Slashdot Mirror
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A 21-year-old Amazon warehouse worker has been replaced by "a giant, bright yellow mechanical arm" that stacks 25-pound bins.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?"
The question going forward is: What happens when the future generations of robots arrive?
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".
That is a sad thing, because it means we will not be significantly richer in the future. Economists right now are assuming that the future will be much richer, and therefore better able to deal with climate change and other pollution -- which means we do not need to worry as much about that now.
So bring on the robots! We need humans to stop doing trivial jobs and start really improving the lives of everyone.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
So...
What happened to the jobs at the retailers that are replaced by Amazon supply chain (ie, working in the bricks and mortar)..
What happens to the workers at Amazon who get displaced by robots after their work force is saturated? When they are not experiencing growth?
I didn't realise that Amazon employed a PR writer called 'Anonymous reader'.
We are The Amazon. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
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.
"Maybe we wouldn't be getting two-day shipping."
Yeah, and even with a Prime account I still don't get that half the time, which sucks because I specifically needed that for my wife's business.
The videos are a bonus, however, some good original content.
Don't worry, the free market and evolution will save us. Those who can't outperform the robots for the same energy expenditure starve. The following generations will be faster, more powerful, AND cheaper to house and feed than robots. Oh wait, robots don't get sick, so that generation will also be impervious to disease.
See? The free market solves all, magically! /s
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
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.
They are tools to enhance the wealth of the company. If other tools can do that better, other tools will be used.
For this reason alone I never use the self-checkout at the supermarket. It is my (small) way of keeping some people making money at a job.
I do this, because I know my job could be next. Perhaps not directly, but indirectly, because more people on the market means more people entering my field, means a higher supply and thus lower prices.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Soon we don't need humans in the world, everything can be done by robots.
Including the purchasing and wearing-out of the products. Yeah, I read that story by Frederik Pohl as well.
https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1954-04/Galaxy_1954_04#page/n7/mode/2up
The question going forward is: What happens when the future generations of robots arrive?
The same thing that happens with every other kind of automation. The people will be more productive and some will find new jobs. What is it with all the chicken-little articles about automation? There is plenty of valuable work to be done no matter how much automation we have. Yes some people will be displaced in the short term and for some that will be uncomfortable. It is highly unlikely to occur at a rate detrimental to the economy at large. Most of the automation will simply make workers more effective at their jobs. The very device you are reading this on (a computer) is nothing more than a form of automation which has made you more productive and increased opportunities. This dystopian notion that automation will cause mass unemployment is just nonsense spouted off by people who don't actually understand automation or the problems surrounding it. Automation is not going to be the grim reaper for jobs. Bad economic policy and bad education policy is what you should worry about. A second rate education system or a poorly controlled economy will kill jobs FAR faster than any amount of automation you could possibly imagine.
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?
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
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. :)
Usually the only companies installing industrial robots are ones that are expanding, and an expanding company will rarely lay-off workers when they install automation because they always have something else for the employee to do. Of course an expanding company installing automation will likely be more efficient than an established company, so it's that other established competitor that eventually downsizes and cuts jobs. So you rarely see robots directly replace people. It happens in aggregate across industries and across the economy as a whole.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
>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?
And how many 3-year-olds get a loan so that someone can teach them to read while their parents are working two jobs?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I just hope someone invents a robot that can buy all the stuff that robots are making. Otherwise, I think the system might have a fatal flaw.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Left unsaid is that turnover is high enough they can wait a few months and the excess workforce will leave, and their numbers won't be hired back because that number of human jobs is no longer necessary. A net number of jobs are lost yet noone was laid off. If they were paying $X to humans before, they aren't going to spend $X plus $Y in robot acquisition/maintenance/operating costs; the new X+Y will always be less than the old X (on paper at least) or else they won't pull the trigger. Thus, less total money goes to humans.
It's not layoffs that are working the magic. It's the fact that amazon is growing at a decent enough rate that it can absorb the extra people. If amazon wasn't growing there would be no way that it could increase efficiency without laying people off.
I just noticed that the worker is "21-year old". Let's forget for now that this worker was actually fired as a result of the automation.
No need to forget that she was actually fired, because she wasn't actually fired at all. I know that pretty much all slashdotters don't RTFA, but it's right there in TFS: 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."
Soon we don't need humans in the world, everything can be done by robots.
We are already surpassing the world that's depicted in the TV series Max Headroom.
The smartest robot in the world is still dumber than an amoeba. We have a long way to go before AI can replace people. AI is mostly well defined problems and pattern recognition. Even something as trivial as "unpacking and sorting a box" like in the summary is impossible for robots currently. With the slight exception of vacuuming, there is almost no task in the home that can currently be automated. Cooking, cleaning, folding laundry, putting away laundry, cleaning the toilet, putting dishes away, picking up toys, dusting, etc... Even when we have something like a dishwasher that washes the dishes for us, it still requires a human to babysit it by putting the dishes in and then taking them out and putting them away.
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.
Wealth is ownership of the means of production. That won't change.
What will change is what counts as bling to impress the neighbors, and that will be the source of many new jobs as I somehow doubt that anything mass-produced will have social clout.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Bullshit.
The first company to go 100% robotic and have 0 labor costs will make a fortune selling to the employees of the remaining companies at prices their employers could never hope to meet, leaving them either going bankrupt or ditching the humans.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I think you are absolutely right today, but that you're perhaps forgetting that tech doesn't move linearly.
I'm not forgetting that at all. Economics isn't linear either. I think you might be confusing the economics of microchips and software for the economics of manufacturing which is very different. It is REALLY hard and expensive to make general purpose manufacturing devices produce non-trivial special purpose products in (relatively) small batches. The limitations aren't typically technical - they are economic and they are extremely hard to overcome in a vast number of cases.
Robot solutions that today cost millions will at some point cost thousands.
Some will. A lot will not. You are under the misapprehension that economies of scale are in play here that are not in actuality. You are arguing that we can develop an extremely inexpensive, safe, easily programmed, general purpose robot. Cheap enough that it can displace humans in low labor cost countries. We aren't in any danger of reaching such a state of affairs any time soon. (as in within the lifetime of anyone reading this) Yes robots and automation will get cheaper and more capable but they have a loooooooong way to go before humans aren't needed to build stuff. Nobody I know who works in manufacturing is worried at all about robots making humans in manufacturing obsolete.
In my country, a company started selling cheaper and safer robot arms a few years ago. They can't carry as much as the robots at car manufacturing plants, and they aren't as fast. But they don't require a cage, they cost a fraction and the UI for programming them is much, much easier to work with.
And yet they haven't taken the world by storm. Yes there will be progress but humans aren't going to disappear from the equation. Even at a few thousand dollars they still are too expensive for a lot of low volume production. There is a very long tail for how cheap automation has to get before it can bump people out of the equation. It's also hard to achieve economies of scale with automation if you don't have large unit volumes because setup and engineering costs don't enjoy economies of scale at low unit volumes.
Yeah, robotic tech today is still primitive compared to humans. But the future belongs to those who can figure out how to take advantage of these primitive robots.
Automation is anything but primitive even today. The problem isn't the technology but in making the technology cheap. You seem to be grossly underestimating the difficulty of that task. You are quite right that there are riches to be had for those who can control future automation and technology but that is nothing new. There will be impressive progress but I have near as makes no difference zero concern about mass unemployment from automation in my lifetime.