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Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs

• EugeneOZ 7y ago
  Surprised to find so many modern Luddites in comments. History lessons says that new professions will appear.
  • lm28469 7y ago
    But that's the whole point though. We're creating bs jobs to replace the bs jobs we automated. What's our goal as a society ? Shouldn't we think about working less, better spreading wealth, figuring out a plan so people don't have to work multiple jobs to barely survive ? Right now almost everywhere in the world we're heading for longer work week and increased retirement age. So much for "automation will deliver us from work" we've heard over and over again for the last 60 years.
    • EugeneOZ 7y ago
      > better spreading wealth I grew up in a country where communism has won - I know for sure that it's an utopia. I really hate communists, socialists and other imbeciles who believe that people/business should give their money to lazy people just to make everybody "equal". No, people are not equal - somebody is smarter, somebody works more, somebody is a great artist, somebody is just a lazy alcoholic. So no, we should not think about "spreading" wealth, we should think how to train people for new skills/professions, required by the market.
      • lm28469 7y ago
        > I grew up in a country where communism has won - I know for sure that it's an utopia. I don't think communism is the answer either. > I really hate communists, socialists and other imbeciles who believe that people/business should give their money to lazy people just to make everybody "equal". That's a very individualistic point of view, I used to hold a similar one a few years ago but traveling made me change my mind. Look at the US for example, people are dying of diabetes, in 2019, because they can't afford insulin. That's in the #1 country in the world according to "the market". It might be lazy people, it might also be disabled people, people born in the wrong place / at the wrong time, people who didn't get the opportunity to develop, &c. The question isn't even "why are these people failing?", but "how do we handle them humanely?". It's life, shit happens, your parents die prematurely, you get sick, your company declares bankruptcy and you get fire out of nowhere. The day you'll have kids or, hopefully not, a car accident, a cancer or other high impact disease, you'll be happy that all these "imbeciles" paid a bit of your hundred thousand dollar bills you'll owe to the hospital / schools. > just to make everybody "equal". No, people are not equal Sure they're not, nothing is. It's not about making people equal, it's about not letting people go down too far. You can shift the blame on people all you want ("somebody is just a lazy alcoholic"), but in the end we're products of our environment. Individuals shape society, society shapes individuals. There are people having full time jobs who won't be able to live when they retire without public pensions, what do you tell to these people ? "Too bad you were too lazy, go die somewhere else" ? When I'm talking about spreading wealth I'm not talking about the average worker giving even more of his money, I'm talking about the top 10%, the people who game the system going through every loophole available to avoid paying tax. > we should think how to train people for new skills/professions, required by the market. We're already doing that, and in a perfect world yeah, it might work. But I don't see that happening, we'll always have people less capable than others, people who chose or get pushed on different paths. Also, idk where you live but (moderate) socialism brought us weekends (yeah before workers started to unionize in europe we were workin 10 hours a day 7/7), vacation days, sick days, health insurance, social security, work insurances, maternity/paternity leave, unemployment benefits, <40hrs work week, &c. so it's not all bad. I care much more about what I and my close community requires than what "the market" requires. By the way, isn't "the market" supposed to serve the people and not the other way around ?
        • EugeneOZ 7y ago
          Next time drink some water before rage-speech. I have 2 kids and I never asked for help from the society to raise them. "The day you'll have kids" - lol, ridiculous that you think you are much older and "wiser". And I answered about old people who can't work anymore in another comment, you were too lazy to read before blaming. There's a huge difference between people who can't work and people who are too lazy to work. Society should not encourage laziness. If only skill person learned is how to pack items into a box - should learn more. And one more time: all communists are imbeciles, without exceptions.
    • noonespecial 7y ago
      As long as we keep setting the cost of housing to "everything you've got" and the cost of health care to "everything you're gonna have", it won't matter how much new productivity we create.
    • mschuster91 7y ago
      > Shouldn't we think about working less, better spreading wealth, figuring out a plan so people don't have to work multiple jobs to barely survive ? We should but that would put a decent dent in corporate profits. Germany actually followed this for a long time - since the aftermath of WW2 up until the collapse of the UdSSR we had the "Soziale Marktwirtschaft" which is basically what you described. Then after communism fell, neoliberalism took over.
  • Kadin 7y ago
    History also suggests that having a significant number of unemployed people who suddenly can't afford basic necessities because their jobs / way of life suddenly disappeared, is destabilizing as hell. Very few people are actually suggesting that automation is bad, per se; the concern many people have is that the rate of change needs to be managed such that significant numbers of people aren't left behind. People can only retrain so fast, and some people will never be able to effectively retrain. Automation that suddenly puts them out of work needs to account for what they're supposed to do, and hopefully it's something better than "sit at home and drink themselves to death / overdose on opiates / engage in crime". I'd rather intentionally put the brakes on automation, even though it's a hit to efficiency (and depresses the value of labor -- automation makes human labor more valuable over time), if the alternative you get with unlimited automation is a massive disenfranchisement of working people and consequent destabilization of society. Better to keep some technologically-unnecessary jobs around than to live in a society constantly teetering on the brink of a violent populist uprising. All the efficiency gains of that automation are going to pale in comparison to the damage and loss that will happen during one night of rioting by the now-unemployed proletariat.
    • EugeneOZ 7y ago
      > one night of rioting by the now-unemployed proletariat Lol, and this is response to "Luddites". Good luck with riots :)
    • max76 7y ago
      > Better to keep some technologically-unnecessary jobs around than to live in a society constantly teetering on the brink of a violent populist uprising. Is there any evidence that the United States is "teetering on the bring of a violent populist uprising."? Your entire comment is hyperbolic.
  • nepeckman 7y ago
    And all those middle age workers will, what? Just be retrained? Who's paying for that? What happens when the retraining fails (as it so often does) because you can't magically turn a truck driver into a software engineer? I don't think any of the comments here are anti-progress. But we do need a social and political plan to handle the automation of a large number of low skill jobs. Failure to plan for this future will result in large numbers of displaced and disaffected people.
    • EugeneOZ 7y ago
      > And all those middle age workers will, what? They will be fired, yes. This cruel world, where people should care about competitiveness of their skills. It starts right after the school.
      • theflyinghorse 7y ago
        > It starts right after the school. I'd argue that the competition start before the child is even born in the modern world. Wealth of one's family, their connections play a major role in the success of the child (admission scandals come to mind)
        • EugeneOZ 7y ago
          I wrote about skills competition, not competition between persons. In our cruel world it's absolutely possible to get new skills, and you don't even need huge money to get skills you could sell later. > Wealth of one's family, their connections play a major role in the success of the child And it's perfectly fine. Somebody's parents were working hard or smart and created some legacy - it is absolutely, 100% fine that their offsprings have some advantage - it was the goal of their parents' life.
      • nepeckman 7y ago
        Let's set empathy aside for a moment (which you seem to lack). This just isn't a practical approach. What do you think those people will do after being fired? Kindly die so you don't have to deal with them anymore? No, they will riot. And when that fails, they will turn to theft and crime in order to feed themselves and their family. We will pay one way or another for these economic hardships, in property damage, increased crime, increased prison costs, and overall worse standard of living throughout the developed world.
  • 0xffff2 7y ago
    As every mutual fund prospectus will tell you, past performance does not guarantee future results.
  • jrockway 7y ago
    I think we've reached "peak profession". The reality is that there will be fewer and fewer types of jobs going forward, and that you probably can't merely retrain a coal miner to be a software engineer. This doesn't mean we should stop automation. It does mean that we need to figure out a real solution to give these people a secure future. Companies are already innovating on how to not need employees. As a society, we need to innovate on how to give these people that aren't need to pack Amazon boxes a productive and fulfilling life. (My answer is basic income, paid for by the government. It seems that other people's answer, though, is that Amazon should have to pay for not needing employees. I don't foresee that working out. You can't put the security of the collective in the hands of a profit-seeking entity.)
• atwebb 7y ago
  Is it odd that the headline and article imply Amazon created the tech, then halfway through it's clear they are implementing a solution many other competitors have? Seems like marketing copy regarding Amazon, possibly being behind in implementation of a common solution.
• fastball 7y ago
  Something tells me people will find a way to complain about this. And that those people will be the same people that think Amazon's warehouse policies are oppressive.
  • vCorrect 7y ago
    True. Why not just employ people with a living wage, and then ask them to do a reasonable amount of things? Ohhhhhhhh... riiiiiiight... "profitability" and "being competitive."
  • cheeze 7y ago
    IMO the best "counterargument" here is that those were jobs which paid folks who then paid into their local economy. That goes away with robots and becomes more revenue. Lots of folks are in favor of a "automation tax." I'm not sure how I feel. Note I'm not arguing these points, but merely pointing them out.
    • avgDev 7y ago
      The problem is that as we move forward and keep automating this will become a major issue in our society. I'm not sure if I support automation tax but it makes me uneasy. I work at a manufacturing company. We are slowly chipping away at data entry, manual processes. It only improves efficiency now, but eventually we will need less people.
      • sphinxpy 7y ago
        I am in the same boat with my unease of the situation. Entitlements are already putting the US in crippling debt, however, I am worried that automation will destroy so many jobs that we need a universal basic income. Which I am personally not advocating. I am unsure of how I feel about it.
        • RhodesianHunter 7y ago
          The only entitlements that have any real budgetary impact are Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. The former will only result in crippling debt due to mismanagement of the funds. The latter could (should?) be replaced with universal healthcare. The rest of the budget is mostly defense spending and debt servicing.
• blakesterz 7y ago
  "That would amount to more than 1,300 cuts across 55 U.S. fulfillment centers for standard-sized inventory." ... "removing at least 24 roles at each one, these people said. These facilities typically employ more than 2,000 people." I'm surprised that number is so low. There's only a couple dozen people out of 2000+ that actually put orders in boxes?
  • rusticpenn 7y ago
    I guess 24 roles could also mean 24 roles like lead packer, junior packer etc ...
    • fastball 7y ago
      Looks like they mean 24 people at each center, as 24 * 55 = 1320.
    • blakesterz 7y ago
      I know almost nothing about how these places work, but I would've thought there would be way more people putting stuff in boxes to ship.
    • richrichardsson 7y ago
      It's no stretch to assume by "role" they might mean a job title, and that each role could possibly be being filled by 3 people (3 * 8 hour shifts for a 24 hours continuous operation), so now you're looking at 72 jobs. I've no idea if Amazon does run 24 hour operations though.
  • mrec 7y ago
    It sounds like a gradual transition to me, not replacing all packers overnight. > A key to its goal of a leaner workforce is attrition, one of the sources said. Rather than lay off workers, the person said, the world’s largest online retailer will one day refrain from refilling packing roles. and > The machines have the potential to automate far more than 24 jobs per facility, one of the sources said.
  • zdragnar 7y ago
• seandhi 7y ago
  Bezos goads competitors to raising wages while developing machines to eliminate wages.
  • whyenot 7y ago
    As mentioned in the article, Amazon's competitors such as Walmart are also doing trials with the same machine.
• irrational 7y ago
  This sounds like good news. I've read lots of negative stories about the working conditions in Amazon warehouses. It would be great if all the jobs could be automated.
  • atonse 7y ago
    Honestly the best proposal I've seen for slowing down such automation is to add a tax on these machines. That'll make the cost-benefit equation less obvious. These machines won't pay for themselves in a year and then be practically free. They'll continue to cost a lot. This kind of tax would help slow the progress of such automation to a speed where society can better adjust. And I say this as someone who absolutely loves all this kind of automation.
    • rytor718 7y ago
      I was going to (very slightly) disagree, but the idea that society is slower than technology is an angle that needs to be stated out loud a lot more. We can't out pace machines and its a fair reason to tax them for the time being. That said, I don't necessarily believe "society is slow to catch up" should be a long term problem. It should be something the government mandates for x years -- so that it has a timeline to get its act together and build society towards the future.
      • atonse 7y ago
        Totally agree, that it would be a temporary measure to add some speed bumps. I first heard this proposal from Bill Gates. Suffice to say he's got a unique view and has probably studied this extensively.
      • SamuelAdams 7y ago
        > It should be something the government mandates for x years -- so that it has a timeline to get its act together and build society towards the future. Be careful what you wish for. Social Security was supposed to be temporary too, but here we are, 50 years later. As Milton Friedman put it: > Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
• csours 7y ago
  Is there a field of study associated with job creation? The answer is not actually obvious. There's a lot of research into efficiency, which is almost synonymous with job destruction. Edit: Thanks for the answers below. I was thinking of academic areas of research. For example, Macroeconomics, Labor Relations, Governance, Management Theory etc.
  • swalsh 7y ago
    I think hand-made "artisan" products is going to continue to be a large part of the future of "Jobs". Automation can mass produce high quality items that aren't unqiue, and 3D printers can make unique products that aren't high quality... but humans right now are the best at making high quality unique items. But I do think things like UBI are still necessary, hand made items are always going to be in-demand, but unless you're selling only to the 1%, it's hard to charge enough.
  • i_am_proteus 7y ago
    Entrepreneurship.
  • rch 7y ago
    Certain segments of the agriculture industry seem promising, since smaller scale operations could benefit from efficiencies in logistics and distribution that were traditionally drivers of consolidation.
  • marcosdumay 7y ago
    Automation means some people are richer (mostly the machine sellers and end-consumers), with more to trade for the products of some other kind of job. People create new jobs about as fast as they destroy old ones, and that has little relation to the kind of jobs and technology involved. There are some second-order factors that create the bad kinds of unemployment, but the ones that currently are relevant have little relation to automation. That's not saying that automation unemployed can not become relevant. It certainly can, and has done so a few times in history, with results varying from bad to disastrous. I'm just saying that job creation and destruction aren't different phenomena, and you delude yourself if you think somebody can study one without also studying the other.
• CamelCaseName 7y ago
  About time! I visited either YYZ4 or YYZ3 a few months ago and I was incredibly disappointed. For a technology company, their warehouses were anything but sophisticated. Their storage robots were surprisingly lackluster, their outbound/cubiscan conveyor belt was incredibly slow and often stopped. Of course, I am just an outsider looking in, and I have no visibility into the underlying software that optimizes these process, but when you look at companies with fulfillment tech like JD, you really wonder how Amazon's retail arm is able to survive at all.
  • ssvss 7y ago
    Any article that you suggest for knowing more about JD's fulfillment tech?
    • adinobro 7y ago
      The technology seems similar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYjc9h8oSsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYjc9h8oSsY (This is actually Alibaba but JD should be the similar)
  • mabbo 7y ago
    It was YYZ4. YYZ3 doesn't do tours. If you're interested in helping make it better, Amazon's got an office full of developers here in Toronto[0] working on these problems. It's a lot of fun, the pay is better than most in Toronto, and the 7 years I've been here have almost always involved me being mentored by really great folks. Feel free to reach out[1]. [0]120 Bremner, between the ACC and Rogers Center. [1]This alias at company name dot com.
    • 0xffff2 7y ago
      Off topic, but you're literally the first Amazon developer I've ever seen say anything positive about working there. Do you feel that the work culture is unusually good for your office compared to Amazon as a whole?
      • 7y ago
• zdw 7y ago
  Video of the CarltonWrap mentioned in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1yw05mWnXw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1yw05mWnXw It's actually pretty neat - creates boxes to size on demand. Doesn't seem like this would be possible with humans at a store, and could really cut down on box inventory.
  • gxx 7y ago
    If it results in the elimination of oversized boxes it should save on cardboard, also reducing shipping volume. This would be financially and environmentally be a good thing. Maybe they could also include in the box sizing algorithm the optimization of shapes for efficient packing.
    • dehrmann 7y ago
      Within reason, shipping weight is a bigger deal than volume.
      • SamuelAdams 7y ago
        Right but from a recycle / waste perspective, its a great thing. If manufacturers and distributors use less materials in their product packaging, that's less materials that end up in landfills. Not everyone recycles (even if the material, like cardboard, is recyclable), so the best way for Amazon to help fix waste is by reducing the raw output of cardboard.
    • NoodleIncident 7y ago
      IIRC, some boxes are intentionally oversized, in order to completely fill the truck, so that things don't move around. That's not going to change because of this new machine.
  • fouronnes3 7y ago
    Absurd how most of the items on the belt are already in a cardboard box. Seems so wasteful.
• throwayEngineer 7y ago
  Fantastic, less human labor in one sector means new opportunities in another.
  • camochameleon 7y ago
    Where are the new opportunities here? Does the number of people employed designing and manufacturing these machines come close to the number of people put out of work by their creation? Let's not pretend that Amazon is some benevolent force here. It's the same company that sets work targets high enough to force employees to have to pee in bottles and penalises sick and pregnant workers for taking time off or breaks. [1] [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-workers-have-to-pee-into-bottles-2018-4?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-workers-hav...
    • throwayEngineer 7y ago
      Yes, now those workers won't have such horrible conditions. Or at least we are closer.
      • 0xffff2 7y ago
        >Yes, now those workers won't have such horrible conditions. Instead of working in "horrible" conditions, these workers are now simply unemployed. Do you think they see that as an improvement of their position in life?
  • hannasanarion 7y ago
    This is a platitude that is said often, but there is no evidence to support it. There is no law of the universe that says whenever a job gets automated, a new type of work pops out of the aether to employ displaced people. It is wishful thinking at best.
    • throwayEngineer 7y ago
      Is there evidence to say the contrary? I imagine instead of Amazon paying 11 dollars an hour, a small business has the opportunity to pay 11 dollars an hour. Before Amazon's size and HR department sucked up local labor.
• Theodores 7y ago
  So the 'pick' part of 'pick and pack' still needs humans. This machine glues a cardboard box together removing the need for the guy with the tape. The article stresses that this is about efficiency rather than reducing head-count. This is a good thing as that means more optimally packed items being ferried around the country. However, for other online sellers that do not have this semi-automated packing this is not so good news, they don't have the scale Amazon does to have the robot support engineer on site. They have to pack the old ways, with lots of labour.
  • cadence- 7y ago
    I think it’s safe to assume that this machine will be getting improvements. The “pick” part will surely also get automated at some point. It’s quite obvious to anybody who is willing to think about it for a while, to deduct that these kind of jobs will eventually all get automated. What the various governments should be doing now, is to start preparing the society to a new reality in which no-skill and low-skill jobs are gone. This will happen at some point. What do we do about it? The only thing that is happening so far are various timid Universal Income pilots. But those often hit substantial political pressure and are being labeled as socialist or even communist, and therefore unacceptable. So how do we prepare?
    • mises 7y ago
      The biggest issue is not America, it is the third world. Billions of people are employed by outsourced manufacturing. When they are replaced, no one will be able to afford any kind of safety net for them. There is not enough money to pay for every one's stuff. China, India, Africa, and S. America have all grown on the backs of this outsourcing. When that goes away, we will have many billions of angry, hungry, restless young men. That is how wars start and how civilizations fall. Previously, countries have typically dealt with an inability to feed their people by starting wars. Those that have not have typically collapsed or starved them (which, in turn, results in collapse). There will need to be some kind of solution. Even if they are all fed, people without purpose are always trouble. As the saying goes, idle hands do the Devil's work.
    • 7y ago
• sandworm101 7y ago
  I'm surprised that Amazon still uses boxes. They have the market power to insist manufacturers comply with amazon-specific packaging requirements. Why not just insist that all products be packaged in postal-compatible packaging? Then the amazon warehouse robot need only slap a label on the product and throw it in the shipping bin. Another answer would be to have products packaged in standard, or at lease square, boxes that could be thrown into larger shipping boxes. Or do away with the warehouse altogether and have products ship directly from manufacturers. I wonder if anyone has tried that?
  • petra 7y ago
    So there are 2 options: 1. Amazon changes the market(a huge challenge). it's now easier for manufacturers and other retailers to do e-commerce. 2. Amazon becomes the best in the world in packaging, and keeps the skill to itself. It's now harder to compete with Amazon. Naturally Amazon prefers #2.
    • m463 7y ago
      what about #3 - amazon tells sellers to ship to buyers, does no packaging, still makes money Of course, there's no reason #2 can be a check-and-balance against #3 becoming too expensive/independent.
      • marcosdumay 7y ago
        That's #1. It depends on the sellers accepting the extra tasks, and doing them competently while harming Amazon's brand if they don't. It also prepares those same services to sell though other intermediaries that can not compete today with Amazon's logistics. Why would Amazon comoditize its greatest competitive advantage? (Yet, it seems that they are, so the question is not rhetorical.)
  • dickeytk 7y ago
    They’ve done this https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201910210 https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
• jordache 7y ago
  andrew yang 2020. no brainer. Surprised why more candidates are not discussing the automation gorilla in the room. there are not enough low-skilled, difficult to automate jobs that can sustain the population.
  • justaman 7y ago
    I like that he brings up a conversation we as a country need to be having but his ideas are hairbrained or idealist at best.
  • asdfman123 7y ago
    Candidates are discussing immigration, tariffs and outsourcing because that's actually affecting jobs in the US and people who work on the factory lines know it. Automation is a scary specter off in the distance but it's not as actively harmful to people's livelihoods.
    • jordache 7y ago
      ppl are stupid. reactionary strategy is way less effective than proactive.
    • aiyodev 7y ago
      > Automation is a scary specter off in the distance but it's not as actively harmful to people's livelihoods. http://nber.org/papers/w23285 http://nber.org/papers/w23285 > According to our estimates, one more robot per thousand workers reduces the employment to population ratio by about 0.18-0.34 percentage points and wages by 0.25-0.5 percent. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/opinion/trump-robots-electoral-college.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/opinion/trump-robots-elec... > No single factor such as tech-driven worker anxiety determines local political behavior. But there’s no mistaking that districts that voted Republican in the 2018 election are subject to higher levels of automation exposure.
  • tzs 7y ago
    Yang is attracting a weird mix...he's a Democrat running on fairly left of center positions [1] yet is also attracting support from white nationalists who have become disillusioned with Trump [2]. [1] https://www.yang2020.com/policies/ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/ [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/white-supremacists-are-disillusioned-by-trump-and-joining-the-yang-gang-2019-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/white-supremacists-are-disil...
• everyone 7y ago
  The fact that rising automation is an issue bothers me. Automation is miraculous! Its has steadily been removing the necessity for humans to engage in drudge work. The solution is simple and obvious. Most people no longer need to work. This has probably been true for decades and is only becoming moreso. With automation, a small number of people can provide the food / water / electricity / etc. for 1000's. Everyone should be provided with the food, shelter, etc. they need for free. Thats it.. The actual problem here is remediating our obsolete society and cultural values so they are once again practical in the light of these automation developments. I'm not saying it'll be easy, there will be plenty of wrinkles, some people (eg. farmers) will still need to work. Do they get more? Do people take turns? But these are just wrinkles. Overall its very clear what the actual problem is and what we need to do. The fact that so many people now are still slaving away engaged in pointless bullshit white collar jobs is a tragedy. Such a waste of potential happiness. Also we are wasting massive amounts of resources carrying out all this pointless work, and furthering the destruction of the environment for no reason.
  • thebigspacefuck 7y ago
    It would be great if the automation were in the hands of individuals. you need to farm? Invest in an automated tractor, combine, whatever and it will take care of your crops. Now you have free time, food to eat, and can work a second job for anything else. Instead the automation goes in the hands of large corporations and there's no relationship between what the machines produce and what people need to live. An automated boxing machine doesn't build houses or farm food for individuals. There's no more abundance to go around. You could create the relationship by taxing machines or taxing the wealthy that own them and spending that money on food and housing, but maybe people don't want to live off food stamps in government housing. Then you have economics that come into play. Are people going to have more kids since they get more food and bigger houses? Will there be an increase in crime? Will prices increase now that everyone can afford food? I'm optimistic, but it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
    • 0xffff2 7y ago
      >Invest in an automated tractor, combine, whatever and it will take care of your crops. Now you have a huge loan to pay every month to pay off your farming equipment. You now need a second job and you're no better off than when you went and bought your groceries at the supermarket. I'm basically a Luddite trapped in a software engineer's body at this point. I'd like nothing better than to buy a hundred acres and become a farmer/rancher, but after taking a serious look at the financial side of things I gave up that dream. The capital costs to start up are so high that there's basically no way I would be able to do it without a loan big enough to mean that one bad year in the first decade would likely sink me financially.
• PorterDuff 7y ago
  I should go back and read some older books on the wondrous future of automation. The idea always was, of course, that machines would do the boring part of a job. What people actually bring to the picnic is a subset of a job that is hard to do with a computer and/or machine manipulation, so you end up with deskilling of supermarket cashiers or bank teller gigs. It always seemed to me that you could wipe out far more jobs than Amazon is likely to by simply removing the need to weigh items in grocery stores (like our local discount market). Generally, supersizing retail and the underlying supply chain has changed matters far more than laying off some warehouse employees. I suppose that outsourcing has already 'automated' scads of US jobs in any case. The interesting automation will hit people who type for a living. Dunno how it will all it turn out, but I've got my comfy chair and a cocktail waiting.
• curiousgal 7y ago
  This seems to simply wrap each item in a cardboard shell, is that protective? Also whenever someone complains about receiving a tiny item in a large box, the answer is usually that Amazon does so to optimize the filling of its trucks so that all the boxes are densly packed (no room for them to fall), wouldn't having each item its own custom sized box hinder that optimization?
• BrendanD 7y ago
  This story started me wondering whether hardware, in this case Amazon order packing automatons, or wetware has a smaller net lifetime carbon footprint, assuming both are as green as possible. (Ignoring, of course global over-population and/or mass over-consumption of essentially disposable goods.). These days I am having a hard time imagining that technology could ever have the negative carbon footprint required to mitigate climate change.
• hardwaresofton 7y ago
  Is it me or does it feel like the door to economic advancement is closing faster and faster every day? In this thread people are suggesting UBI, but I can't see that as anything more than an economic uncertainty (trying to predict how market forces will respond and adapt), which will be exploited by the oligarchy that is already exploiting the systems we have now (as you might expect anyone to). To think we could successfully create a good UBI system despite the fact that we can't get other very important pieces of governance right in many parts of the world seems ludicrous. People are suggesting that new jobs will be created as jobs are automated but there's no proof of that except history and this time seems different -- humanity has never had the tools it has now, the step change in ability/utility over the last few decades is insane. In a world with high levels of automation, where does advancement come from? Up until now, it's mostly been differentiation through some form of work. Do creative endeavors become the new work/only way to differentiate if we spend most of our time on leisure? But then what if someone automates that away too? It seems like once we evolve past work the economic system and the big & small players in it will freeze in place. If you had enough capital to be on the right side of the split then you get to stay on that side, but if you didn't you seem all but condemned. Dystopia seems inevitable. I'm not saying that I think work is good in and of itself but it's disconcerting to happens when that particular music stops -- it's run so much of the world up until now. Another thought -- the good 'ol revolution/riot path is going to get closed down in a few decades I think. Weaponization of autonomous machinery will happen, and the efficiency of oppression will reach untold heights. Security will be a highly sought skill and those most able to pay for it (with resources/money/whatever) will be able to purchase it. Sure hope I'm wrong about all/most of this.
• aszantu 7y ago
  more people loosing their jobs will be unable to buy products, no matter how cheap, from amazon, hu?
• polskibus 7y ago
  It's awesome that the boxing machine is not patented by Amazon but is owned by an independent (? for now?) company. It means that others can access this tech and that Amazon won't close it before competitors. If it works, I believe Amazon won't wait for long with the takeover though. It's great because Google et al tend to keep a lot to themselves, not offering hardware on the market (for example full version of the TPU).
  • KON_Air 7y ago
    I would like to remind you such machines are not built because it requires some genius touch in design, they are not built because there is little demand for them. But yeah, tool being not locked under some patent by some monopoly or the other is a good thing.
    • polskibus 7y ago
      Do you have any pointers for articles stating that this is the case? I'd love to read more about such solutions - I thought that machines stealing our real jobs is still a matter of tech not being good enough.
• flyingplasma 7y ago
  Looks like it's not just Amazon "JD.com Inc and Shutterfly Inc have used the machines as well, the companies said, as has Walmart Inc. Walmart started 3.5 years ago and has since installed the machines in several U.S. locations" And they are faster too "They crank out 600 to 700 boxes per hour, or four to five times the rate of a human packer"
• tluyben2 7y ago
  I was debugging firmware for a Dutch supermarket chain as a summer job while in high school in the 80s and at that time they were ‘very close’ to replace all packing jobs with robots. Did Amazon pull it off finally?
• rhacker 7y ago
  In related news, Amazon has announced it will give $10000 to any employee that wants to start a delivery business. Seems like a reasonable move, from packer to delivery person.
• CriticalCathed 7y ago
  This is going to be a shock to all of those people who were willing to give tax incentives for Amazon to build distribution warehouses in their city in exchange for "jobs." Though, this is only the beginning. A few thousand jobs now, the majority of them later.
  • xkjkls 7y ago
    Most of those tax breaks have specific empployment figures associated with them.
    • bobberkarl 7y ago
      Bu there's no penalty if this target are not met.
      • cies 7y ago
        Or the penalty is "cheap" aka worth it.
      • javagram 7y ago
        Aren’t the tax breaks often tied directly to the number of jobs? I believe that’s how the incentive structure for Amazon’s new NoVA headquarters works for instance. If the company doesn’t create the job, the tax break is reduced by a certain percentage per job.
        • dragonwriter 7y ago
          > Aren’t the tax breaks often tied directly to the number of jobs? Usually, no, though the public justification for the tax breaks is usually in terms of expected jobs.
          • WillPostForFood 7y ago
            This is false, there are almost always specific job number requirements that must be met to be eligible for tax credits or the credits are tightly tied to hiring. The Joliet, IL Amazon warehouse incentive deal is a typical example. Amazon can credit employee withholding taxes against corporate income tax. If there are no employees hired, then there is no withholding tax, and no tax credit.
• lukewrites 7y ago
  I'm all for this as soon as we change the laws so companies pay payroll taxes on automation commensurate to the number of paid positions taken by the equipment. Automation is what we should be striving for, but only if workers and society see material benefits from it. ("Your labor potential can be reallocated to a position of higher need"/"You now have the opportunity to retrain" isn't a material benefit.)
  • gnode 7y ago
    I find this notion ridiculous. There are many industries like farming and mining which are now highly mechanised and employ a tiny fraction of what they did. As a result, food and minerals are cheap, fewer workers have to put their lives at risk doing dangerous jobs, and the labour force for other endeavours is increased. Mechanisation delivers benefits to society at large, although I agree that at an individual level redundancy is harmful. This harm is a humanitarian issue, which the whole of society is responsible for, not an ill which employers should be specifically penalised for.
  • cies 7y ago
    Tax on labour (or housing) is quite weird if you look at it with fresh eyes. Don't we want to support people working and living in a house? Then why tax those? Is it a relic from the past? Thought experiment: what if we (only) tax pollution? All taxes end up being paid by the consumer anyway. But this get the incentive straight to deliver products/services "cleanly". Just a thought...
    • 0xffff2 7y ago
      "Taxing housing" isn't weird at all. We don't tax housing. If you rent, you pay rent to your landlord and that's it. You don't also pay taxes on that rent to the government. I'm guessing what you actually mean is that we tax property. This seems inherently fair to me. Why should you get to squat on a piece of land for free in perpetuity, especially when for most land, the value of the land is inherently improved by government-provided services?
      • 7y ago
• iambateman 7y ago
  If we taxed robots, this would be easier for more people to embrace as a good thing.
• jason0597 7y ago
  Considering how badly Amazon treats their employees, I'm surprised they haven't allocated vast amount of resources already to automating everything in their warehouses. The number of times they've appeared in the news in the past regarding their treatment of employees, you'd think they despise humans and want to replace everyone with robots and that they would have done it already.
  • jimmywanger 7y ago
    Well, if they could they would. They're keeping the workers they absolutely need and automating everything else possible. The endgame is a dark warehouse (no lights, the robots just sort of know what to do) but the workers still need some money so they keep working even though their numbers keep dropping. This box robot saves material (little wastage of cardboard) and labor costs, and doesn't ever call in sick. Why wouldn't they want robots for everything?
    • athenot 7y ago
      > This box robot (…) doesn't ever call in sick. Any machine eventually calls in sick when it undergoes maintenance and failure. Of course the failure modes are different than with human labor, but the point is machines also fail.
      • jimmywanger 7y ago
        >Any machine eventually calls in sick when it undergoes maintenance and failure. Of course the failure modes are different than with human labor, but the point is machines also fail. I think that robots are more fungible and predictable in failure than humans. You can plan around that, like plugging in spare hard drives and machines when they fail so throughput is not affected.
• Judson 7y ago
  As someone in consumer-goods warehousing and distribution, automation is the only way forward. The seasonality of demand and inherent monotonous nature of the work itself makes it near-impossible to scale and retain the workforce required to fulfill orders. You have to automate what can be automated, and continue to aggressively hire just to keep up with order growth.
• sacradix 7y ago
  Workers of the world, rejoice! Amazon will now be exploiting fewer workers.
• darksaints 7y ago
  Amazon's push to reduce costs always ends up going after the obvious, but their cost structure is more like an iceberg, and they're going after the least effective parts. The majority of the costs have little to do with direct labor, but rather planning. Inventory costs, logistics costs, warehouse utilization, sales forecasting, etc. There is far more to shipping costs than distance. A split shipment (two items in two boxes) will typically increase costs for an order by $3-6, whereas receive/stow/pick/pack labor costs are only on the order of $1/unit. And yet, nearly every order I place comes in multiple shipments. Kiva has O(n^2) efficiency degradation with respect to the size of their fulfillment centers. They solve this problem by having smaller fulfillment centers. But that also means more fulfillment centers, which means more split shipments, and much higher shipping costs. They're literally spending dollars to save pennies. Reverse logistics are incredibly expensive. I'm talking $10-20/unit in some cases. The Amazon marketplace, and their associated quality control problems with fake reviews and counterfeit products, have increased their product returns by several fold over the last decade. 15 years ago, Amazon's inventory turns were something like 17, now they're 6. That directly translates to increased holding costs...for every sqft of storage space they needed in 2005, they need three today to ship the same amount of product. And fulfillment costs aren't the only place they're making dumb mistakes with priorities. They did their whole HQ2 search shenanigans, only to settle on the two cities that offered the highest tax subsidies. But if they chose to instead prioritize lower cost of living, they could have saved an order of magnitude more, considering the fact that they are planning on having several tens of thousands of high paid workers in their HQ2 cities. The COL increases alone from locating in expensive cities with obstructive housing policies will eat up far more than those tax subsidies are worth. In the funniest of ironies, Amazon's growth-first mindset that defied Wall Street expectations has led to an invariably laser-focused expectation on revenue growth that they are now a slave to. The P/E premium that Amazon has relative to its industry competitors, carries an implied expectation that Amazon will one day be ~10x bigger than it currently is. And Amazon's equity-first compensation philosophy means that their compensation budget inherently relies on the stock price. Therefore, any decision that may be in the long term best interest of the company (such as dumping the brand perception nuclear bomb known as the Amazon Marketplace) is now no longer feasible: it will cut revenue, killing growth expectations, lowering stock prices, and forcing Amazon to pay more cash compensation, which will just cause prices to tank further. If we were to judge how Amazon is doing based off of how well their PR releases jive with wall street ideas of what good business decisions look like, they are doing everything right. Unfortunately, wall street ideas are shit for actual profitability. And Amazon is suffering for it.
• Rapzid 7y ago
  They really need to wrap the books with a piece of butcher paper or something. I keep getting books that slid around and got scuffed to heck by contact with the boxes. Since I have been buying more pricey collection quality books, I have been sending them back :|
  • dmix 7y ago
    Isn't that what the bubble wrap is for? Although they don't fit well in the smaller standard book boxes that Amazon uses...
    • Rapzid 7y ago
      Well, I didn't see any bubble wrap in that video :) My recent return and its replacement had zero protection between the book and the cardboard.
      • dmix 7y ago
        I've bought two books in a reecent box and they weren't padded either. I never had any scuffs or damage on the hundreds books I've bought through Amazon though. How bad are the scuffs? My apartment is close to an Amazon outlet factory so it doesn't have to very far to arrive.
• forgingahead 7y ago
  Video link of the packing machine that Amazon is using: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rP1wjEsbak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rP1wjEsbak
• elamje 7y ago
  Articles about Amazon are quick to mention the workplace conditions or robots automating something. Rarely do they mention that machines equal lower prices for the consumers 9 times out of 10. You can think what you want about Amazon but I’m not complaining that I have 100’s of options for my phone case, all for 1/5 the price of the previous days buying them at Verizon or Apple. Edit: would be awesome to hear about Amazon’s pricing practice from an employee
  • fxfan 7y ago
    Thank god I can now buy that $70 iPhone case for $69. Who cares what these uneducated people get paid. Also, everything will be fine when we ring socialism so others can pay taxes to subsidies the lives of these uneducated people. Not me though, I want my stuff cheap and my taxes low. /s
  • tammer 7y ago
    I think you are correct in that this is often not brought into such conversations. I also think that the full extent of this conversation, that consumer interest is currently in opposition with our responsibilities as a society, is rarely considered by the mainstream media as well.
  • JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
    It seems less relevant to compare the cost of a case at Verizon/Apple than purchasing through Amazon. Why? It's a completely different experience -- you get to see the selection in person, ask questions, try the case on your phone to confirm it actually fits, you know there is near-0 odds of it being a counterfeit or unscrupulous seller (unlike Amazon). The mort apt comparison is the cost of the phone case when packed with human labor vs. packed by robots.
  • o_p 7y ago
    >machines bring lower prices Do you have any source about this? If the costumer is already willing to pay a price there would be no point in lowering the price just because you automated the process. Or better said, theres no point in investing in machines if your profit margin is not going to get wider.
• mikeash 7y ago
  I wonder if this means I’ll stop receiving boxes the size of a small house containing a single small item, or if it’ll be even worse.
  • _1 7y ago
    That's usually due to delivery/packing requirements, not a human unable to find the smallest possible box.
    • mikeash 7y ago
      Can you elaborate? I routinely get smaller boxes, but I also routinely get boxes that are comically oversized and contain an item that would easily fit in one of the smaller sizes. What requirements are making that happen?
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • mdorazio 7y ago
        In a lot of cases it's optimization for a truck loadout. The loading setup is usually automated to maximize the number of packages in a truck while minimizing empty space, so you can easily end up needing a larger box to fit a specific gap in the truck. There are also some products that are marked as "fragile" and require a minimum amount of empty space in a box to prevent them from getting smashed. The exact definition of "fragile" and amount of space required is some kind of arcane black magic.
        • mikeash 7y ago
          These items aren’t fragile and usually come with totally inadequate padding, so that’s not it. The truck loadout thing seems likely though.
• dfilppi 7y ago
  Cool. After all Amazon's product isn't "jobs". It is customer service, and robots are better.
  • tomc1985 7y ago
    Such a shame that this is the top comment here. People at that level are watching their job options shrink at an incredible place. Qualify your statement; robots are only "better" because they are cheaper.
    • abakker 7y ago
      Well, Robots may be cheaper, but they may also be more accurate. In my 20 years shopping with Amazon, I have very occasionally received the wrong items, so maybe robots will combat that, or reduce the need to double check, etc. I agree, low-skill jobs are shrinking, but we should not expect companies to solve that. We have a government and we vote. Ideally, we should all be asking the government to propose solutions to this problem, not expecting it to be inside the corporate charter.
      • tomc1985 7y ago
        With the current political gridlock voting is not enough. Workplaces -- the very entities that provide the jobs we need to earn a living -- need to shoulder more of the burden they inflict from the zero-sum game that they're paying. They hold a disproportionate amount of the world's wealth and they need to take responsibility for it.
        • slphil 7y ago
          The economy is not a zero-sum game, nor are corporate profits. Increases in productive efficiency create objectively more wealth overall, and those benefits diffuse out to every socioeconomic class (the classic conservative snark that even poor people have cars, refrigerators, and air conditioning, living better than medieval kings in many ways, is not inaccurate). We are living in an era where megacorporations and their related efficiency gains will rapidly increase the "standard of living" for a population which is (nonetheless!) going to get more miserable over time. Stepping past the "zero-sum" claim, though, I agree that corporations should take responsibility for their incredibly powerful role in modern society, but I don't see a mechanism by which this could happen. The entire point of a regulated liberal democracy is to create a legislative landscape which modifies the incentive structures of businesses to "coerce" them into providing more social benefit than cost. There is also nothing wrong with some level of redistributism, as long as it doesn't blindly ignore economic reality (a la communism). Many of the right-leaning nerds here on HN are in favor of universal basic income for that reason.
• ddlatham 7y ago
  A couple weeks ago, I toured the Amazon fulfillment center in Tracy, CA. Some observations: It was very impressive. Watching the yellow plastic tubs flying around on conveyor belts, being sorted into different tracks automatically. It reminded me of the scene in "Monsters, Inc." where are the bedroom doors are flying around on different tracks. Work was divided into different stages: 1. Taking delivery from supply trucks, checking that contents were correct and in good shape. Contents placed into tubs that were conveyed to multiple different areas of the warehouse. 2. Storing items. Tubs of incoming items were delivered to a storage station. Robots brought storage pods (6-7 feet tall) with many cubbies up to the station. Different pods had different sized cubbies. A storage worker would scan each item from the tubs, and choose some cubby to put the item into. It looked like a camera watched which cubby they stored into to record it. cubbies could hold multiple different items. Apparently they are careful to never put two similar items in the same cubby, to make it easier for the next stage: 3. Picking items from storage. When an order needs to be fulfilled, the robots would bring a line of pods up to a person who would pick the needed item out of the correct cubby of each pod. All the items would go into a tub, to be conveyed to somewhere else for packing. 4. Packing the items for shipment. A person gets the items out of the tub, puts them in the correct sizes box, adds the air pockets for protection and seals up the box, which is then conveyed to another machine that weighs them and labels them for shipment. 5. Outgoing shipping distributed to different trucks based on geo location to ship to. We walked around the warehouse with a few guides, and headphones to be able to listen to them. Our guide was excellent in being able to explain things and genuinely enthusiastic about the whole process. At the end they gave us branded water bottles too. I asked our guide what he thought would happen as they began to automate more and more of the jobs. He said that they would shift people over to new roles and gave an example of a time in the past when they automated some job and instead split up roles to have a separate person do QA / checking of orders where before the same person had to fill an order and check it. He also spoke of another fulfillment center in Southern California where they automated a job, then later reversed course and went back to all manual because the people at that center decided that it was done better that way for them. I was surprised that decisions over automation were made locally at each center. We hung around the building afterward, and bought lunch from a taco truck outside, and ate at some picnic tables where many employees also ate. I talked to some of them to try to get a less biased perspective from the employees. When I asked them how they liked working there, the most common answer I got was "It's a job." They said that expectations were high and they had to work hard. Some shifts were more desirable than others. One man said that it was tough, but he was very loyal because a year before Amazon had chosen to pay for his cancer treatment and he said they didn't have to. I left with a positive impression of the operation. I'd recommend taking the tour if there's a fulfillment center nearby. You need to register in advance for a time, but it's all free.
• smpetrey 7y ago
  Anyone parading around like this is bad news has never worked in an assembly line or warehouse job. This might reduce the workforce overall long-term, but honestly this is hard back-breaking long-workday labor. Anything that improves the livelihood of the warehouse workers is a win in my book.
  • c0vfefe 7y ago
    Snap jobs out of existence so the workers don't have to suffer by doing them - Thanos would approve!
  • discreteevent 7y ago
    I worked two assembly line jobs. One feeding a robot with pre cut steel sections. The other wiring trucks. Both were non stop but just for 8 hour shifts. Both took physical energy and flexibility but were not back breaking (no more than the Amazon jobs anyway). I enjoyed them both and felt physically better at the end of the day than I do when I come home from a days coding. Everyone who worked with me needed the job and most were proud to have it. It was part of their identity.
    • Moru 7y ago
      An industrial job often pays a lot better than amazon ever would
  • dzmien 7y ago
    I worked for Amazon in what was then a brand new warehouse for a few months in 2015. I worked 10 hour shifts, from 20:00 to 07:00 (the extra hour was for lunch and breaks). My job was picking orders. It seemed easy at first (and it was, but mentally, not so much). All I had to do was stand in one place while robots brought me pod after endless pod of products. There was nothing to it, and that was the problem. The pods were divided into indexed bins containing their random assortment of products and the computer told me to get product X from bin Y. Again and again and again. I was literally just a robot arm with a human brain attached to it, and for what? To torment it [me, the head]? I was in hell. By the end of each shift I would be in a daze, wondering why the hell I thought this would be a good job, and by the end of my first month I started using heroin again (I had been clean for six months up until that point). Now I'm not saying I would have stayed clean if it wasn't for Amazon, but it definitely made relapse happen a lot sooner. And besides, the drug made me work like a machine. The 10 hour shifts that slogged by in sobriety began to blow by with blissful alacrity, and my numbers were excellent to boot. And eventually, well, I was fucking hooked on heroin again and I knew I had to stop. So I quit to focus on my recovery. It was the best decision I've ever made and I've been clean for over three years now. That might be a stupid story, but the whole time I worked at Amazon, all I could think was "they are going to automate this job someday, and thank fucking god for that. What is taking them so long?" No human should be made to do such mindless work. It sucks. And for $13.75 an hour, it definitely isn't worth it.
• katakuchi 7y ago
  Jobs are changing, the skills we require of the working force is in constant flux. We pretend like this is a catastrophe, while we should be thanking progression and embracing development that improves production which no longer requires humans to do such mundane jobs. The friction and disruption the abrupt rollout of such machines might cause is a different matter. We should take a long hard look how we want to re-educate or re-employ the workforce which is currently on jobs such as retail sales, factory workers or even drivers. New developments also introduce new jobs, last I've heard the western population is also aging. And there are still huge gaps in sectors such as education, nursing. Whatever drives the population will definitely create a new demand in work-intense labour. It's needed to keep the economic wheel turning.
• vivekrkumar 7y ago
  Contrarian (and biased) point of view based on our current success serving Fortune 500 customers - automation in warehouses is not a near-term solution, and acquiring and retaining talent is still a huge pain. Reuters only 12 days ago published, "Amazon dismisses idea automation will eliminate all its warehouse jobs soon." [1] Automation will continue to increase, but we're still seeing numerous job openings in warehousing. [2] For now, it looks like robots in warehouses are displacing work, not replacing jobs. We do believe that automation and robots will eventually lead to the creation of more stable jobs with less turnover. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-warehouse/amazon-dismisses-idea-automation-will-eliminate-all-its-warehouse-jobs-soon-idUSKCN1S74B9 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-warehouse/amaz... [2] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm
• thrower123 7y ago
  Is anyone complaining about this? These are mindless, terrible, Taylorized jobs. If machines can do it, they should.
• 40acres 7y ago
  The industrial revolution helped spur the Progressive Era and the modern welfare state, the current technological evolution will likely bring about the next wave of Progressive actions. The US is more conservative than Europe, but sooner rather than later we are going to have to reckon with the fact that employment based health care doesn't cut it when the blue-collar jobs of yesteryear are eliminated by automation. It's not Amazon's role to provide jobs for Americans, it's their job to increase profits -- it's the government role it tax Amazon appropriately and use those funds to support Americans disrupted by the changing landscape. It's time for all of us to accept what the future brings and act appropriately.
• Animats 7y ago
  This is a minor improvement in packaging. It's not automated picking, which will be a big deal if Amazon cracks that. They've been trying and failing for years now. Amazon gave up on their robotic picking challenge after 2017. Here's the winner of the last challenge.[1] Way too slow and not reliable enough. Amazon has about 100,000 robots now. Most are Kiva machines, moving storage racks to human pickers. Here's what that looks like.[2] The pickers stay in one place, take things out of bins brought to them, and put them in outgoing bins. A laser pointer tells them what to pick. That's almost 10 years old, but Amazon has not yet been able to replace humans in that job. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AljePt7Mh6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AljePt7Mh6U [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UxZDJ1HiPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UxZDJ1HiPE
  • canada_dry 7y ago
    Here's a vid of the actual packing machine noted in the article: https://youtu.be/0eqtqKDbV1Q https://youtu.be/0eqtqKDbV1Q It is pretty slick, and an obvious improvement to packing things in over-sized/generic boxes.
    • CodeCube 7y ago
      Yo that's crazy! custom sized packaging regardless of what's being packed? impressive
  • bschne 7y ago
    Here's how one of the biggest online electronics retailers in Switzerland handles storage / logistics for their smaller items [1]. As is the case with your amazon example, putting the items in the storage containers and picking them for shipping is still handled manually. I'm really curious as to how this compares to the moving shelf idea efficiency-wise and how a possible "solution" (if it is a problem that needs solving...) for the picking could look like, e.g. standardized containers for small items that could be handled by a machine or something like that. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Scql9_7RjfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Scql9_7RjfU
    • 7y ago
• vbuwivbiu 7y ago
  I will start using Amazon again if they replace their dehumanized workers with robots
• nwrk 7y ago
  "The new machines, known as the CartonWrap from Italian firm CMC Srl, pack much faster than humans." Here is the product link: https://www.cmcmachinery.com/portfolio-item/ecommerce1-cmc-cartonwrap/ https://www.cmcmachinery.com/portfolio-item/ecommerce1-cmc-c...
  • no_identd 7y ago
    https://youtu.be/0eqtqKDbV1Q https://youtu.be/0eqtqKDbV1Q Here's the YouTube link.
• toss1 7y ago
  "...builds boxes to size..." That is a major feature. The inability of human packers to properly size boxes is merely wasteful for many products that come in their own packaging, but damaging and costly for Amazon's original product, books. We've had so many book orders arrive damaged that we hardly ever shop at Amazon for books. They just toss them in a box that is too large, with some wadding material, and sent them off. Almost every time, the corners, covers and pages are damaged or torn. Returns more than once are frequent. So, I'm very glad to see this on a micro level, and also on the macro-level of reducing waste, both in packaging material per box, and repeat shipments for shipping-damaged goods.
• ineedasername 7y ago
  I suppose the hope is that such eliminations come gradually enough that displaced workers are able to find other accommodations without too much difficulty, maybe with a little extra up-skill that gradually increases the necessary skill level for the average job. I think the doom & gloom "automation is killing jobs" narrative presupposes a sudden shift from manual to automation, which really hasn't been the norm.
• nikofeyn 7y ago
  amazon is on a downhill decline for me. their scale and automation of both humans and machine yields a disconnected service. a large percentage of books i receive from them, which is substantial, are damaged upon arrival. but what do they care? they just initiate a replacement with no questions asked, but now i have to repack the material and go to ups or an amazon locker. i am now working for them for free! my time and effort is explicitly being used as quality control, and this is undoubtedly factored into their statistics.
• mensetmanusman 7y ago
  Now I will tell my small children that they won’t have a box filling job waiting for them when they graduate middle school.