
Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs - Vaslo
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-automation-exclusive-idUSKCN1SJ0X1
======
smpetrey
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.

~~~
dzmien
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.

~~~
gdy
"And for $13.75 an hour, it definitely isn't worth it."

A billion of people around the world would be happy to work with that hourly
rate.

~~~
pkaye
Not at the US cost of living. Nor would those billions of people be paid a
that rate if their cost of living is lower than the US.

~~~
georgespencer
I think it's quite likely, but unknowable, that folks would accept the
income:cost of living ratio of the US if it came with the associated
sociological benefits. I think you're underestimating how disproportionately
impoverished many people around the world are.

~~~
geodel
Well people here keep ranting about 1 percenters without ever realizing that
>$100K earners are among one percenters in the world.

~~~
mamon
Actually, the threshold to be in top 1% income bracket worldwide is $32,400

[https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-
finance/05061...](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-
finance/050615/are-you-top-one-percent-world.asp)

~~~
zjaffee
This number is both old and in nominal terms. A person making 50k USD in China
is likely richer than a person in the US making 100k USD in the US.

[http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/771271476908686029/Segal.pdf](http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/771271476908686029/Segal.pdf)
suggests that the number to be in the global 1% is around $50,000 PPP per
person in a given household.

~~~
mensetmanusman
Except that the Chinese person is a prisoner in their own country, and the
American could move to China to have a higher quality of life outside of the
polluted cities.

------
sandworm101
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?

~~~
shiftpgdn
The vast majority (95%, including lots of oddball pcbs, fasteners, etc) of my
recent Amazon deliveries have come from an Amazon van. I'm almost surprised
they don't offer a reusable bin or something of that nature. It feels wasteful
to throw away so many boxes.

~~~
myself248
Especially with the recent news that a lot of what we thought was recyclable
really isn't. I presume that clean brown corrugated is still OK, but I don't
know that for sure.

~~~
JudgeWapner
oh it is "recyclable", just (for several materials) takes more energy to
recycle it than toss it in a landfill. You get to feel good that cardboard
gets a "new life", instead of a new one (which extracts more carbon from the
atmosphere) being created, we can burn _more_ CO2 to have a second truck
travel down your street to pick up renewable cardboard and haul it around town
till it eventually gets cleaned and processed (at the cost of even more
energy).

------
Judson
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.

------
zdw
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.

~~~
fouronnes3
Absurd how most of the items on the belt are already in a cardboard box. Seems
so wasteful.

~~~
SamuelAdams
Part of it could be privacy too. I ordered a computer monitor that was in its
own cardboard box. However, that box had clearly printed "Gaming Monitor" on
the box. This item was sitting on my porch for a few hours before I got home.

Amazon put it in one of their boxes, which did not have any labels about the
package contents. Thieves are more likely to steal a box that says "expensive
computer part" versus an unlabeled box.

Not to say that's always the case, but it depends on what the products box is
like.

------
Animats
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
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
Yo that's crazy! custom sized packaging regardless of what's being packed?
impressive

------
elamje
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

~~~
o_p
>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.

~~~
nerdponx
It's worth expanding on this. Because I think it gets lost in the rhetoric,
whether deliberately or by accident.

A profit-maximizing firm sets prices that maximize its expected profit. This
seems tautological, but it's important and I think it's implications aren't
appreciated.

If your prices are already beating the competition, and you already have a
solid reputation for low prices, there is no incentive to continue lowering
prices, even as you cut costs. This is why monopolies are considered "bad",
because they eliminate incentives for firms to care at all about the welfare
of consumers.

In undergrad economics classes, you might learn that prices are set equal to
marginal cost (including opportunity cost). But that is only true under
specific and relatively strong equilibrium conditions, which I don't believe
apply to Amazon.

~~~
andrewmutz
The reason that this tends to lower prices for consumers is that these
innovations rarely stay confined to the companies that invent them. If this
lowers costs for amazon to fulfill orders, then these techniques tend to get
adopted by their competitors.

And once adopted by competitors, when everyone's margins have increased, these
companies do compete on price.

This process doesn't happen immediately but it does happen.

~~~
nitrogen
Who are Amazon's most likely competitors?

~~~
gcmeplz
Walmart, alibaba, jet.com, Target, and ebay all spring to mind

~~~
cco
I believe jet.com is owned by Walmart.

------
40acres
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.

------
vivekrkumar
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/amaz...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-
warehouse/amazon-dismisses-idea-automation-will-eliminate-all-its-warehouse-
jobs-soon-idUSKCN1S74B9)

[2]
[https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm)

------
CamelCaseName
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.

~~~
mabbo
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
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?

~~~
mabbo
The hiring bar at Amazon is high enough that anyone unhappy would have little
trouble getting a job elsewhere. Plus, there's an internal policy that any dev
in good standing is welcome to join any team that wants them. So most managers
treat their devs very well.

I had a coworker join in January. Very talented, great to work with. Wasn't
really into what we did. So he found a team doing what he was interested in
and transferred last week. Sorely missed, but better to have him happy in the
company than unhappy until he leaves.

The culture itself is something special. The leadership principles mean
something here. For certain types (of which I am one) it really works well. My
only displeasure with the culture is the times the company makes choices that
seem to go against the LPs.

------
polskibus
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
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
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.

------
blakesterz
"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
I guess 24 roles could also mean 24 roles like lead packer, junior packer etc
...

~~~
richrichardsson
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.

------
csours
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.

~~~
marcosdumay
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.

------
flyingplasma
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
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?

------
lukewrites
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.)

~~~
mikeash
That seems tough to determine. Does an autonomous bulldozer count as one
employee because you would have had one person driving it? Or does it count as
five employees because you run it 24/7? Or does it count as five hundred
employees because that’s how many people you’d need if they were using
shovels?

~~~
mdorazio
Similarly, this also leaves open a big loophole - if you implement a tax on
jobs eliminated, the incentive shifts to starting companies that that don't
have jobs in the first place. Then you quickly arrive at the sub-contracted
functions shell game where a company pays for a service rather than for
specific workers to avoid the automation tax, and the fulfillment companies
shuffle around as new automation tech allows them to eliminate more jobs.

I don't think taxation on automated labor really gets us anywhere. Wealth tax
makes a lot more sense with fewer loopholes.

------
jason0597
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
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
> 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
>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.

------
PorterDuff
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.

------
toss1
"...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.

------
Theodores
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-
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?

~~~
marcosdumay
Picking things is surprisingly hard. It will by automated at some point, but
it may be one of the last jobs to disappear from warehouses.

------
forgingahead
Video link of the packing machine that Amazon is using:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rP1wjEsbak](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rP1wjEsbak)

------
BrendanD
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.

------
ineedasername
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.

------
curiousgal
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?

------
nwrk
"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-c...](https://www.cmcmachinery.com/portfolio-
item/ecommerce1-cmc-cartonwrap/)

~~~
no_identd
[https://youtu.be/0eqtqKDbV1Q](https://youtu.be/0eqtqKDbV1Q)

Here's the YouTube link.

------
CriticalCathed
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.

~~~
crazygringo
How do you know overall jobs will decrease?

It's also totally possible that each warehouse will be made twice as efficient
per employee... but also deliver twice the merchandise... maintaining the same
total number of jobs.

Kind of the same way that automation of the past 100 years across the economy
has still resulted in record-setting employment right now.

~~~
asdkhadsj
Curiously, what does the homelessness & (true, ie not unemployment) jobless
rate look like in that graph? Of course though, they're tough metrics.

More importantly though, we're on the cusp of some pretty hairy water. Imagine
we drop all of the truck drivers, taxi drivers, Uber and Lift drivers
tomorrow. How many millions of people will that be - where can they go?

I'm not against automation in the slightest, but to think it won't have an
impact on employment seems farfetched. Imagine a robot tomorrow, humanoid
capable of basic tasks. How many millions of people would that displace almost
instantly?

I don't think the past 100 years even remotely indicates how we'll handle this
as a society. We aren't talking about taking away one job. We're talking about
taking away a _skill category_. No more drivers. No more basic manual labor.

And that's not even talking about how growth would need to expand to handle
the increase in workforce. Imagine our workforce doubles tomorrow - who is
going to consume it all? Do we even _want_ more consumption?

I don't think it's as cut and dry as looking at the street cleaners and how
they handled it when horses stopped being used transportation. We're talking
about fundamentally categories of work becoming obsolete, and having no jobs
that _some_ people qualify for.

With that said, I'm curious to live in a world where the population is
_forced_ to be educated. No low skilled jobs might have a benefit of
_(basically)_ no low educated people. However I am worried about how it will
affect the current populace.

~~~
crazygringo
> _I don 't think the past 100 years even remotely indicates how we'll handle
> this as a society. We aren't talking about taking away one job. We're
> talking about taking away a skill category._

We did it with farmers. 80% of jobs in early 1800's, close to 40% in 1900, 20%
by 1930, 5% by 1965, and 1.7% now. A whole "skill category" like driving
doesn't even come _close_ to farming.

Automation, and even displacing drivers, is going to continue happening
gradually, not overnight. E.g. only the easiest driving jobs in the easiest
areas are automated first, then gradually more difficult ones... There's no
"overnight". It'll take many years, and it will be fine just like it has each
decade over the past century.

[1]
[https://azizonomics.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/farmjobs.jpg](https://azizonomics.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/farmjobs.jpg)

~~~
asdkhadsj
So I take it your view is we should not plan / discuss how to handle it? Take
it on good faith that it'll be fine?

~~~
crazygringo
My view is that the loss of driving jobs can be handled normally, via existing
free market and education institutions -- that it's no different from the loss
of other job categories over the past 50 years.

That this isn't special, that we're not "on the cusp of some pretty hairy
water", but rather that this is just par for the course.

I just don't see any statistics that suggest the scale or rate will be
anything close to larger/faster than our economy can normally handle. If
someone can show those comparative statistics exist, then I'll change my mind.

~~~
asdkhadsj
That's fair. It would be interesting to have data that compares all of the job
classes out there and the number of workers out there, against the worker
education.

Ie, how many millions of food service workers, manual laborers, and drivers
_(for trucks, taxis, etc)_ could move upward in career depth? Where would we
expect them to be absorbed?

I definitely think this is hairy waters, in the sense that I want to see
studies done. Planning for how it can be handled. Etc. Calling it fine in my
view would suggest we don't even need to study it - which seems unfair. This
degree of automation, assuming we can get over some AI hurdles of course,
seems unparalleled - at least enough to warrant real data.

~~~
crazygringo
Just a quick point: they don't necessarily need to move upward. They can move
laterally. They can work in package delivery, in restaurants, at Starbucks, in
health care, in tourism, in solar panel and home battery installation, in
environment cleanup sites, in converting homes to greater energy efficiency,
and so on. Honestly a lot of the new jobs 20 years from now we have a hard
time guessing what they'll even be (if you magically know, you'll make
billions investing), which makes "planning" for it a bit handwavy anyways.
(Remember, nobody "planned" for web developers to be an exploding new career.)

~~~
asdkhadsj
Well that goes back to the original point though. Which is, that no education
jobs will theoretically dwindle. If we have machines capable of handling all,
repeat all no education manual labor jobs; things like picking fruit,
delivering boxes, etc. Where will those people go?

They will be forced to acquire more education or skill oriented trades.

The concern is if humanity will be able to adapt to something it has never
seen. Where creativity and thinking oriented jobs become more and more
required.

------
Rapzid
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
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
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
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.

------
atwebb
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.

------
iambateman
If we taxed robots, this would be easier for more people to embrace as a good
thing.

------
hardwaresofton
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.

------
nikofeyn
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.

------
rhacker
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.

------
mensetmanusman
Now I will tell my small children that they won’t have a box filling job
waiting for them when they graduate middle school.

------
thrower123
Is anyone complaining about this? These are mindless, terrible, Taylorized
jobs.

If machines can do it, they should.

------
seandhi
Bezos goads competitors to raising wages while developing machines to
eliminate wages.

~~~
whyenot
As mentioned in the article, Amazon's competitors such as Walmart are also
doing trials with the same machine.

------
vbuwivbiu
I will start using Amazon again if they replace their dehumanized workers with
robots

------
sacradix
Workers of the world, rejoice! Amazon will now be exploiting fewer workers.

------
aszantu
more people loosing their jobs will be unable to buy products, no matter how
cheap, from amazon, hu?

------
mikeash
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
That's usually due to delivery/packing requirements, not a human unable to
find the smallest possible box.

~~~
mikeash
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?

~~~
mdorazio
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
These items aren’t fragile and usually come with totally inadequate padding,
so that’s not it. The truck loadout thing seems likely though.

------
jordache
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.

~~~
asdfman123
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.

~~~
aiyodev
> 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-
elec...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/opinion/trump-robots-electoral-
college.html)

> 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.

------
darksaints
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.

------
ddlatham
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.

------
dfilppi
Cool. After all Amazon's product isn't "jobs". It is customer service, and
robots are better.

~~~
tomc1985
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
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
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
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.

~~~
tomc1985
If that is true then why is wealth inequality so high? I have a hard time
believing the argument that that wealth manifests as tech toys and amenities
when the amounts of money that are in question here outweigh technology a
million-fold.

UBI's an option -- one that I'm in favor of -- but as long as it is an idea
and not reality there are still millions of people getting shafted without a
lot of recourse, short of restructuring one's entire life and starting over in
a new career. An expensive and emotionally draining transition that weak-ass
severance packages fail to adequately compensate for.

If corporate tax payers were actually paying taxes and not sitting on a
dragon's hoard of cash I might be more in favor of increased automation, but
the fact is reserves being as high as they are means that automation is not so
necessary in many sectors short of unreasonable and unethical shareholder
demands.

~~~
abakker
Wealth inequality is because capitalism. We collectively permit a very large
share of wealth to return to owners of capital. Frequently, this is
concentrated because of a variety of financial realities (e.g. large amounts
of liquid collateral make it easier to gain leverage, which can increase
returns, etc.). OTOH, this return to capital has made the retirement funds and
investments of many people's pensions possible. After all, Vanguard and others
like them are probably the biggest beneficiaries of the great return on
capital (who do you think "Shareholders" are?).

Balancing that return, is of course the relatively lackluster returns on cash.
Companies sit on cash not because they enjoy counting it, but because they
cannot find appropriately productive uses of it. They also hold it because it
helps them cope with uncertainty (of economic reality, regulation,
opportunity, etc). Taxing cash is fine, but companies will just change how
they balance their uncertainty with other methods.

It sounds like what you are concerned with is that labor is not receiving an
equal share of the output, compared with capital. this is likely because true
labor productivity has not been great
([https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/below-trend-the-us-
pro...](https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/below-trend-the-us-productivity-
slowdown-since-the-great-recession.htm)) and also because capitalists
(including pension fund shareholders, often the workers themselves) are
engaged in rent-seeking on behalf of their capital. I think in many cases this
reflects a shift in the role of savings from the employee to the employer. In
eras past, the employee received relatively more pay compared to shareholders,
but was required to save for themselves. Corporates that offered pensions had
to set aside money to managed those obligations directly. In modern times,
corporations tend to create retirement benefits that come from an employee's
salary and the company's money, but which have been underfunded due to the
assumption of future returns. This "optimistic" assumption about rate of
return on the 401k/retirement fund/pension funds of today drives a lot of
capital into the role of rent seeking from corporations. Corporations respond
by trying to meet their shareholder demands, and corporate officers tend to be
the beneficiaries of generally capital friendly activity, since they
themselves are shareholders.

There's a lot to unwind here, and a lot more that I haven't written, but I
think it is best to not assume that there can be a single solution to a very
complex problem which results from a system built of many interacting
components.

~~~
tomc1985
I'll agree that individual pension-holders and retirement-account holders
create something of a perverse incentive, since decisionmaking about capital
markets generally improves them less than they think and incentivizes their
demise, but how many private-sector jobs nowadays even offer a pension? I
imagine the pensioners' argument will hold less and less weight going forward
as these populations retire and die off.

I am not saying there is a single solution to the complex problem of low-level
work disappearing. However, there are many countries where the business
culture is more willing to hold on to labor (non-english-speaking western
europe, the specific example I am thinking of is big-box retail in France and
Germany, though I've also seen this with the lack of self-serve gas stations
in parts of South America); these are still successful businesses doing well
in their sectors and in many cases out-competing American entrants to their
markets. (And yes the reasons for their success are often better cultural fit
than foreign entrants versus comparing where the spend their money) Yet the
American zeitgeist seems to be heading full-on into mass automation with its
eyes wide shut, when there is already so much money floating around that it
doesn't really seem necessary. What labor crises are there that _necessitate_
the deployment of automation? (I don't think rising minimum wages nor
increasing threat of unionization count as they do not raise costs above what
can be absorbed by capital hoarding)

~~~
abakker
Agree that there are fewer pensions, however, I think the incentives for rent
seeking in 401Ks are still quite strong, and the 401K is quite common for
professional jobs.

------
throwayEngineer
Fantastic, less human labor in one sector means new opportunities in another.

~~~
hannasanarion
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.

~~~
asdfman123
Well, if you look at history it keeps happening. Imagine if you said in 1900
that almost all farm jobs would be eliminated in 100 years. The future would
be almost unimaginable, but we've turned out okay.

However I think the problem is we're at a point where things are churning so
rapidly that many are being left behind. Your 50-year-old truck driver is not
in a position to learn a new skill every 5-10 years to stay afloat, or uproot
his life and move to a new city where they need workers.

Furthermore, there's conceivably a point when we won't need very many
unskilled workers at all -- when we finally run out of things for average
people to do -- and humans don't tend to treat other humans very well when
they aren't needed. However, that's further off than the churn economy we have
right now.

~~~
hannasanarion
It doesn't "keep happening", it's happened exactly twice, in the two
industrial revolutions, in each case the new type of work that needed millions
of human hands was obvious. There is no guarantee that it will happen again,
especially given that new industrial inventions require no human intervention
at all.

To fall back on an example that is not my own, imagine a conversation in 1900
between two horses:

Horse 1: I'm worried about these new automobile things, they might take our
jobs

Horse 2: Don't worry, every technological development that displaced horse
work in the past has led to more newer and better jobs for horses, there will
always be work for us. Just look at trains, we don't have to pull big loads
anymore, now we just draw carts and support riders, who knows what great jobs
are just around the corner.

The world's horse population peaked in 1915, and is now down by 70% in the US.

------
irrational
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
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
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.

~~~
SamuelAdams
> 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.

------
EugeneOZ
Surprised to find so many modern Luddites in comments. History lessons says
that new professions will appear.

~~~
lm28469
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
> 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
> 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 ?

------
fastball
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.

~~~
cheeze
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
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
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.

~~~
cadence-
Universal basic income seems to be the only viable way forward. So far I have
not heard any other good solution to the societal problems automation is
causing. The other alternative would be to slow the progress, but that’s even
worse. We need to let people learn new skills, and universal basic income
makes that possible. There will be obviously freeloaders, which is the main
issue with this approach. This is extremely difficult problem to solve, and
the current political climate makes it even more difficult to find acceptable
solution Are there any other viable alternatives? How can we help people who
don’t have marketable skills get back to work and contribute to the society?

~~~
jcranberry
The other solution I've heard is shorter work weeks.

------
everyone
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
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
>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.

