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An anonymous reader writes: A 21-year-old Amazon warehouse worker has been replaced by "a giant, bright yellow mechanical arm" that stacks 25-pound bins.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?"

Comments

Isnt it obvious?

[GeekWithAKnife]

We are The Amazon. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile.

Won't be more jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Umm. No.

[TheRaven64]

There are three issues conflated in this debate:

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.

Automation is not a job killer

[sjbe]

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.

Re: Future generations of robots

[fluffernutter]

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.

This is typical for the automation industry

[RobinH]

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.

Re:Soon we don't need humans.

[CastrTroy]

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.