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There's also the other option similar to what happened after the New York Elevator Operator Strike in 1945 -- the total elimination of a profession. https://ww

by drorco 5y ago

There's also the other option similar to what happened after the New York Elevator Operator Strike in 1945 -- the total elimination of a profession. https://www.inc.com/thomas-koulopoulos/100-years-ago-we-feared-a-different-kind-of-driverless-vehicle.html https://www.inc.com/thomas-koulopoulos/100-years-ago-we-fear... "It wasn't until the middle of the twentieth century that the tipping point came along for the driverless elevator as the result of a strike by the elevator operators' union in New York City in 1945. The strike was devastating, costing the city an estimated one hundred million dollars. Suddenly, there was an economic incentive to go back to the automatic elevator. Over the next decade there was a massive effort to build trust in automatic elevators, which resulted in the elimination of tens of thousands of elevator operator jobs." If Amazon is close enough to automating these jobs, then it will likely just automate it and fire whoever it can. If not, then you're likely making the path towards that faster. I don't see any way for the employees to win this beyond buying a bit more time. Unless the employees, the government, and Amazon, find a way for them to get a profession in which they have more leverage thanks to the *high individual value* they provide, rather than being a temp for future robots. One solution can be for a union, government, Amazon etc, is to put aside money for a fund that will invest in training these employees so they could one day not depend on these kind of low-leverage jobs.

zapataband1 5y ago
retraining does not work https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/the-false-promises-of-worker-retraining/549398/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/the-fa...
saurik 5y ago
> If Amazon is close enough to automating these jobs, then it will likely just automate it and fire whoever it can. They will do this anyway. The reason it mattered for elevator operators is that you had to convince a bunch of end users that it was reasonable to self-operate the elevator after they had been trained for years to have an attendant, and you probably had to modify the deployed elevators all over the city--which weren't owned by and one party but had been installed by various buildings--to have additional safety features. Amazon can replace out how Amazon works internally and I would have no clue.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"being a temp for future robots" While everyone was predicting that the dirty jobs would get automated, instead its a lot of midlevel jobs are getting automated, but we still don't have a robot that can take out the trash. I am willing to bet my house thay we can automate away the CEO but not the janitor, and it will be hilarious. Management is just analysis of data, we can do that. But the physical works requires dexterity and robotics that still escapes us.
- kungito 5y ago
  Management isn't analysis of data, it is making a decision based on that analysis. A completely different and more complex problem. One could argue that the border between the two is unclear but we have for sure been automatizing the analysis and we are nowhere near removing the managers. Maybe we could say we have removed layers of management though
  - foobiekr 5y ago
    I'm with the bet-the-house guy. I've worked for huge organizations since 1990 and I really think that even a mid-grade student project could make decisions as well as the management I've known, which includes multiple Fortune 50 CEOs. When I say "known" I mean "known" and not "been ten layers under." What I think will happen is CEOs will be glorified actors that are tasked with delivering the decisions some ML system has made. It'll be like the "white guy in a suit" role that some Chinese companies have.
    - whall6 5y ago
      Because you knew every counter factual, right?
    - snowwrestler 5y ago
      ML systems don’t make decisions. I feel like a lot of comments about what ML will do start with a misunderstanding of what ML actually is. Saying ML will make a CEO’s decisions is like saying Excel will make CEO’s decisions. Neither is anything more than a system for keeping track of correlations.
taurath 5y ago
I think a fully automated amazon without a large local workforce and therefor a large local TAXBASE is going to be a huge target for regulatory enforcement.
- XorNot 5y ago
  How? If the workforce isn't local, then there's no citizens involved which US law applies too.
  - topkai22 5y ago
    Reducing jobs reduces overall political support, which makes it more attractive for politicians and regulators to pass new laws or more aggressively pursue existing ones. Amazon could get hit with antitrust or some other new legal theory that develops.
  - kortilla 5y ago
    Those warehouses have to go somewhere and politicians are much more likely to initiate a shakedown when non of their constituents benefit.
Hikikomori 5y ago
Should these menial, easily automated jobs in a low margin business exist in the future?
shadowgovt 5y ago
To be clear, from Amazon's point of view, all of their human employees are tamping for future robots right now. They're always pushing for automation as fast as they possibly can.
- LgWoodenBadger 5y ago
  I don’t disagree with you, but robots don’t spend money.
tomrod 5y ago
Amazon should be federally fined for every RIF sufficiently to pay for a retraining/education. As should all dominant employers receiving sweetheart deals on local taxes. It should be done today and held in escrow for when it happens.
heavyset_go 5y ago
> One solution can be for a union, government, Amazon etc, is to put aside money for a fund that will invest in training these employees so they could one day not depend on these kind of low-leverage jobs. Unions have negotiated with companies that outsource or automate its members' jobs to secure compensation for the workers who were affected. However, I think this is a problem that requires a larger solution. There needs to be compensation plans for workers as they're automated away or outsourced. Perhaps it can be a buyout, or a shared ownership scheme where workers get shares in the company or the automation itself that pay dividends. Or a tax on automation or outsourcing that gets returned to workers. We're heading towards a world where most work is done by machines, and only a handful of people will own, control and profit from them. I think a tax and a shared ownership model would help prevent a world where workers and their progeny are relegated to peasantry.
- kortilla 5y ago
  > We're heading towards a world where most work is done by machines, and only a handful of people will own, control and profit from them People keep saying that but we are no closer than we were 50 years ago. A lot of jobs have been replaced but new jobs have been created and society has absorbed the increased productivity (cheaper goods, foods, and much more complex high end goods (iPhone, airplanes, etc).
  - lovecg 5y ago
    Yep. Back in the hand-written letter days people must have thought “think how much time we would save if all this was automated and letters were delivered instantly!” Nope. We just send 10x more.
    - rhacker 5y ago
      Yeah but we read 100% fewer of them.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Counting workers is misleading, you don’t replace a 40$ an hour jobs with a 15$ an hour job without consequences. Beyond that looking at the percentage of Americans employed shows a net drop even accounting for retirement etc. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001
llamataboot 5y ago
There's not enough high-value jobs to go around. We can either automate and share the wealth, or automate and have a class of useless poor people and some factory owners. Historically the former tends to end in violent ways. And so far, we haven't experimented enough with sharing the wealth in ways that also didn't turn incredibly authoritarian and also oppressive with violent ends...
- chii 5y ago
  > There's not enough high-value jobs to go around it's hard to make this argument when you apply it to the industrial revolution which has already happened, and people aren't completely destitute because of it. In fact, people, on average, are wealthier because of it! Automation means wealth, and this new-found wealth means more demand for goods/services - of which may not yet exist today. How many people would have guessed that a youtube content-creator is going to be a thing?
- whearyou 5y ago
  Key comment of the thread
jatins 5y ago
Rest assured if Amazon could automate, Amazon would automate. > I don't see any way for the employees to win this beyond buying a bit more time. Why can't the government increase minimum wages? If those jobs are likely to get automated away then that's going to happen either way At least let them make decent wages _while_ they have a job.
- vidarh 5y ago
  And Amazon will over time or they'll get squeezed. I get my groceries from Ocado in the UK. Their warehouses are almost entirely automated, including increasingly picking and packing groceries that often include soft or easily breakable products into bags. They're moved from focusing on growing their own direct sales to increasingly licensing that platform globally.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    You say that, but you know how many people that "fully automated" warehouse in the UK employs? Around 800 per shift. It was mentioned in the last incident report when one robot caught fire. Yeah a big part of the work is automated. But these warehouses still need people.
    - vidarh 5y ago
      They still need people, but far fewer, and dropping rapidly as a proportion of goods shipped. The number of workers is a distraction - what matters is product shipped per worker. E.g. a few years ago the packing into bags was still done by people across the board from trays brought by robots. They've systematically automated more and more of it at a pretty astounding pace.
nazka 5y ago
The problem is that all automatic elevators are going to be stamped Amazon and there is hardly any room available for someone else. It’s a bigger and bigger monopoly. I am sure that Amazon is going to automate as much as possible and it will only increase. Cool story about the elevator. :)

by drorco 5y ago

zapataband1 5y ago

retraining does not work https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/the-false-promises-of-worker-retraining/549398/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/the-fa...

saurik 5y ago

> If Amazon is close enough to automating these jobs, then it will likely just automate it and fire whoever it can. They will do this anyway. The reason it mattered for elevator operators is that you had to convince a bunch of end users that it was reasonable to self-operate the elevator after they had been trained for years to have an attendant, and you probably had to modify the deployed elevators all over the city--which weren't owned by and one party but had been installed by various buildings--to have additional safety features. Amazon can replace out how Amazon works internally and I would have no clue.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

"being a temp for future robots" While everyone was predicting that the dirty jobs would get automated, instead its a lot of midlevel jobs are getting automated, but we still don't have a robot that can take out the trash. I am willing to bet my house thay we can automate away the CEO but not the janitor, and it will be hilarious. Management is just analysis of data, we can do that. But the physical works requires dexterity and robotics that still escapes us.

kungito 5y ago
Management isn't analysis of data, it is making a decision based on that analysis. A completely different and more complex problem. One could argue that the border between the two is unclear but we have for sure been automatizing the analysis and we are nowhere near removing the managers. Maybe we could say we have removed layers of management though
- foobiekr 5y ago
  I'm with the bet-the-house guy. I've worked for huge organizations since 1990 and I really think that even a mid-grade student project could make decisions as well as the management I've known, which includes multiple Fortune 50 CEOs. When I say "known" I mean "known" and not "been ten layers under." What I think will happen is CEOs will be glorified actors that are tasked with delivering the decisions some ML system has made. It'll be like the "white guy in a suit" role that some Chinese companies have.
  - whall6 5y ago
    Because you knew every counter factual, right?
  - snowwrestler 5y ago
    ML systems don’t make decisions. I feel like a lot of comments about what ML will do start with a misunderstanding of what ML actually is. Saying ML will make a CEO’s decisions is like saying Excel will make CEO’s decisions. Neither is anything more than a system for keeping track of correlations.

taurath 5y ago

I think a fully automated amazon without a large local workforce and therefor a large local TAXBASE is going to be a huge target for regulatory enforcement.

XorNot 5y ago
How? If the workforce isn't local, then there's no citizens involved which US law applies too.
- topkai22 5y ago
  Reducing jobs reduces overall political support, which makes it more attractive for politicians and regulators to pass new laws or more aggressively pursue existing ones. Amazon could get hit with antitrust or some other new legal theory that develops.
- kortilla 5y ago
  Those warehouses have to go somewhere and politicians are much more likely to initiate a shakedown when non of their constituents benefit.

Hikikomori 5y ago

Should these menial, easily automated jobs in a low margin business exist in the future?

shadowgovt 5y ago

To be clear, from Amazon's point of view, all of their human employees are tamping for future robots right now. They're always pushing for automation as fast as they possibly can.

LgWoodenBadger 5y ago
I don’t disagree with you, but robots don’t spend money.

tomrod 5y ago

Amazon should be federally fined for every RIF sufficiently to pay for a retraining/education. As should all dominant employers receiving sweetheart deals on local taxes. It should be done today and held in escrow for when it happens.

heavyset_go 5y ago

> One solution can be for a union, government, Amazon etc, is to put aside money for a fund that will invest in training these employees so they could one day not depend on these kind of low-leverage jobs. Unions have negotiated with companies that outsource or automate its members' jobs to secure compensation for the workers who were affected. However, I think this is a problem that requires a larger solution. There needs to be compensation plans for workers as they're automated away or outsourced. Perhaps it can be a buyout, or a shared ownership scheme where workers get shares in the company or the automation itself that pay dividends. Or a tax on automation or outsourcing that gets returned to workers. We're heading towards a world where most work is done by machines, and only a handful of people will own, control and profit from them. I think a tax and a shared ownership model would help prevent a world where workers and their progeny are relegated to peasantry.

kortilla 5y ago
> We're heading towards a world where most work is done by machines, and only a handful of people will own, control and profit from them People keep saying that but we are no closer than we were 50 years ago. A lot of jobs have been replaced but new jobs have been created and society has absorbed the increased productivity (cheaper goods, foods, and much more complex high end goods (iPhone, airplanes, etc).
- lovecg 5y ago
  Yep. Back in the hand-written letter days people must have thought “think how much time we would save if all this was automated and letters were delivered instantly!” Nope. We just send 10x more.
  - rhacker 5y ago
    Yeah but we read 100% fewer of them.
- Retric 5y ago
  Counting workers is misleading, you don’t replace a 40$ an hour jobs with a 15$ an hour job without consequences. Beyond that looking at the percentage of Americans employed shows a net drop even accounting for retirement etc. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001

llamataboot 5y ago

There's not enough high-value jobs to go around. We can either automate and share the wealth, or automate and have a class of useless poor people and some factory owners. Historically the former tends to end in violent ways. And so far, we haven't experimented enough with sharing the wealth in ways that also didn't turn incredibly authoritarian and also oppressive with violent ends...

chii 5y ago
> There's not enough high-value jobs to go around it's hard to make this argument when you apply it to the industrial revolution which has already happened, and people aren't completely destitute because of it. In fact, people, on average, are wealthier because of it! Automation means wealth, and this new-found wealth means more demand for goods/services - of which may not yet exist today. How many people would have guessed that a youtube content-creator is going to be a thing?
whearyou 5y ago
Key comment of the thread

jatins 5y ago

Rest assured if Amazon could automate, Amazon would automate. > I don't see any way for the employees to win this beyond buying a bit more time. Why can't the government increase minimum wages? If those jobs are likely to get automated away then that's going to happen either way At least let them make decent wages _while_ they have a job.

vidarh 5y ago
And Amazon will over time or they'll get squeezed. I get my groceries from Ocado in the UK. Their warehouses are almost entirely automated, including increasingly picking and packing groceries that often include soft or easily breakable products into bags. They're moved from focusing on growing their own direct sales to increasingly licensing that platform globally.
- gambiting 5y ago
  You say that, but you know how many people that "fully automated" warehouse in the UK employs? Around 800 per shift. It was mentioned in the last incident report when one robot caught fire. Yeah a big part of the work is automated. But these warehouses still need people.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    They still need people, but far fewer, and dropping rapidly as a proportion of goods shipped. The number of workers is a distraction - what matters is product shipped per worker. E.g. a few years ago the packing into bags was still done by people across the board from trays brought by robots. They've systematically automated more and more of it at a pretty astounding pace.

nazka 5y ago

The problem is that all automatic elevators are going to be stamped Amazon and there is hardly any room available for someone else. It’s a bigger and bigger monopoly. I am sure that Amazon is going to automate as much as possible and it will only increase. Cool story about the elevator. :)