and turnover is high anyhow (it's a shitty job, by all accounts).
If you don't know about these robots, BTW, they're quite clever. It's a shame among all these overpriced social media startup acquisitions that Kiva wasn't worth a lot more. Rather that getting hung up on the problem no one has solved yet (picking the part from the bin on the shelf reliably and cheaply), they built a robot to move the whole shelf to a central locations where the humans do the rest. They solved a problem that was practical to solve, and it made a real difference to efficiency.
Eventually someone will solve the "picking problem" end-to-end, and then I'm sure those jobs will be gone.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
In about 1982, when I was seven years old, my grandpa told me to study computers and robotics, because that's where the jobs would be when I grew up. He was not wrong.
LOL, when my brain tried to type "grew", my fingers, out of habit, typed "grep". It seems I HAVE been working with computers a lot.
I've spent many years in the AWS (Automated Warehousing Solutions) industry. I've seen automated warehouses with huge industrial cranes moving 500 pound drums and tiny little pill box pickers. I've seen systems run 24x7 with almost no human intervention unless a robot drops something. How the hell did it take them this long to get some basic pickers running.
I can only think their warehouses are just a clusterfuck of different items in the same bin or whatever they call it. If so their inventory system was shit to begin with.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
One solution would be to have the robots be more assertive in taking over a human's job. Instead of firing the person, let the robot kill whoever it displaces.
"Savings" also means "less money for workers to spend in their local economy".
We're making radical changes to the whole cycle of "wages => purchases => revenues => wages => ..." cycle. Yes, it has happened before, but never at this speed, never at this timescale, never at this scale of number of jobs. This may not end well.
here's your problem, pally. you had the mode switch set to EVIL.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
1) progress is in the eye of the beholder. To be a bit flip, if i broke into your house and stole your TV, that's certainly progress... to me. You may feel differently.
2) Go read about actually working in an Amazon warehouse. There is no time for chitchat. You're tracked. You're timed. It's hot. People pass out. Your back will be hurting. You're lucky if you eat lunch much less checking facebook or twitter. And you do this, puppet on a string, for a small hope of getting a full time job, so you get benefits so you can actually take your kid to see a doctor once in a while. And you want to complain to Bezos? well, technically you're far from an employee. You're a contractor, probably that company working for another contractor, far removed from the "amazon way".
Don't use strawmen of lazy people sitting on their ass in the warehouse, hoping to get cash as they eat bonbons. No Amazon warehouse is like that. Its a very hard, very demanding job. But, people take it because they'd rather hurt their bodies than not eat. Than their kids not eat.
In the longer term, is trapping people in a crappy job they get nothing from as an individual, and which they know could be done better and cheaper by a machine, but which they are required to keep doing because some rich executive wants to show how much they pity the poor really a good solution?
The problem isn't the jobs going away, it's the lack of other options to replace them.
If you don't know about these robots, BTW, they're quite clever. It's a shame among all these overpriced social media startup acquisitions that Kiva wasn't worth a lot more. Rather that getting hung up on the problem no one has solved yet (picking the part from the bin on the shelf reliably and cheaply), they built a robot to move the whole shelf to a central locations where the humans do the rest. They solved a problem that was practical to solve, and it made a real difference to efficiency.
That problem was actually solved some time ago - for years, Frito-Lay's bigger plants have had automated cranes to grab pallets from the shelves in 10-story warehouses, deposit them into a ground-level circulation conveyor where they're picked up by automated forklifts, then brought to the buffer areas where they're de-palletized and small robots then run the pick boxes to the appropriate place on the picking lines, and the shipping boxes are routed via conveyor automatically to the appropriate loading dock for deadloaded (non-palletized) bulk shipments. For palletized loads, the fork trucks are sent directly to the loading dock. Not all of their plants have the robot forklifts, and in the fully-automated plants they still have man-driven lifts, but even where the manual lifts are still in use they've seen *huge* efficiency gains with the system. The tricky part there is staging the inventory and product flow such that the oldest product always ships first. They're also starting to implement automated loading for the trucks even though an experienced loader is scary-fast.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I know no one really dreams of working in a warehouse filling boxes, or in a factory making steel or whatever. But, society here in the first world has been based for decades on the idea of wealth transfer and stable lifetime employment. Some examples:
- 30 year fixed mortgages are designed to be painful in the beginning but manageable over time because of increasing income.
- Manufacturers give auto loans with the assumption that people have the monthly income stream needed to pay them off over an extended time.
- Retirement under the pension system is dead for most, but for the lucky few, pension based retirement's payoff is dependent on years of service.
- Retirement under the DIY 401(k)/IRA system requires lifetime, increasing contributions commensurate with your income to ensure stable retirement income later.
- Car and other heavy goods manufacturers assume people will be able to purchase replacement heavy goods throughout their lives, and maybe someone who's worked a long time will buy a Cadillac instead of a Chevrolet for example.
- Basically every consumer business relies on people being able to purchase more and better things over time, again due to increasing income.
I really wonder what Amazon, home builders, supermarkets, car manufacturers, etc. will do when almost everyone cannot depend on a reasonably stable work life anymore. Personally, the reason why I buy things is because I'm somewhat confident that I will have a job for the near term. If I didn't have that confidence, I'd close my wallet as any other rational actor would do. Now, combine this fact with the slow creep of unemployment both from the low and the high end. Examples:
- Robots replacing fast food workers, warehouse workers, factory workers
- Cloud and automation replacing IT workers
- Offshoring replacing IT and software developers
Since socialism will never take hold in the US until things are at the French Revolution level, what are we going to do with all the unemployable people? It's not nice to say, but there are a group of people who are absolutely incapable of doing anything beyond warehouse work or factory work. Heck, there are corporate employees who are incapable of doing anything outside a narrow processing-type job description. For these people, I do kind of wish for a return to the pre-automation days when you had 10,000+ people working in a steel mill, or another 10,000+ just churning out paperwork at a corporate job. Those people earned a decent middle class salary, and had a good life. I doubt anyone growing up now is going to have it so good.