Amazon's Robot Workforce Grows By 50 Percent In Just One Year (siliconrepublic.com)

Amazon hires a lot of people. But the expansion of its army of orange-wheeled robots is more than keeping pace. An anonymous reader writes: E-commerce and cloud giant Amazon has revealed that it now has 45,000 robots across 20 fulfilment centres around the world. This is a 50 percent increase on the same time last year, when the company said that it employed 30,000 robots alongside its 306,000 people. Amazon uses the robots to automate the picking and packing process at large warehouses. The robots are 16in tall and weigh 145kg. They can travel at 5mph and can carry packages that weigh 317kg. The robots became part of the company's workforce when Amazon acquired Kiva Systems in 2012 for $775m.

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[rsilvergun]

there's a third dystopia nobody likes to talk about, where the masses are simply left to starve to death while the entire world's resources are claimed by the 1%. I mean, if they have robots to make everything and the control access to food/shelter/health care/etc then why bother with employees? What the hell difference does it make if somebody buys your crap when you already own everything? The few of them you want for cooking food/doctors/engineers/military/sex workers/ will do as you say or they'll starve to death. And your robot guns will cut them down if they try to rebel.