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FedEx Embraces More Robots Without Firing Humans (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: As soon as the first robot arrived at a FedEx shipping hub in the heart of North Carolina tobacco country early last year, talk of pink slips was in the air. Workers had been driving the "tuggers" that navigated large and irregular items across the vast concrete floor of the 630,000-square-foot freight depot since it opened in 2011. Their initial robotic colleague drew a three-dimensional digital map of the place as it tugged freight around. A few months later, three other robots -- nicknamed Lucky, Dusty and Ned in a nod to the movie "iThree Amigos!" -- arrived, using the digital map to get around on their own. By March, they were joined by two others, Jefe and El Guapo. Horns honking and warning lights flashing, the autonomous vehicles snaked through the hub, next to about 20 tuggers that still needed humans behind the wheel. [...] But what has happened at the FedEx hub may be a surprise to people who fear that they are about to be replaced by a smart machine: a robot might take your role, but not necessarily your job. Yes, the robots replaced a few jobs right away. And in time, they will replace about 25 jobs in a facility that employs about 1,300 people. But the hub creates about 100 new jobs every year -- and a robot work force still seems like the distant future.
Not I.
As long as there is another job to be done.
It is just PR. Here is how it will work. A company would get bad PR if it fired someone after putting in a robot, so they shift the job somewhere else and spend more on keeping an employee they don't need until someone quits, then that person does not get replaced.
The math could be misleading. Without the bots, Fedex may be hiring more humans. With the bots, they keep the number of humans the same but expand with bots instead. If/when there's a slump, they then dump humans such that they employee less humans than they would otherwise.
As far as the argument that "automation has always made new jobs", that could be true, but the displaced people may not be qualified for them. It appears that on the larger scale, automation and global trade are creating increasing inequality as it becomes a winner-take-all economy. Warren Buffett admitted his investment company can take on bigger risks, giving total average higher rewards, because it's big enough to spread the risk around, something smaller competitors don't have by definition. The "network effect" is taking over every industry.
Therefore, the issue may not be so much "fear the bots" as it is "fear inequality".
Table-ized A.I.