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Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
- okasaki 2y ago> The significant investment in robotics showcases Amazon’s commitment to innovation in its supply chain and highlights the company’s belief in the synergistic potential of human-robot collaboration. Despite the massive scale of automation, Amazon emphasizes that deploying robots has led to the creation of new skilled job categories at the company, reflecting a broader industry trend toward the integration of advanced technologies with human workforces. An article about robots that's written by a robot. It's robots all the way down.
- smcin 2y agoWho will inform the turtles they are no longer needed?
- tacocataco 2y agoTrust me, they'll know.
- RowanH 2y ago> has led to the creation of new skilled job categories at the company. "While systematically removing the unskilled job categories at the company" The robot missed out that sentence for some reason.
- raverbashing 2y agoWell given the complaints about work conditions it would be good if humans were given less dangerous jobs
- RowanH 2y agoNot saying whether it’s good or bad, just the obvious bit left out. Does really show that UBI discussion needs to be had sooner rather than later …
- rickydroll 2y agoI'm coming to think that the wages that would have been paid to people who robots have replaced should now go into a sovereign fund to help fund UBI.
- lotsoweiners 2y agoHaha that is funny.
- ta1243 2y agoDon't forget all the robots reading it. It seems the end goal of the advertising industry -- robots doing, robots writing, robots reading. Like cockroaches and twinkies, one of the few things to survive nuclear war.
- rickydroll 2y agoBut will robots survive a nuclear war's EMP?
- moffkalast 2y agoMilitary drones have to be covered in a Farraday cage layer to prevent jamming, so that would double as nuclear EMP protection. Finding a place to charge afterwards might be tricky though...
- exe34 2y agoHave you read Accelerando by Charlie stross? He talks about a Vile Offspring that's basically what you said!
- tacocataco 2y agoMaybe robots should pay taxes like humans since they are taking the jobs and the tax base that goes along with them.
- exe34 2y agoOr you could tax the companies on revenue, the way employees are.
- hnburnsy 2y agoSure, if you enjoy higher prices or lower wages
- LadyCailin 2y agoThat’s too hard to do. What is “a robot” and “a job?” Replacing workers is easy enough to calculate that with, but what if I start a brand new factory that only ever used robots? The solution is wealth tax and UBI. Get rid of regular income tax, then do a progressive wealth tax, which is enough to pay for a progressive UBI. This way, it’s no problem if you lay off all your workers to replace them with robots. In fact that’s great! Because now these people have a UBI, which frees them up to go find (or make) other work. Meanwhile the factory owner’s taxes should be going up, since his wealth is going up since he doesn’t have to pay all the workers, unless he’s still spending that money to further invest in things, which is also great. The biggest problem really is people just hoarding wealth. If they are spending or investing it, then that’s not a problem.
- SoftTalker 2y agoVery few people hoard wealth. You imagine wealthy people like Scrooge McDuck with a room full of gold coins. It's almost always invested in stocks which helps companies grow or in bonds which helps finance public works.
- foobarbaz321 2y ago[dead]
- berniedurfee 2y agoWritten by a robot that was written by Amazon and runs in AWS. Vertical integration indeed!
- throwaway48476 2y agoBut will the robots be given piss bottles?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- agilob 2y agoNo, but they have free healthcare and time off to recharge their batteries
- loloquwowndueo 2y agoHaving an in-place battery swap is the equivalent of having to eat lunch at your workstation.
- odiroot 2y agoProbably have wet sump.
- mc32 2y agoThey’ll just need oil cans instead.
- WillAdams 2y agoWhen I worked in an Amazon Warehouse, while a bathroom break was considered time-off-task, it wasn't a big deal to use the bathroom (or take some other break) whenever one wished. https://old.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/dmnuts/53mamazon_fulfillment_center_warehouse_worker/ https://old.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/dmnuts/53mamazon_fulfi... Basically, it was just a gym membership which I got paid for (and couldn't skip out on beyond what my available time off facilitated).
- naveen99 2y agoMaybe jobs that require moving around should be split into 2 hr shifts, and then people with sedentary jobs can moonlight for getting in their cardio, instead of paying a gym, or walking pointlessly.
- littlestymaar 2y agoIt's a good thing actually given that the worker conditions are pretty terrible there. But it is only a good thing if the increased productivity translates into better wages, increased vacations and reduced work days and not helping Jeff getting a bigger yacht. And for that, it must be an active government policy.
- bamboozled 2y agoSoon Jeff will have ten yachts and his job each day will be choosing which yacht to use once he has automated himself out of work. It will be gruelling.
- methuselah_in 2y agoI don't know for aging economics this is somewhat good. But for developing countries it's horrible. Where humans has to search work each day to find food for night
- FlyingAvatar 2y agoI would suspect that in these countries labor is cheap enough that replacing it with robots would not be cost effective.
- exe34 2y agoAnd once it's cost effective for robots to do it, you might as well move the factories close to where the stuff is needed and transport raw material that's more fungible.
- 082349872349872 2y agoIf we also sufficiently automated food production, there ought to be enough calories to feed everyone, right? Right?
- red_trumpet 2y agoIndustrialized agriculture already produces enough food to feed the world. The remaining problem is a question of distribution.
- tacocataco 2y agoFood waste is tragic. Now no one eats that $5 iceberg lettuce head, and people are forced to eat unhealthy low nutritional carbs for sustenance.
- exe34 2y agoWhy don't they eat the $5 lettuce? Is the argument that it's too expensive here? I thought fast food was more expensive.
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- kypro 2y agoI assume this is being upvoted because HN thinks this is good? At least that's what I hear in AI threads... AI just allows humans to work more efficiently right? The few fulfilment center workers left are probably now 100x fulfilment workers now that they can manage a fleet of robotic workers instead of human ones. As HN says, these types of innovations historically only create new job opportunities so there's probably loads of new amazing jobs these replaced workers can go do instead. For those who are worried about the future we're creating for their children, don't worry, because when robotics and AI can do everything humans can do (and better) businesses will still want hire humans, because they still hired humans when the combustion engine was invented. I'm sure it will be the same this time. Don't be so anti-progress!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- onion2k 2y agoAmazon's role in society is not to provide menial jobs to keep people busy though. If anything, the automation provides good, innovative jobs in robotics. Those are the sorts of jobs I think everyone should have. Leave fetching and carrying to robots, and educate people to be useful in more meaningful, fulfilling, and impactful ways. Suggesting that robots are bad because they take jobs from people doing horrible, boring jobs just says that you want people to carry on doing that work. That's not a good look.
- 082349872349872 2y agoIf the robots are the ones altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter, there are still roles for telling them to do so, and history suggests the latter work is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. (plagiarism intentional)
- JaimeThompson 2y ago>just says that you want people to carry on doing that work Or that we don't want them to starve. We are talking about the US where their isn't really an effective solution to help people without jobs.
- techdmn 2y agoAbout 20 years ago I was a programmer at a manufacturing company. I worked on a project to automate part of materials requirements planning. The woman who was in charge of it was spending about 20 hours per week wrangling Excel spreadsheets to figure out what materials they needed. It was all based on data we had: inventory, orders, etc. A few weeks later, and with a fair amount of her help, I'd automated the whole thing. She was happy, it was her least favorite part of her job and she desperately needed time for other things. I was happy, I was showing that I was worth what they were paying me! (Salaried at the equivalent of $12.50 per hour.) BUT: That project took half a job out of the economy. A decent one at that, a nice cushy desk job. Automation is definitely having an impact on labor demand, with software driving out some jobs much the way cars and trucks drove horses out of our economy. I think it points to an increasing bifurcation, with jobs being high skill / high pay or low skill / low pay, without much in the middle. Of course here in the U.S. this is also being driven by our monetary policy, our tax policy, our trade policy, our labor policy, I could go on. I'm in favor of UBI, but that seems about as likely as the use of any of those levers to reduce income inequality and spread the wealth our society generates in a way that supports most of those contributing to it.
- pydry 2y agoThere's plenty of stuff in the middle it's just been moved overseas and the output is sent back to the US on a shipping container. Chinese and Mexican factory workers != robots. It sounds obvious but the establishment, media, and economists do like to blur the distinction.
- K0balt 2y agoThis sounds a lot like one of the last projects I worked On, where some significant operations were to be assigned to “AI” which was meant to mean Artificial intelligence for marketing slicks but everyone knew it would be “Actually, Indians” for the foreseeable future.
- 082349872349872 2y ago> drove horses out of our economy A graph of the process is in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39604784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39604784 (it also includes a bifurcation: between draft and sport/companion horses)
- aczerepinski 2y agoI wish I could believe that all this automation would lead to more leisure time for all of humanity, but it certainly won’t happen on its own out of generosity from the robot owners.
- 082349872349872 2y agoWhy does the Ampère–Maxwell law, the largest of Maxwell's equations, not simply eat the other 3?
- VHRanger 2y agoWe've been saying that for a long time. [Keynes predicted we'd be working 15 hour weeks by now](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecca.12439 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecca.12439) The thing is, people don't actually want to tradeoff their labor time for leisure time all that well. They value consumption too much. There are plenty of 15 hour jobs out there. You can get one right now! But you'd need to have a smaller appartment, an older car, and eat more lentils. While people say they want to work less, their [revealed preference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference) is that they value buying stuff above having more leisure.
- seper8 2y agoHow detached from reality are you that you think people can make ends meet while working 15 hours a week?
- Nimitz14 2y agoSome people do do that. Try stepping outside of your bubble.
- ameister14 2y agoThe average hourly wage in the United States is $30, so 15 hours a week is $450 pre-tax. Live on that with a family.
- air7 2y agoIt's clear that technological development creates a shift in jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a result. Whether the total #jobs increases or decreases is debatable. The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set. (You wouldn't displace 100 manual labor workers with a machine that requires 105 workers to maintain). So by definition, the average intelligence requirement for jobs increases over time (though never stated directly). This means that as time and technology progress, a growing percentage of people will have no jobs that they are capable of doing. [o] What's the proper social response to that, I don't know. [o] If and when AGI comes along, that will be all of us.
- exitb 2y agoJobs are a byproduct of capital owners needing labor to sell things and services with a profit margin, so they can buy the good stuff. I’d argue that once the capital owners possess the technology that brings the cost of labor near zero, they will have no need for an economy at all, not to mention other people - unless it’s something more akin to a zoo.
- acestus5 2y agoThis reminds me of the Chinese white monkey jobs.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> once the capital owners possess the technology that brings the cost of labor near zero Most Americans are capital owners. You’re describing a world in which most Americans live in a utopia.
- dhosek 2y agoA quick google says that 53% of Americans own publicly traded stock, but that means that 47% do not. There will be some fraction of that 47% who have their own businesses, but I’m guessing that these would be people at the bottom end of the business scale. Would it really be fair to call the guys driving a truck through the alleys collecting crap metal capital owners who would live in a utopia? The same article that cites the 53% number also says that the top 10% of income earners own 70% of the stock market. That doesn’t really sound like a recipe for utopia.
- pjmlp 2y agoSo much for IA helping to create jobs.
- tossandthrow 2y agoIf the jobs is moving boxes around, then I think we are good. monitary and fiscal policies will keep employment high regardless of AI and robotics.
- pjmlp 2y agoWishful thinking.
- tossandthrow 2y agoare you saying that employment is low now because of the automation we have seen over the past 100 years? are you saying that interest rates are not being lowered to allow kapital. investment for job creation?
- ben_w 2y agoI have no idea what @pjmlp is saying, but I myself would caution against using the past as too strong a guide to the future — we don't have pre-existing examples of tools that can out-think their owners. (The closest historical examples to this description are feudal serfs and slaves, the latter is a much broader category than just the USA's example, and these are also bad examples from which to imagine the future for a variety of different reasons). The early usage of the term "singularity" with regards to computers and automation was about the unpredictability of the future; even now, I cannot say with any confidence if we'll get a future more like that of The Terminator or more like that of The Culture, let alone smaller-scale and less dramatic dystopias and utopias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture
- ben_w 2y agoDoesn't say much about that either way, as Amazon in particular already had a known problem of running out of people willing to work for them: https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-warehouses-hiring-shortage https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-wareh... The last 200 years of automation being followed by new jobs is slightly stronger evidence that further automation will lead to new jobs, but I don't see any way that could remain true once AI is actually human performance when on hardware that runs under some appropriate electrical power threshold. Induction and Turkeys.
- batch12 2y agoIs there an index that ranks companies by their benefit to society? Something like amount of taxes paid, number of employees, benefits, environmental impact, etc?
- starbugs 2y agoThere's ESG. But that comes with its own challenges.
- rcstank 2y agoWho would create the weights that balance this system?
- batch12 2y agoWhoever managed the index, I imagine.
- lotsoweiners 2y agoIn today’s news, Microsoft outbid Amazon to maintain the index.
- batch12 2y agoWhat index? The question was does it exist.
- Ekaros 2y agoValue delivered or increase of value per unit of labour is very murky to measure, but something to think about. In some sense Amazon improving efficiency of retail could be a good thing in general improving the purchasing power of average consunmer.
- batch12 2y agoGood point
- seydor 2y agoWait until amazon replaces china
- shrubble 2y agoThis is self-reported: remember the 1000 Indians that were watching people shop at the Amazon Go stores? Amazon told us it was all "sensors" because it fit their company narrative to do so. I am not saying that Amazon doesn't have 750k robots and hasn't laid off 100k people... but they usually have some seasonality, plus, the quoted number is from 2021, the height of at-home shopping. "The world's second-largest private employer employs 1.5 million people. While that's a lot, it's a decrease of over 100,000 employees from the 1.6 million workers it had in 2021" I think a bit of skepticism is in order, is all.
- jedberg 2y agoThe 1000 Indians story was completely incorrect though. They has 1000 people in India tagging the videos after the fact for improvements to the machine learning algorithms. They weren't watching in real time.
- smnrchrds 2y agoI have a question: was the customer billed based on whatever the machine learning algorithm determined, or based on what humans decided after the fact? In other words, was the humans' job to just provide training data for future versions of the machine learning algorithm, or to manually fix the algorithm's errors and prevent over-billing?
- entangledqubit 2y agoIIRC, they could correct your bill after the fact. I used to joke with others that shoplifted items should be retroactively free - as long as you self report after the fact. (Extra useful training data...)
- antiterra 2y agoFrom my experience you just weren’t actually billed until they were done, it could be many hours after you left the store.
- paxys 2y ago
- callwhendone 2y agoWonder what the job is like fixing those robots.
- mandibeet 2y agoRobotic future is coming
- Animats 2y agoAs Amazon really using that humanoid robot in production? Or is that just a demo? The first big breakthrough was when Amazon bought Kiva, which makes those little mobile platforms that move racks of goods around. Those are mechanically simple and cost-effective, and have been very successful. Amazon is now making about 1000 units a day of the current model.[1] This is about 10% of the human birth rate in the US. Moving standardized totes around automatically is decades old. Picking things out of bins has been difficult, and gets better as computer vision gets better. Amazon is still struggling with that. Amazon Prime Air drone delivery starts soon.[2] [1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/amazon-robotics-facility-photo-tour https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/amazon-robotics-... [2] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/amazon-prime-air-drone-delivery-mk30-photos https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/amazon-prime...
- Nevermark 2y agoAutomation can eliminate lots of jobs without replacement jobs. But other times will also created new higher level jobs. Especially when automation impacts a companies total cost for a high-demand independently consumed service or product. So that decrease costs can translate into decreased pricing for an upwardly elastic demand. And the revenue growth results offsets the need for fewer workers per revenue. — But most jobs within a company are only part of a product or service. With other parts not as automatable. In this case, even automation that produces higher level jobs is likely to produce far fewer of them. Since savings in part of a value chain increase profits but impact total costs, and therefore pricing, at a much lower percentage. So increased demand is less likely to offset job reduction. This is also true for any product or service from one company whose demand is anchored to any complimentary services or products from other companies. — Worse still, automation taking over only part of a high employee count, low skill job is very bad for employees. The number of workers is likely reduced, and as the job becomes simpler, their replacability goes up. Their value, and therefore pay and respect, go down. They start to get managed ruthlessly, like just another part of the overall automation. I expect the vast majority of Amazon’s headcount, across each of its logistical divisions, fall into that latter category.
- xg15 2y agoThis seems a bit backwards. Most demand for automating existing jobs is driven by the specific goal to reduce workers and labour costs, so of course there will be fewer jobs afterwards than before - otherwise the automation didn't fulfill its goal from the companies' POV.
- Nevermark 2y agoAutomation is to reduce cost per revenue, by reducing jobs per revenue. Which is not quite the same as an absolute desire to eliminate jobs. The result is initially lower employee count, but in cases where the automation significantly impacts total costs, and therefore pricing, of an independently consumed product or service, with upwardly elastic demand: the lower cost & pricing will trigger growth that also creates a job growth effect. But those are special conditions. As I point out, and you do too, in most situations efficiencies reduce jobs and improve profits, more than they increase demand that would create more (or mitigate lost) jobs.
- SMAAART 2y agoWhether the article is accurate or not, that is the trend. And we've seen it coming for a while now.
- socketcluster 2y agoThe thing that's missed here is that it's not clear that robot purchase, maintenance cost and depreciation would be cheaper than paying 7.5 people a salary... Not to mention that the robots aren't going to be spending part of their salaries at Amazon as a worker might. Also, robots won't be eligible to vote in elections to support Amazon's political aspirations which give it access to billions of government contracts. It seems we have gone to the opposite extreme since the days of Henry Ford where he wanted to pay his workers enough for them to be able to afford the cars they made.
- cactusfrog 2y agoThe jobs robots replace aren’t good for the human soul
- OccamsMirror 2y agoUntil investment funds can sell souls as a commodity they will remain without value.
- EasyMark 2y agoBeing homeless and unemployed isn't good for the human soul either.
- jillesvangurp 2y agoWe have record employment currently. There are other jobs.
- int_19h 2y agoThose two things don't have to be correlated. It is our choice as a society to make them so.
- wordpad25 2y agoFord was a ruthless capitalist and antisemite. He never cared for workers affording his cars, only that they bought them. His union busting gangs were some of the worst. Ford offering higher pay and better working hours were for employee retention which was important at the time.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- CircuitMaestro 2y agoWith the rise of AI, the entire economic structure will undergo even more significant changes.
- btbuildem 2y agoIt's difficult to hold the paradox evident in most of the commentary here: both the desire to free people from the unhealthy repetitive tedium they are bound to participate in daily, and the overarching need for "jobs". I'm much happier watching robots take over dangerous, mundane tasks, than seeing them edge into creative, intellectual, and decision-making work. Wasn't that the dream? That robots do all our work and we just chill, enjoy a life of leisure and fulfilling activity? Looking back in history across all the -isms, the surplus created by those labouring has rarely gone to benefit them (unless we look as far back as hunter-gatherers). I don't know that advancing technology is the credible threat here; I think the misalignment is deeper than systemic even, as it persists across lifespans of civilisations.
- sydbarrett74 2y agoA life of leisure is the mirage-like carrot that the PTB dangle in front of our noses. Simultaneously, they intensify advertising to keep us on the hedonic treadmill, and thus trapped in a life of debt peonage.
- RaftPeople 2y ago> I don't know that advancing technology is the credible threat here The thing most people don't realize is that the robots in question aren't really even taking jobs that existed prior to the ecommerce model, and the work the robots are doing used to be handled by the consumer. Details: 1-The robots are taking over the job of moving goods from the storage shelf to the packer. 2-This is pure "walking" time when humans do it, 10 miles per day in a typical DC, not value add. 3-Before ecommerce, with brick and mortar, the goods were picked in bulk and shipped to stores and placed on the racks, and the consumer was the person that walked to get the item and bring it to the packer (cashier). Some of the walking was done in the DC, but not nearly to the same extent. 4-There are multiple different ways to solve this problem of humans walking all over the DC to pick one+two piece orders in a way that is efficient. "Robots" in the form of moving shelves (Amazon), or conveyors+sorters with bulk pick then sort by order, or etc.
- pdfernhout 2y ago
- tacocataco 2y agoI wouldn't mind if robots replaced all humans, if humans didn't need to prove they deserve housing, Healthcare and food. See the Supreme Court case coming up for a preview on how we will be treated when our labor is no longer needed. https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/04/supreme-court-to-hear-case-on-criminal-penalties-for-homelessness/ https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/04/supreme-court-to-hear-cas...