5 ms·

Amazon's warehouses aren't the future of work. They're its history. That kind of zero-skilled, follow-the-instructions work is going fully robotic, much more q

by ef4 13y ago

Amazon's warehouses aren't the future of work. They're its history. That kind of zero-skilled, follow-the-instructions work is going fully robotic, much more quickly than people realize. Amazon themselves are investing heavily in robotics.

megaframe 13y ago
Yup, http://www.kivasystems.com http://www.kivasystems.com In some test warehouses, outside of the service technician, the person loading the shelf, and the person loading the truck there are essentially no employees.
DamnYuppie 13y ago
The question then becomes what happens to all of those unskilled and now unneeded workers?
- selter01 13y ago
  Who knows. Unskilled workers make me sad.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    It gets worse. What if skilled workers are skill in a field that becomes suddenly redundant? Think about payroll clerks who typed out checks every two weeks; now it's all done by computers, databases and spreadsheets. Even skilled workers are not necessarily immune. Of course that merely shows that there is a problem, it doesn't show what to blame or how to fix it in general.
    - saraid216 13y ago
      Remember how we used to have telephone switchboard operators?
      - mpyne 13y ago
        Even better, remember when people used to talk on "party lines" with no privacy at all?
    - briancaw2 13y ago
      The problem is that all of the technology we've created as a society (sharing science, funding from the government, allowing resource harvesting from public land) is being used to make workers obsolete, but instead of honoring the communal investment in technology by making a strong safety net where people can live, further training/education, and thrive, making our economy even stronger, we allow the corporations and uber-rich to dodge taxes (and hoard the hundreds of billions of dollars that could support that safety net).
    - baddox 13y ago
      Or wagon manufacturers when automobiles took over. Or manual farm workers when plows and then tractors took over.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    What happens when Silicon-Valley-tech of the week skilled workers become redundant and they're suddently "unskilled"? That makes me sad.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - PeterisP 13y ago
      If some "tech-of-last-week-skilled" workers can't become "tech-of-next-week-skilled" workers in that proverbial week, then they already are unskilled workers and should be treated as such.
  - mhurron 13y ago
    Why? Most jobs in the world require no special skill not picked up on the job. In all seriousness, the world needs ditch diggers too.
    - saraid216 13y ago
      http://www.harborfreight.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/i/m/image_18946.jpg http://www.harborfreight.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/i...
      - mhurron 13y ago
        I suppose you could call that skilled, but I would have put that under the on the job training I had mentioned.
    - woodchuck64 13y ago
      As Eliezer says, if personal maids, cooks, and servants suddenly become affordable, only then might we have an unskilled labourer problem (http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_antifaq/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_a...)
- dlhavema 13y ago
  They are "sadly" forced to find other unskilled labor based jobs, many of which are being replaced by automation or process improvements... Or they need to find a way to learn a skill that can provide a stable income for them. I'm not saying it is always easy to just pick up a skill like that, but that's the more job-security-based route to go...
  - megaframe 13y ago
    I think some of this can be solved with apprenticeships like some manufacturers are doing in the US. Were they need skilled labor to preform mechanical tasks automation is not able to do yet. Though the number of these jobs is not going to be enough.
- unabridged 13y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
  - Florin_Andrei 13y ago
    It will happen, eventually. It's either that, or some kind of Blade Runner dystopia. But the transition will not be easy. Massive upheavals might be lurking under horizon. The possibility of the transition is predicated, on the technical side, on massive advancements in AI and robotics.
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    I would love to be able to hold my breath for that, but I somehow doubt that the direct result of the race for profit and monopoly will be gifts with no strings attached.
    - swalsh 13y ago
      There's a few ways to view it. However I think between all the perspectives there's one central theme. A basic income is not a gift. It's kind of part of the unwritten deal no one has ever discussed. As a society we work together because as a group we're stronger then individually. Its true for animals, and its true for us. Humans have a knack though for really making use of our intelligence, and physical capabilities. We've engineered (hacked) the physical world to make our lives better. Doing that alone though is impossible, so we've engineered "society" to facilitate the process. When the industrial revolution happened, a debate kind of started. What is more important, a persons right to work for stuff, or a persons right to more stuff? By allowing the mechanization of labor, we've implicitly chosen the later. Of course, it was easy to justify. There's always more work, so industrialization is ultimately a good thing. The worker would only be temporarily shifted anyways. There's a caveat to that though. When mechanization became intelligent mechanization (what I call having a Computer whether mechanical or digital control the process) the shifts started happening more frequently, and the replacement jobs became harder to obtain. I think ultimately this is the key point, as a society we LET mechanization happen, and ultimately it has taken us to a point where not everyone is CAPABLE of having a highly skilled job. There's ways to alleviate it, part of the problem is an outdated education system. Another part of the problem is probably cultural, there might be a lack of high skilled jobs too. None the less, there WILL be a growing population of people who we've taken away their capability to work for a living. So when we offer a basic income, its not us graciously giving them a gift of our hard work. Its giving them the lives they are owed because of the decisions we have collectively made a hundred years ago.
- baddox 13y ago
  Well, they're either worse off without the option of working at Amazon, or they're better off. It can't be both.
  - Tichy 13y ago
    How can you be worse off for having an option?
    - baddox 13y ago
      I don't think they can, but I was just making the stronger and more obvious statement.
  - dasil003 13y ago
    It's sort of a game theory thing because the future is uncertain. With Amazon they're better off today, but maybe without Amazon they push politicians to solve the bigger issues of unemployment sooner and thus would be much better off sooner than if they slave away in the sort of futuristic assembly line dystopia that the Amazon warehouses are portrayed as.
jsnk 13y ago
This exactly. This is not the future of Amazon. This is the current state of Amazon. If the writer is concerned about anything at all with the workers, he should be concerned about the workers losing their job. Thousands of warehouse workers will be losing their job because their work will soon be automated. I am not saying that it is trivial to replace them. It will be a costly process to streamline and automate current process with robots, but believe me when I say it will be done.
brandonbica 13y ago
In the US Amazon is already using robotics and recently purchased the company that supplied them. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-19/amazon-acquires-kiva-systems-in-second-biggest-takeover.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-19/amazon-acquires-kiv...
- LandoCalrissian 13y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr6Rco5A9SM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr6Rco5A9SM It's really cool how it works too.
krrrh 13y ago
The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. - Warren G. Bennis
cliveowen 13y ago
Think even bigger, what will happen when traditional jobs such as bartender, waiter, salesman will be replaced by automatic dispensing machines, robots and online transactions? If you think about all the kinds of jobs that can be replaced by automation you'll see that this only leads to a grim proposition: mass unemployment.
wdr1 13y ago
> That kind of zero-skilled, follow-the-instructions work is going fully robotic, much more quickly than people realize. Amazon themselves are investing heavily in robotics. Exactly. This is what worries me about the attempt to bring unskilled manufacturing jobs back to America. It's a losing battle & the wrong battle. The focus should be on how to equip workers with skills for the 21st century.

by ef4 13y ago

megaframe 13y ago

Yup, http://www.kivasystems.com http://www.kivasystems.com In some test warehouses, outside of the service technician, the person loading the shelf, and the person loading the truck there are essentially no employees.

DamnYuppie 13y ago

The question then becomes what happens to all of those unskilled and now unneeded workers?

selter01 13y ago
Who knows. Unskilled workers make me sad.
- mpyne 13y ago
  It gets worse. What if skilled workers are skill in a field that becomes suddenly redundant? Think about payroll clerks who typed out checks every two weeks; now it's all done by computers, databases and spreadsheets. Even skilled workers are not necessarily immune. Of course that merely shows that there is a problem, it doesn't show what to blame or how to fix it in general.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    Remember how we used to have telephone switchboard operators?
    - mpyne 13y ago
      Even better, remember when people used to talk on "party lines" with no privacy at all?
  - briancaw2 13y ago
    The problem is that all of the technology we've created as a society (sharing science, funding from the government, allowing resource harvesting from public land) is being used to make workers obsolete, but instead of honoring the communal investment in technology by making a strong safety net where people can live, further training/education, and thrive, making our economy even stronger, we allow the corporations and uber-rich to dodge taxes (and hoard the hundreds of billions of dollars that could support that safety net).
  - baddox 13y ago
    Or wagon manufacturers when automobiles took over. Or manual farm workers when plows and then tractors took over.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  What happens when Silicon-Valley-tech of the week skilled workers become redundant and they're suddently "unskilled"? That makes me sad.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - PeterisP 13y ago
    If some "tech-of-last-week-skilled" workers can't become "tech-of-next-week-skilled" workers in that proverbial week, then they already are unskilled workers and should be treated as such.
- mhurron 13y ago
  Why? Most jobs in the world require no special skill not picked up on the job. In all seriousness, the world needs ditch diggers too.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    http://www.harborfreight.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/i/m/image_18946.jpg http://www.harborfreight.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/i...
    - mhurron 13y ago
      I suppose you could call that skilled, but I would have put that under the on the job training I had mentioned.
  - woodchuck64 13y ago
    As Eliezer says, if personal maids, cooks, and servants suddenly become affordable, only then might we have an unskilled labourer problem (http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_antifaq/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_a...)
dlhavema 13y ago
They are "sadly" forced to find other unskilled labor based jobs, many of which are being replaced by automation or process improvements... Or they need to find a way to learn a skill that can provide a stable income for them. I'm not saying it is always easy to just pick up a skill like that, but that's the more job-security-based route to go...
- megaframe 13y ago
  I think some of this can be solved with apprenticeships like some manufacturers are doing in the US. Were they need skilled labor to preform mechanical tasks automation is not able to do yet. Though the number of these jobs is not going to be enough.
unabridged 13y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
- Florin_Andrei 13y ago
  It will happen, eventually. It's either that, or some kind of Blade Runner dystopia. But the transition will not be easy. Massive upheavals might be lurking under horizon. The possibility of the transition is predicated, on the technical side, on massive advancements in AI and robotics.
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  I would love to be able to hold my breath for that, but I somehow doubt that the direct result of the race for profit and monopoly will be gifts with no strings attached.
  - swalsh 13y ago
    There's a few ways to view it. However I think between all the perspectives there's one central theme. A basic income is not a gift. It's kind of part of the unwritten deal no one has ever discussed. As a society we work together because as a group we're stronger then individually. Its true for animals, and its true for us. Humans have a knack though for really making use of our intelligence, and physical capabilities. We've engineered (hacked) the physical world to make our lives better. Doing that alone though is impossible, so we've engineered "society" to facilitate the process. When the industrial revolution happened, a debate kind of started. What is more important, a persons right to work for stuff, or a persons right to more stuff? By allowing the mechanization of labor, we've implicitly chosen the later. Of course, it was easy to justify. There's always more work, so industrialization is ultimately a good thing. The worker would only be temporarily shifted anyways. There's a caveat to that though. When mechanization became intelligent mechanization (what I call having a Computer whether mechanical or digital control the process) the shifts started happening more frequently, and the replacement jobs became harder to obtain. I think ultimately this is the key point, as a society we LET mechanization happen, and ultimately it has taken us to a point where not everyone is CAPABLE of having a highly skilled job. There's ways to alleviate it, part of the problem is an outdated education system. Another part of the problem is probably cultural, there might be a lack of high skilled jobs too. None the less, there WILL be a growing population of people who we've taken away their capability to work for a living. So when we offer a basic income, its not us graciously giving them a gift of our hard work. Its giving them the lives they are owed because of the decisions we have collectively made a hundred years ago.
baddox 13y ago
Well, they're either worse off without the option of working at Amazon, or they're better off. It can't be both.
- Tichy 13y ago
  How can you be worse off for having an option?
  - baddox 13y ago
    I don't think they can, but I was just making the stronger and more obvious statement.
- dasil003 13y ago
  It's sort of a game theory thing because the future is uncertain. With Amazon they're better off today, but maybe without Amazon they push politicians to solve the bigger issues of unemployment sooner and thus would be much better off sooner than if they slave away in the sort of futuristic assembly line dystopia that the Amazon warehouses are portrayed as.

jsnk 13y ago

This exactly. This is not the future of Amazon. This is the current state of Amazon. If the writer is concerned about anything at all with the workers, he should be concerned about the workers losing their job. Thousands of warehouse workers will be losing their job because their work will soon be automated. I am not saying that it is trivial to replace them. It will be a costly process to streamline and automate current process with robots, but believe me when I say it will be done.

brandonbica 13y ago

In the US Amazon is already using robotics and recently purchased the company that supplied them. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-19/amazon-acquires-kiva-systems-in-second-biggest-takeover.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-19/amazon-acquires-kiv...

LandoCalrissian 13y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr6Rco5A9SM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr6Rco5A9SM It's really cool how it works too.

krrrh 13y ago

The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. - Warren G. Bennis

cliveowen 13y ago

Think even bigger, what will happen when traditional jobs such as bartender, waiter, salesman will be replaced by automatic dispensing machines, robots and online transactions? If you think about all the kinds of jobs that can be replaced by automation you'll see that this only leads to a grim proposition: mass unemployment.

wdr1 13y ago

> That kind of zero-skilled, follow-the-instructions work is going fully robotic, much more quickly than people realize. Amazon themselves are investing heavily in robotics. Exactly. This is what worries me about the attempt to bring unskilled manufacturing jobs back to America. It's a losing battle & the wrong battle. The focus should be on how to equip workers with skills for the 21st century.