Humans Are Still Crucial To Amazon's Fulfillment Process (technologyreview.com)

Amazon's fleet of automated warehouse robots, now more than 100,000 machines strong, is working alongside human employees to help meet the e-commerce giant's massive fulfillment demand. From a report: The company's robots carry inventory around massive warehouse floors, compiling all the items for a customer's order and reducing the need for human interaction with the products. But the chief technologist of Amazon Robotics, Tye Brady, insists that these robots are enhancing human efficiencies rather than eliminating warehouse jobs.

Amazon has been going full steam ahead when it comes to hiring and now employs over 500,000 people. Brady views the robots as necessary to this growth. "When there are tens of thousands of orders going on simultaneously, you are getting beyond what a human can do," he told the audience at MIT Technology Review's first EmTech Next conference today. Humans still provide necessary skills in the fulfillment process, like dexterity, adaptiveness, and plain old common sense. For example, when some popcorn butter accidentally fell off a pod in a fulfillment center, it got squished, creating a big buttery mess in the middle of the floor. The curious robots didn't know how to handle the situation but wanted to go check it out. "The robots were driving through it, and they'd slip and get an encoder error," says Brady.

Comments

and there push for rate kills common sense or just

[Joe_Dragon]

and there push for rate kills common sense or just pushes people to only use common sense when it cheats the system.

Only for now.

[Gravis Zero]

We all know they are pushing as hard as they can to remove humans from the equation and it's going to happen slowly. They'll reduce the number of situations where humans are needed slowly but surely and eventually none will be needed. This is just how it is.

Re:Only for now.

[bluefoxlucid]

That's called technical progress. If a worker from 100 years ago could produce 6 donuts per hour, and a worker today can produce 60 salted caramel designer cupcakes per hour, and people are buying 60 confections per hour, how many workers do we need 100 years ago? How many today?

The answers are 10 and 1. I hope you like that donuts cost $1 and the average income is $58,000/year, instead of donuts being $1/dozen and the average income is $480/year.

Re:Only for now.

[PolygamousRanchKid]

They'll reduce the number of situations where humans are needed slowly but surely and eventually none will be needed.

Gee, when I read:

"Humans Are Still Crucial"

. . . I thought that Amazon's robots run on Soylent Green for fuel.

This is just a peremptory defensive strike at the anti-automation and anti-AI crew.

Amazon is certainly NOT going to brag about how many human jobs they have eliminated with automation and AI.

Maybe Amazon should put bumper stickers on their robots claiming:

"We brake for humans!"

Re:Only for now.

[Wycliffe]

Wrong.

The answer today is zero, because that's how many customers you're likely going to have once the masses have been deemed unemployable by the robot workforce.

Try not to gleam over the facts regarding supply and demand next time. It'll be easier to accept the chaos you want to call "progress".

We are nowhere close to getting rid of manual labor. We might be starting to move back to the plantation world (which still exists in much of the world) where you have the rich with multiple household helpers but we are nowhere close to being able to automate anything in the home. Cooking, laundry, housekeeping, lawn care, child care, etc.. are not able to be automated at all. Even amazon, as this article points out, has to have someone there to babysit the machines because the machines can't deal with slight changes.

Also, unemployment is still amazingly low. The official numbers is at or below the theoretical lowest it can go (based on churn). There are some problems with people giving up looking and therefore not being counted or being underemployed but there are plenty of jobs to go around. The problem isn't the lack of jobs but rather the lack of good paying jobs for many people. We aren't going to have massive unemployment anytime soon. The biggest threat is probably self driving cars but if you look at the news lately, that's mostly just smoke and mirrors and is still likely decades away and will likely take a fundamentally different approach and probably a breakthru or two in order to replace all the drivers currently employed.

Re:Only for now.

[hackertourist]

Cooking, laundry, housekeeping, lawn care, child care, etc.. are not able to be automated at all

Laundry has already been automated: washing machine and dryer have cut down the time we need to spend on laundry by 95%.

Lawn care and vacuum cleaning: you can buy robots for that today. And their cost is not that much higher than the cost of a manual lawnmower/vacuum cleaner.

Re:Only for now.

[Rick Schumann]

We all know they are pushing as hard as they can to remove humans from the equation and it's going to happen slowly.

Are you a Dominionist? Are you actively hoping for the Apocalypse to happen, so the Second Coming of Christ (allegedly), the Rapture, and all that stuff, happens? End of the world? No? Then why are you apparently predicting the downfall of human civilzation and our species, as we descend into endless warfare because The Machines Have Taken Over, everyone is fired from their jobs because they're 'obsolete', and people are starving in the streets, causing the uprising of Warlords, organizing everyone into armies, to fight for their survival, destroy the machines and The Few who control them?

..okay, I'm exaggerating as much as I possibly can, because the entire idea, since I first heard it, of 'machines taking everyones jobs' is utterly ridiculous. Not only do I disbelieve it'll ever happen, I am also certain to a very high degree of confidence that it won't be allowed to happen, either. Machines are tools. Our species creates tools to help us. Creating tools that harm us, as a species, is a ridiculous concept, always has been, always will be.

There will be jobs for people. You may not see what they'll be just yet. You, and everyone else, needs to calm down, relax, and stop channelling your inner Chicken Little, the sky is emphatically not falling. Everything is going to be just fine. This is no different than when any other new technology came along; there is a Growing Pains period, followed by a New Age of Prosperity because of the new technology. It's all happened before countless times, it's happening again now, and it'll happen countless times again in the future, for as long as there is human civilization on this planet. Oh and by the way if the New Technology ends up not benefitting us? Then the New Technology will get deprecated, disregarded, and scrapped. That's also happened before, may happen this time, and may well happen again in the future. Everything is going to be fine.

Re:Only for now.

[Gravis Zero]

the entire idea, since I first heard it, of 'machines taking everyones jobs' is utterly ridiculous. Not only do I disbelieve it'll ever happen, I am also certain to a very high degree of confidence that it won't be allowed to happen, either. Machines are tools. Our species creates tools to help us. Creating tools that harm us, as a species, is a ridiculous concept, always has been, always will be.

LOL! Machines aren't going to take everyone's job, just the repetitive stuff. As for harmful tools, what do you think guns, bombs and nukes are? They exist for only to harm other humans. Nukes in particular are harmful to the species which is why we are terrified of nuclear war, not just because it will devastate both sides but because of how damaging it would be for humanity.

There will be jobs for people. You may not see what they'll be just yet. You, and everyone else, needs to calm down, relax, and stop channelling your inner Chicken Little, the sky is emphatically not falling. Everything is going to be just fine. This is no different than when any other new technology came along; there is a Growing Pains period, followed by a New Age of Prosperity because of the new technology.

Apparently you are unwilling to recognize it but during those "Growing Pains" a lot of people died. Just because you fail to recognize that automation is eliminating jobs far faster than it's creating them doesn't mean it isn't happening.

if the New Technology ends up not benefitting us? Then the New Technology will get deprecated, disregarded, and scrapped.

HAHAHAHA! It only needs to benefit some people and the people that own it most definitely will keep it because it benefits them greatly. You are ignoring some very basic truths about humanity, primarily the willingness of a small group of people to fuck over large group of people if it's profitable.

Re:Only for now.

[ChatHuant]

I am also certain to a very high degree of confidence that it won't be allowed to happen, either. Machines are tools. Our species creates tools to help us. Creating tools that harm us, as a species, is a ridiculous concept, always has been, always will be.

Unfortunately there is a wrong statement and at least a hidden assumption in your argument; neither of them seems true to me.

First, your assertion that humanity won't create tools that harms the species. This is obviously false. People *do* create tools that harm us as a species. They do it all the time - from cigarettes to plastic, to atom bombs, polluting industries, medicine that causes genetic harm, and so on, and so on. Nobody except a few idealists think "as a species" or are willing to abandon short term profit and/or convenience, especially for something as vaguely defined as "the good of the species". Most of us think in terms of "me and mine", and "the devil take the hindmost".

Second, you argue that taking away people's jobs is harmful to them or to the species. This relies on the unspoken assumption that people need jobs to survive or to prosper. This is not the case. Jobs are an artifact of the current social and economic structure, a mechanism for distributing the results of the economy, but are not in themselves necessary for someone's well-being. On the contrary, jobs are often a source of stress, sickness and accidents. What we need is to find a replacement for jobs as a distribution mechanism for the goods produced by robots. UBI is one such proposed mechanism - I'm sure more can be imagined.

Re:Only for now.

[Wycliffe]

Cooking, laundry, housekeeping, lawn care, child care, etc.. are not able to be automated at all

Laundry has already been automated: washing machine and dryer have cut down the time we need to spend on laundry by 95%.

Lawn care and vacuum cleaning: you can buy robots for that today. And their cost is not that much higher than the cost of a manual lawnmower/vacuum cleaner.

Sure, the washing portion of laundry has been automated but not the folding nor the putting away.
Likewise, you can buy a roomba that cuts the vacuuming down but that's really a minor part of the overall cleaning of a house.
Many people go weeks between vacuums while cleaning the kitchen is a daily task.
And although roomba like lawn mowers might exist they are not at all common nor are they safe to leave unattended.

Re:Only for now.

[Rick Schumann]

..from cigarettes to plastic, to atom bombs, polluting industries, medicine that causes genetic harm, and so on, and so on.

Those aren't tools; some are weapons, which are a distinctly different category, some are just materials, and some are just nuisances. A computer is a tool. Computer code is, in a way, a tool. A robot is a tool. Before you even say it, pre-emptive strike: A tool can be harmful if it's used as a weapon (i.e. I whack your head off with a shovel); we're not going to descend into mincing words here, though, and if you do then I will whack your head off with a shovel, stet?

The curious robots...

[llamalad]

Are they really programmed to be curious?

Or is someone just anthropomorphizing them to make them seem cute and cuddly?

Re:The curious robots...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the latter. If they were programmed to drive/roll themselves over to a part of the floor where there was something happening, it is not called being "curious"

If they were not programmed like that, they would not go there except as part of their schedule.

Either way, they are not "curious". The author slipped that word in to make it sound cute and cuddly and assign a non-existent intelligence to them (after all, what article is complete without machine learning, ai etc thrown in)

Fulfilment - It's never enough

[Anonymous Coward]

I strive for fulfilment, but I always end up wanting more. More. More. More. A friend suggested I strive for contentment, but I really didn't understand what they meant by that. Thinking about Amazon warehouses and shipping always brings me to a philosophical frame of mind.

Re:Fulfilment - It's never enough

[nadass]

True.

Re:Fulfilment - It's never enough

[llamalad]

Found the Zen master.

Amazon don't let them

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon don't let the robots milk the cows. The cows will get upset when they see robot eyes wearing aprons before sunset

The milk from upset cows tastes udderly different.

So I've heard

"Need humans"

[Tablizer]

Yes, human flesh feeds the robots' metabolism.

Oh good

[93 Escort Wagon]

"Amazon has been going full steam ahead when it comes to hiring and now employs over 500,000 people."

That's good - when the economy seems to be heating up too much, the government can ask Jeff "Zorg" Bezos to quietly fire 500,000.

Re:Oh good

[Rastl]

"Amazon has been going full steam ahead when it comes to hiring and now employs over 500,000 people." That's good - when the economy seems to be heating up too much, the government can ask Jeff "Zorg" Bezos to quietly fire 500,000.

Fire one million.

The curious robots didn't know how to handle...

[kamakazi]

>The curious robots didn't know how to handle the situation but wanted to go check it out.

Is this not an egregious case of anthropomorphism?

Amazons little screwjack robots are not curious, and I am pretty sure the system does not send robots to go rubbernecking when there is a problem in the system.

Apparently the editors at Technology Review are neither technologically savvy, nor good reviewers.

Re:The curious robots didn't know how to handle...

[GungaDan]

Not rubbernecking. Butterwheeling. You should see what happens when they get to the banana peel aisle.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Amazons bots are powered by humans - matrix style

[Anonymous Coward]

There are warehouses full of 'employees' that are crucial to Amazons fulfillment process.

That worked because we had social progress

[rsilvergun]

mostly following WWII. Prior to that wealth inequality meant there weren't a lot of folks with $58k in inflation adjusted wages. Businesses hire to meet demand. The last few industrial revolutions wiped out jobs without creating enough new ones to create demand.

There were decades of unemployment, poverty and wars following those revolutions that we're glossing over. Then WWII blew up most of Europe and created enough demand (to rebuilt it) to drive the economy. Eisenhower wrote about this in his memoirs. He created the Military Industrial Complex to keep the economy going after the rebuilding was done. But we're hitting the limits of what the MIC can do.

Re:That worked because we had social progress

[bluefoxlucid]

You're talking about periods where technological progress happened rapidly, and the economic processes which recover were overloaded. Military-industrial complex isn't helping to rebuild the economy; it's actively harming it: wars create economic stress and make us poorer. Oh, they create jobs, sure; the problem is those jobs are just making things that never reach folks--if 10% of your economy is making military materials, then 10% of your labor goes to things that don't actually benefit you, rather than to things like food or cars or video games. In other terms, it's like working to produce 36 hours's worth of stuff in 40 hours of work--technical progress is producing 40 hours's worth of stuff in only 36 hours of work.

Technical progress happens constantly. It causes structural change: 12,000 lay-offs here, 10,000 lay-offs there, a coal mining town decays into a ghost town, and so forth. You lose 0.01% or 0.05% of your employment, gain wealth all over the place, and nearly everyone is better off. It's so tiny that the economy reacts to the greater purchasing power by purchasing more and creating job demand--it's the same rational process that sets prices in the first place with the new change that another competitor has entered the market or the other ten thousand people in your market are able to lower their prices and draw your customers away, and so forth.

Basically, it's a paper cut here and there, and you heal.

An industrial revolution is not a paper cut, but a hole being blown in a major organ. Assuming your economy survives (it usually does), it's going to be a wreck for quite a while.

Now, you should have noticed something above: this structural change may collapse a coal mining town or a factory town, and then create a dozen powerful information technology cities on the other side of the nation. The people over here are poorer and the jobs are going to the people over there; we're all better off as a whole, not as individuals: almost every individual is better off, and a few individuals are the sacrifice.

Because we're all better off as a whole, the winners in this transaction can compensate the losers and still be better off. This is accomplished through social insurances: unemployment, disability insurance, retirement pensions, food stamps, housing assistance, economic stimulus, the like. This applies not just to technical progress, but to trade and immigrant labor which draw down prices around the whole of the nation yet necessarily cause the displacement of some small number of jobs along the way.

The MIC is a waste and creates nothing but poverty. It serves the important function of national defense; if it expends wastefully by accomplishing little with much spending or by building beyond what is ever necessary, it is harming our economy. It should just be defense: an efficient, well-oiled economic machine which achieves its purpose with the least cost achievable.

If you want to protect against unemployment and poverty, you need three things.

The first is structural wage distribution. Make the minimum wage 1/4 of the GNI-per-adult--$10.20/hr in 2018 if 40 hours per week is defined as "full time"). When the minimum wage falls, the opportunities for employment rise; yet the capacity to survive and to support an economy without assistance by such employment falls, and so local economies struggle and decay. The need for social insurances (welfare) increases, causing tax costs or inadequate service and thus collapsing of economies. A sudden, large minimum wage raise creates an unemployment shock; steady growth controls the growth of job opportunities and, thus, the growth of population and labor force. Setting minimum wage to never fall and to never be below a certain portion of the per-working-age-adult income (e.g. 1/4) creates a wage income structure with a defined bottom.

The second is social insurances to protect against structural change and individual microeconomic events. These i

Re:That worked because we had social progress

[4wdloop]

Mod the parent up. I can't judge validity of all claims, but on the surface it is an attempt of a global solution to the problem.

Re:That worked because we had social progress

[bluefoxlucid]

The Dividend is a unique solution. It's similar to a Universal Basic Income and a social insurance (like Social Security Retirement Pensions, Disability Insurance, or Unemployment), as well as to a Keynesian stimulus (that $300 check you got back in 2009 when Obama signed a huge stimulus into law to halt the recession).

It's not global, but national; yet the protections against damage from structural change and the maximization of gains from such structural change allow us to take full advantage of global trade and labor movement. This is fundamental in Nordic nations, and is studied extensively.

It's really weird being an economist because you basically just have to sound like one to qualify. Economists are well-aware of this fact.

Re: so maybe you're not human

[reanjr]

Customers are not involved in fulfillment.

Re:well of course

[Oswald McWeany]

for now they're still cheaper than robots, have more dexterity, can be pushed around and threatened, and make more of themselves at no cost to you! A win-win for the modern psychopath, errr, businessman.

And when Robots are just as dexterous as humans, humans will still have a role; they can form a living carpet for the robots to roll right over.

Like ...

[PPH]

... the Morlock need the Eloi.

Re: Sure.. Humans treated like slaves

[Anonymous Coward]

If it lowers the price I pay for dildos even a penny it is awesome! Their pain is my gain. I am very confident I will never end up on the losing side of this race to the bottom.

Goes both ways

[wwalker]

When a deadly strain of monkey flu infected one of the dumb humans, he kept breathing air out and coughing, infecting other dumb humans in the warehouse, who kept doing the same, infecting even more workers. While smart robots kept going and didn't care. See, it goes both ways.

Robots GO HOME!

[presidenteloco]

No but seriously, the key questions are:

How many humans are employed in fulfilment and shipping across the whole retail economy, which Amazon is reported to be eating a large chunk of.

How many fewer people per $ value of goods shipped across that whole sector. That's a key metric.

Another one is what does the trend curve of employed people / $ value of goods shipped across the whole sector look like, over last 10 years, and projected next 10 or 20 years.

(I think the real solution is to give robots/AIs an income, so they can be the customers too. :-)

That is not the point

[gweihir]

Humans will remain critical for a lot of processes, just much, much fewer than before. And, incidentally, at some point the few humans remaining will stop being a relevant cost factor and will just be left in the process because that is cheaper. That does not help the 80% or so of currently working people that will eventually lose their jobs permanently, though.

Re:That is not the point

[gweihir]

And that is the kicker. The purely economic idea behind a UBI is to make sure people have money to spend to continue to buy things. It is, at best, a partial solution overall though, as people crave meaning in their lives and just being able to buy things will not be enough to supply that.

Humans are key...

[pubwvj]

...as consumers.

Oh, wait, Amazon has even that automated with their Dash!

Amazon sorting centers

[Locke2005]

I worked in an Amazon sorting center during Christmas shipping rush. It's amazingly low tech, literally every package is hand-sorted and hand-scanned by a human being carrying a barcode scanner (running Embedded Windows, of course). Amazon is too frugal to automate. Their worst mistake? Metal slides for packages that all the speaker magnets would stick to -- apparently it never occurred to them to make the sorting conveyor system non-ferrous. Here's the thing: how does Amazon get it diversity stats up when all it's engineers are white boys? By hiring unskilled labor in sorting centers, then promoting all the women and minorities, obviously!

Re: Sure.. Humans treated like slaves

[Locke2005]

Besides which, robots are much less fun to harass!

clean-up in aisle 15

[lfilipoz]

i, for one, look forward to my future as a cleaner of robot-confusing spills (popcorn butter)

excellent example of how humans remain essential

So...

[XSportSeeker]

Humans are essencial to clean up robots' mess, until robots or routines around robots get to a point that they don't mess up anymore. Extremely simple fix for the example given which I'm sure is happening pretty soon: either make robots that won't drop anything, or make packaging that won't create a mess when dropped.
Great defense there Amazon.
It's not about whether humans will be needed or not... they always will. It's about scale and environment. Whether it's justified or not, the worry comes from replacing a hundred workers for one robot, one specialized worker and 99 unemployed people.
And sure, Amazon employs a huge number of people, but what are the hidden costs there? Smaller to medium businesses that closed doors because they couldn't compete. Multiple times more jobs in diverse areas extinguished. A monopoly that has taken opportunities from too many because of it's heavy handed practices.
I always hear this argument that robots are coming first for supposed cumbersome, burdensome, brainless and low paying repetitive jobs... but I think people underestimate how important those are to keep the wage gap from getting even bigger. And we already have lots of signs that those are not the only types of jobs robots will soon be taking over too.

Re: so maybe you're not human

[reanjr]

A typical one. I never sign for my packages nor do I see the delivery driver. The fulfillment process has completed before I ever set eyes on my package.