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

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.

[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.

The curious robots...

[llamalad]

Are they really programmed to be curious?

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

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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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

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.

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!