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As Robots Move Into Amazon's Warehouses, What's Happening To Its Human Workers? (brisbanetimes.com.au)
An anonymous reader writes:
A 21-year-old Amazon warehouse worker has been replaced by "a giant, bright yellow mechanical arm" that stacks 25-pound bins. "Her new job at Amazon is to baby-sit several robots at a time," reports the New York Times, "troubleshooting them when necessary and making sure they have bins to load... [T]he company's eye-popping growth has turned it into a hiring machine, with an unquenchable need for entry-level warehouse workers to satisfy customer orders." Even though Amazon now has over 100,000 robots, they still plan to create 50,000 new jobs when they open their second headquarters. "It's certainly true that Amazon would not be able to operate at the costs they have and the costs they provide customers without this automation," said Martin Ford, author of the futurist book Rise of the Robots. "Maybe we wouldn't be getting two-day shipping."
Amazon's top operations executive says they're saving less-tedious jobs for the humans who work as "pickers" and "stowers" for the robots. "It's a new item each time," Mr. Clark said. "You're finding something, you're inspecting things, you're engaging your mind in a way that I think is important." The Times reports that the robots "also cut down on the walking required of workers, making Amazon pickers more efficient and less tired. The robots also allow Amazon to pack shelves together like cars in rush-hour traffic, because they no longer need aisle space for humans, [meaning] more inventory under one roof, which means better selection for customers."
"When Amazon installed the robots, some people who had stacked bins before took courses at the company to become robot operators. Many others moved to receiving stations, where they manually sort big boxes of merchandise into bins. No people were laid off when the robots were installed, and Amazon found new roles for the displaced workers, Clark said... The question going forward is: What happens when the future generations of robots arrive?"
Amazon's top operations executive says they're saving less-tedious jobs for the humans who work as "pickers" and "stowers" for the robots. "It's a new item each time," Mr. Clark said. "You're finding something, you're inspecting things, you're engaging your mind in a way that I think is important." The Times reports that the robots "also cut down on the walking required of workers, making Amazon pickers more efficient and less tired. The robots also allow Amazon to pack shelves together like cars in rush-hour traffic, because they no longer need aisle space for humans, [meaning] more inventory under one roof, which means better selection for customers."
"When Amazon installed the robots, some people who had stacked bins before took courses at the company to become robot operators. Many others moved to receiving stations, where they manually sort big boxes of merchandise into bins. No people were laid off when the robots were installed, and Amazon found new roles for the displaced workers, Clark said... The question going forward is: What happens when the future generations of robots arrive?"
Before someone comes in commenting how robots will create more jobs or at least equal jobs like in this instance, it won't. Robot mechanic and all the like might exist for a while, but the end result is always the same: save money by hiring less people per unit of productivity. Translation: less human jobs.
Amazon (along with Walmart) is a perfect example of this as it kills of undoubtedly more middleman retail jobs than it ever created. More efficient organizations win in capitalism and efficiency the last 50 years always meant hiring less expensive westerners, whether that's H1Bs, China, outsourcing, or robots.
Yes, people can be retrained. Really depending on age and openmindedness though. But robots can also retrained and in less time for certain things. Yes, tech opens avenues for job possibilities but those avenues have always been smaller than what they replaced. There were never as many elevator mechanics as elevator operators when the latter got replaced with self-operated push buttons. And what if we are coming to an end to our wants and needs (at least as current tech allows)?
Economics wants to teach us that we have unlimited wants as a basic tenet. I don't think that's fundamentally true. We can have VERY BIG demands, but not unlimted. When I'm watching a netflix film I like, I can't sit there and realistically consume 3-4 other films simultaneously. When I'm there eating a pizza, I might want a few other foods, maybe in rapid succession, but there's a limit to how much I can stuff my mouth. For the most part, Human wants are basically tied to the mouth (food), genitals (sex) or other needs (sleep, keeping warm, etc) or ego. There is a limit to many of these not tied to the person's wallet but rather tech level. Replicators would eliminate many food and material needs but we're not there yet.
But the overarching point is as needs are fulfilled, you can't always get jobs fulfilling higher needs on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Some people simply won't pay for. Some because it's not a service or product that can be made. Some because the tech level isn't there - for instance 200 years ago Kings in tropical countries would have people fanning them with palm leaves. Did the lack of fans create jobs for fanners? Not really, most people just went around hot. Tech opens up previously unimagined conveniences for the rest of society, but jobs won't be one of them in huge amounts.
The question going forward is: What happens when the future generations of robots arrive?
The same thing as the people that Martian Marine in 'The Expanse' ran into on her AWOL episode in the underbelly of New York? Young people brimming with optimism will put their name on a waiting list for vocational training only to find them selves 20 years later vegetating away on an absolutely minimal government subsistence stipend to keep them from rebelling while they wait for it to finally be their turn to get a slot in the vocational training program, a slot that will never come. Meanwhile the offspring of the elite get all the vocational training slots, cushy jobs and genetic enhancements. In a world like that I'd give pretty much everything for a one way ticket to Mars, The Belt, the Jovian Colones, the outer rim settlements or even a shit-hole mining colony on a rock in the Kuiper Belt. Failing this there is the future where the redundant workers will form an important component of Solyent Green. Let's hope it won't come to that.
100 years ago, when work was horrible, the dream was that automation would let people work less, ideally not at all. Now that the dream might become reality, the reaction is "Oh my god, our existence is _based_ on work! How dare they suggest we change!" Why don't we spend more time talking about how this might be made into a good thing, instead of shouting about how bad it is destined to be?
The bigger questions is, what is happening to all of the human workers at the thousands of businesses Amazon is putting OUT of business with its dumping practices?
First, the economic value of particular forms of work. If someone is doing work that can be done cheaper by a machine (or which provides no value and can be simply avoided entirely by making workflows more efficient) then there is a benefit to the economy as a whole from automating or eliminating that job.
Second, there is the degree to which labour is used to redistribute capital. In a capitalist system, working is the primary mechanism by which capital flows from those that are born rich to those that are not. Those born poor often have less access to education and so are less likely to be qualified for high-skill jobs. There are basically three options regarding these people: you give them jobs that allow them to acquire capital, you round them up or kill them, or you wait until they turn up at the doors of those who have accumulated disproportionate amounts of wealth with pitchforks and flaming torches, then you reset the system with a different set of rulers.
Finally, there's the social and psychological effect of doing productive work. Humans are social animals and doing work that is of value to others helps encourage social cohesion.
Economists tend to look solely at the first, politicians primarily at the second.
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You can't stop progress, robots are so much better and cheaper (in the end) than using humans for a lot of things (especially factory/warehouse stuff).
HA! If that were actually true then my job would be a lot easier. My day job is to run a manufacturing plant. I'm an industrial engineer as well as a cost accountant and I make these sorts of decisions regarding automation daily. Your estimation of the cost/benefit of automation is not even close to reality for all but a few corner cases. Robots only make economic sense when you are talking about relatively large unit volumes or certain types of high value precision work or very dangerous jobs. They are not always faster or better and they sure as hell are not always cheaper. Yes that includes "factory/warehouse stuff".
Simple example. My company makes wire harnesses. There isn't a machine in existence that can automate a substantial portion of what we make for anything remotely resembling a reasonable cost. The machines that do exist to make some limited portions of what we manufacturing are either limited to fairly narrow jobs like lead making (cutting, stripping, and crimping wires) or ones that can do wider numbers of jobs cost literally millions of dollars each. Some specialty jobs they do faster or better but not nearly as many as you are probably imagining. To replace humans in general you will have to come up with a robot that is as trainable, as dexterous, and cheaper than a human. Good luck with that because we are no where close to that level of automation much less getting there for economically reasonable cost.
With the current rate of automation we are actually already to late do handle the loss of jobs and how to figure out how we could give those people a better live.
There is no data to support this assertion. Unemployment is well within normal ranges and showing no signs of changing. There has been no measurable long term displacement of workers by robots. What data there is shows that worker displacement is a result of poor economic and education policy, not automation. In places like the US the losses in manufacturing jobs are in reality a function of labor costs, not automation. What happened is the labor intensive jobs went to places with low labor costs. When politicians talk about bringing manufacturing jobs back what they are really promising (though they don't know it) is to lower wages to compete with places like China because that is the ONLY way those jobs are coming back. Do you really want people working for $1-2/hour?
After WWII when the rest of the world was rebuilding for a few decades folks in the US had a remarkable run of economic prosperity in large part due to a lack of competition. Those days are gone and now the US and other prosperous countries are going to have to compete globally. If you think automation is the biggest threat to your economic prosperity then you are delusional. The biggest threat is the 50% of the world's population in Asia (esp China and India) who have been sitting on the economic sidelines for over a century. Now that China has woken up and India is threatening to do so the game is different. You can worry about automation killing jobs in the short run if you want but you are worrying about the wrong thing.
I see two different kinds of workers, and two different kinds of jobs.
There are jobs that exist because they need to be done, and they require almost no skill beyond some initial training. They are low-paid, boring, have high churn (but that doesn't matter because training is simple) and the people in them are easily replaceable.
Almost every other kind of job is the opposite - better paid, require skill beyond just "training", are not boring, have less churn and the people in them are much more difficult to replace (with other humans or with robots).
Like my teacher at school always told me. Work hard, so you can get skills, so you have a job to go to and a career path. If you are - for a career - doing something that anyone could do if you sat with them and told them everything in the space of a few weeks, then you're in the former.
My job is one of the latter - I couldn't explain my job in that time, and merely explaining it would not allow them to adapt and change and perform it indefinitely. Only to someone who's done my job already, really. I don't claim to be a genius, but it's a skilled job. It's nothing like the degree I took, it's nothing like I wanted, but it's a skill I have and continue to evolve that other people can't just walk up and steal.
Now, not everyone will able to get such a job. Not everyone has a skill that few others possess. For those people - I'm sorry, but you aren't going to have a long-term career that isn't as boring as hell. You're going to have to chop-and-change or get outsourced or superseded or made obsolete on a regular basis.
Even if you have a skill-based job, some day that skill will be less relevant (whether it's blacksmithing or programming). The determining factor, though, is the ability to learn. If you have the ability to learn, it doesn't MATTER that your job disappears - you retrain, go and do something else entirely different. Whether you're highly-skilled or a fries-packer, you need to be able to learn and continue to learn.
The "job for life" died generations ago. There won't be a "world without jobs", only a "world without menial jobs". Possibly.
The insulation against that is an ability to learn, and always having a skill that isn't common. Like my teachers used to go on about all the time.
In time, I'm sure my job will be obsoleted. But it won't really matter because the knowledge it brings can be applied elsewhere, and I can learn fast. I'm nearly 40, I'm not that concerned about a future career path yet. And by the time I get to that point, a menial job will be all I can get anyway
The problem is people who get jobs because "they need money" but where their entire working life is spent doing the same things, things that are easily replaceable. It's not even about "going to school", it's about having some kind of interest, skill, talent or effort.
The kind of jobs where you're sitting in a warehouse stacking boxes are ALWAYS going to have their days numbered. You can go to another warehouse and stack different boxes, but the risk of redundancy is always there.
P.S. Don't think me an elitest arsehole, my degree isn't that great, unrelated to my job, my job is pretty ordinary, and yes I have worked stacking shelves in hardware stores, etc. The point is that it was never seen as a "career job", but as a chore to earn money. Often I did it alongside my career job.
But if have no unique selling point, you're just a standard commodity.
A world without jobs is just a fantasy at the moment, we can't even feed everyone in a first-world country, let alone worldwide, the resources that produce robots and electrical power are not infinite. Even if you get to the point where food is free, heating is free, etc. then the options left for those jobless are boredom and anarchy (hey, I get fed, clothed and looked after whatever I do, so what's the consequence?)
But things like lawyers, counsellors, doctors, designers, supervisors, etc. are always going to be around and
Because the only way this becomes a good thing is for the owners of the automation to give up wealth to the people with no work, and it's already clear that isn't going to happen without some bloody revolution.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Stacking bins on pallets that goes out to the supermarkets for all those items that does not require refrigeration.
The software knows the layout of the supermarket so the bins that ends up on top, are for those shelves closest to the back entrance and the ones at the bottom are furthest away.
The arm that stacking the bins, are getting them in the right order from the automated warehouse holding the bins.
Humans are (still) involved packing the bins with goods from other bins and pallets from a larger automated warehouse.
The area where goods are moved by humans are a decreasing area for pallets moved by forklifts controlled by humans, but they are just following orders on a screen so they are not making any decisions at all. And more and more of the pallets are in a fully autoautomated warehouse.
In the beginning there were some problems that require humans to see it, and who knows perhaps it still exists. The human controlled forklifts told us that they sometimes got an order to move the same pallet multiple times in a few hours between storage locations. So the system was kinda doing defragmentation until everything was placed like it wanted it to be. :)
Why everyone just refuse the idea that if we want automation will help to get rid of what we call "work" and have a roof on the top of your head, something to eat and drugs to cure yourself ? The problem is not automation but human greed. Idea of work really changed during history of humanity and that will happen again. Savage Capitalism, the idea that anything can be sold of bought, including health, human dignity, etc is a problem, not machines that make work easier.
>Yes, people can be retrained. Really depending on age and openmindedness though. But robots can also retrained and in less time for certain things.
Sure. More options for business. They will choose whatever is cheaper option.
The only answer to technological progress vis-a-vis employment problem is 2000 years old: "bread and circuses". Free bread and free circuses for fired. In our days this must include shelter.
>Yes, people can be retrained. Really depending on age and openmindedness though. But robots can also retrained and in less time for certain things.
Sure. More options for business. They will choose whatever is cheaper option.
The only answer to technological progress vis-a-vis employment problem is 2000 years old: "bread and circuses". Free bread and free circuses for fired. In our days this must include shelter.
I'd like to think that we're (the world) smarter than that, and that we (the readers of this forum) are the smart people in the room.
This is an impending problem, and one of the definitions of intelligence is that it is proportional to your planning horizon. We can see this as an impending problem, so let's anticipate the problem and fix it.
Current theories of economics are flawed, being based on assumptions of "infinite" that are no longer true. Consumption isn't infinite, population growth isn't infinite (thankfully, for the sake of our resources), and as a corollary jobs aren't infinite. (Minor other corollaries too; for example, the market for your product isn't infinite.) Productivity rises at an exponential rate (3% growth compounded over time), and has doubled in about the last 40-ish years.
Current theories of economics that extrapolate the past to the future are invalid. Referring to Luddites, sabotaging the looms, throwing your wooden shoes into the looms, or anything that says "it's been OK before, it'll be OK this time" are flawed because they rely on nothing but past performance to predict future behaviour, while future predictions rely on math and assumptions. It's the turkey believing that the farmer will continue to protect and feed it, because that's what the farmer has done for the turkey's entire life.
Current measures of the economy are flawed because they don't include the welfare of the workers. Up to recently, measures of economy have been all about the productivity - the sum total of the profits of businesses, without regard to the welfare of the people. The economy is strong when profits go up. It's flawed because economics is clearly a loop: you need citizens with wealth to purchase products, and the math has to change to reflect that.
Given these flaws in our economics, we need a way forward that doesn't predict in the collapse of civilization.
I know there are at least 5 changes that might work, but it all starts with the smart people in the room.
What changes can we come up with, and how do we encourage these changes?
Without using words such as "only way", "doomed to", and "must".
We need to make changes. How do we do that?
> We need humans to stop doing trivial jobs and start really improving the lives of everyone.
The problem is, companies are highly focused on the first part but the second part isn't their problem.
I like the principle behind this (greater efficiency/productivity) and the assumption of a better overall economic result because of it, but what the article leaves out are the uncountable numbers of local retail workers that are destined to be laid off as Amazon and similar automated/consolidated warehouse operations crush them in competition. Who will buy stuff from Amazon if they don't have the money from their former job selling to customers in a shop somewhere? It's fine if we've got a system that can even more efficiently scrape off a few percent off material transactions and give it to investors as a return, but the deeper that automation progresses the further you have relegated your customers to jobs that bots can't do yet. That could be a wonderful world where humans only do the jobs they really want to do, or an economic hellscape where they are compelled to the crappiest jobs that bots can't handle yet because they have no other choices.
Basically, every time I go to the grocery store I look thoughtfully at the automated checkout line and think about the entry-level job that somebody doesn't have anymore, and consciously decide to pay ostensibly a little more for the human checkout line even though I know it is less efficient. I know what would happen if I picked the automated one: the company would make sure they got the same profit margin or better (that the savings from that efficiency would be passed on to me is dubious) and wouldn't care one iota whether they had any employees at all as they take my money for their product.
In principle I want companies to efficiently shed employees if it is the best way to run their business, but it's a race to the bottom and I'm not sure I want the long-term outcome of that trend because there's not nearly the political or economic investment in mitigating the potential negative outcomes.
I actually work at a factory (doing automation). There are some interesting facts I've noticed. We have a lot of manual laborers, but of all the people in the company, they're paid the least and they work the *least* overtime. In fact, overtime percentage seems to correlate highly with base pay rate, so if someone is a skilled trade and makes $30 an hour, they're asked to work a lot more overtime than someone making $15 per hour as a laborer. Yet it's the laborer that mostly wants overtime, because they make so little money. The company doesn't want to do it because (a) their pay is directly related to product cost and they need to keep direct labor rate low, and (b) they get paid less because they don't bring much value to the table. Sure, there's more jobs for skilled trades when you bring in automation, but all of these laborers eat lunch in the same room as the skilled trades, and they know that they could go to a community college for 2 years (and we're in Canada where education doesn't cost as much as in the US), then do an apprenticeship for 2 years, and they'd be making double what they make now, and hardly anyone's doing it. We're constantly complaining that we can't find enough skilled trades, and we're complaining that the laborers need so much hand-holding to do even the simplest tasks. So the idea that these laborers could go do something else when they're replaced by robots... I just don't buy it. Unskilled laborers working on farms went to work unskilled labor jobs in factories making cars. A guy shoeing horses knew a skilled trade, so they could probably do another job. If you get rid of all the unskilled labor jobs everywhere, what are those people going to do?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
A lot of desk jobs don't even require any kind of AI. There are tons of desk jobs out there where people just copy information from one system to another. Or they follow a set of predefined rules about what to do when something happens. They could have been replaced a decade ago with a simple program, but businesses are slow to change. These jobs are slowly being fazed out, and there will be a lot of job losses to office workers who simply aren't actually doing anything that a simple computer program can't replicate. There are side cases that a simple computer program can't handle, but you only need a few workers to click a few buttons and make a decision when the side case arises and then the automation can continue.
There's a lot of stuff floating around about how accounting used to be a very lucrative profession, but due to computer systems finally becoming mature, a single person can do the work of 10. There will still be jobs for accountants, you won't replace them completely, but you'll need a lot less accountants, and it will be hard for those just graduating to find a job, as they don't have the experience necessary for the high level jobs that remain.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Right now productivity growth in the first world is less than 3%. Much less, in many places. The answer to the above question is "very, very little".
Since productivity has been decoupled from wages for the 99% does it matter? It's now a measure of how fast the 1% will grow as the 99% won't see any gains anyway. The only way the 99% will see any gains is to stop squabbling over trivial social issues that impact just this side of nobody (ie a dozen transgenders in the military) and start worrying about economics that impact hundreds of millions of people. It's not hard, just turn off your TV and ask yourself is your life easier or harder than you parents and grandparents.