
What Amazon Teaches Us About AI and the “Jobless Future” - rmason
https://medium.com/the-wtf-economy/do-more-what-amazon-teaches-us-about-ai-and-the-jobless-future-8051b19a66af
======
kiliantics
This post neglects a lot of externalities. Before, a single kettle could last
generations. I'm personally very disturbed by the idea of more and more people
getting many deliveries every single day. That kind of consumption is insanity
and just think of the carbon footprint.

They mention clothing too. Clothing is an incredibly harmful industry for the
environment and don't forget how it affects workers - be they seamstresses in
unsafe factories in Bangladesh or inmates in cotton fields in Louisiana. I
don't know​ why we should be happy how many clothes we can all wear now.

The big problem with automation is the trend of who really benefits most. The
point is made in the article that the consumer will experience massive
benefits. And this is true if you are a first world professional, like people
working in silicon valley. But how much of the new employment in Amazon is in
fulfilment centres? Those don't sound like the kinds of jobs we should be
happy that automation is creating and they are hardly going to last long
either.

I'd love if all vehicles became smart electronic driverless miracle machines
and getting blood to dying mothers sounds great. I just can't support these
shifts if there isn't also a big change in the class structure of the society
that these changes are happening in. The wealth this creates should be less
concentrated and the benefits and TRUE costs (incl. Environmental) shared more
equally.

~~~
saint_fiasco
The kind of people who benefit most from being able to buy cheap clothes made
in sweatshops is not Silicon Valley professionals, it's poor people.

Get rid of the unsafe factories and poor people won't be able to afford
clothes anymore. And the workers of those unsafe factories won't be able to
afford anything.

There is no easy answer.

~~~
crdoconnor
"The kind of people who benefit most from being able to buy cheap clothes made
in sweatshops is not Silicon Valley professionals, it's poor people."

The benefit they gain through slightly cheaper clothes is more than offset by
the benefits from the jobs they could have had if the manufacture of clothing
(like everything else) was not offshored.

The real winner is Stefan Persson and the $28 billion he made from H&M's
sweatshop labor arbitrage.

"There is no easy answer."

There is. Make trade deals contingent on good labor and environmental
conditions and ruthlessly enforce that. That will bring jobs home and improve
working conditions in 3rd world countries.

Then, deal with the fact that that new top is going to cost $4 more and Stefan
Persson won't be quite so spectacularly wealthy.

~~~
devdas
As long as the people from 3rd world countries can easily relocate to places
with better working conditions.

~~~
crdoconnor
To be clear, this usually means poor 3rd world countries pay for the
educations of their best and brightest and then see no benefit from doing so.

Most people ignore this subsidy from poor countries to rich.

~~~
devdas
I do mean unrestricted. That includes unlimited immigration of unskilled/lower
skilled labour as well.

------
azakai
Amazon's success is remarkable, and yes it is adding jobs at a high rate, both
internally and via contractors, third-party sellers, etc.

But the bigger question is whether the Amazon job increases offset the jobs
that are lost elsewhere, as retail outlets close, Amazon's direct competitors
fail, etc. Amazon and its satellites are growing, but is the job market as a
whole?

I don't know the answer, and it might be hard to estimate. But the optimism of
the article requires a leap of faith without that information.

~~~
FullMtlAlcoholc
Amazon is the next iteration of Walmart

~~~
notyourwork
In what way?

~~~
clock_tower
If I were to guess: Wal-Mart has a very bad reputation for sucking the wealth
out of a community; money spent at a locally-owned store is more likely to
circulate in the community, while with Wal-Mart the money's spent once and no
one but the Waltons ever sees it again.

Amazon might be a little bit like that: a fountain of wealth for Seattle (and
check out real estate prices there if you think that's an exaggeration), but
pumping that wealth out of all the rest of the globe.

But I see a weakness in this argument: Wal-Mart mostly displaced existing
chain stores, which had similar wealth-pump effects -- and which had much
higher prices than Wal-Mart, partially because they wanted higher prices but
mostly because they didn't have Wal-Mart's hyper-efficient supply chain. And
the old corner groceries and general stores had supply chains that were even
worse than the previous generation of chain stores, and therefore even higher
prices and even smaller variety...

So: you hear the wealth-pump argument, wealth pumps do sometimes exist, and
I'm pretty sure the previous poster was accusing Amazon and Wal-Mart of both
being wealth pumps; but I'm not entirely sure that that's what's going on with
either business. If it is going on, of course, it's a problem. (Have there
been any studies on Wal-Mart's effect on areas where it opens?)

~~~
closeparen
> money spent at a locally-owned store is more likely to circulate in the
> community

This has always been a silly argument. Locally-owned businesses tend to be in
the service industry. Their primary expenses are wages, paid to people living
nearby. This is also true of internationally owned service-industry
businesses.

Retail businesses tend to sit at the end of a long supply chain. Their primary
expenses are the goods they buy from upstream. Local staff are a minor bit of
overheard, like the air conditioning or the internet connection for the credit
card terminals. This is true whether the retail business is locally or
internationally owned.

~~~
cat199
yes, but where do the profits go in each case?

To the local store owner, or to remote owners/shareholders?

The point of the local argument for me is that local owners are more likely to
invest in locally owned businesses and create more local owners, whereas
remote super-owners are more likely to create remote super-owners who further
create more remote super owners, the net effect being that the ownership
within the local community over time erodes.

The concrete facts of walmart et al as an example only support this argument..

~~~
closeparen
In many lines of business, retailer profit margins are so thin that it doesn't
really matter. But let's suppose it does.

Growing up, we had some family friends who were local business owners, albeit
in the service industry.

The first place money will go is the local housing market. As a renter, this
is incredibly destructive. If shopping at national chains reduces what my
competitors can bid, all the more reason to do it.

The next place it'll go is luxury SUVs. As a (sometimes motor)cyclist, it
might help me to get more drivers into Volvos with their safety sensors,
though I do prefer to share the road with smaller vehicles. Neutral on this
one.

Then it'll go to international travel. None of that money is local.

Then it'll go to investment accounts at national brokerages into multinational
stocks on New York-based exchanges.

As far as I know, there is no forum where the local computer parts store
proprietor and grocer invest in each other. Maybe some local philanthropy -
they might be at Rotary together - but most of the philanthropy around me was
driven by the handful of national companies headquartered locally.

~~~
FullMtlAlcoholc
Are your neighbors automatons? Otherwise, the first place the money will go to
is the grocer and restaurants. From your description, I'll extrapolate and
predict that it goes to some high end, organic food farmer's market.

Next, it'll go to Geetika Miller, formerly known as Karen, who went to India
to study and came back as an enlightened yoga instructor :D

Come on, you're being a bit disingenuous. Keeping money local isn't some BS
concept that has no history or evidence of success, it's how certain immigrant
communities have thrive in a new country. I've seen this personally in the
Detroit with the Chaldean (Iraqi Christians) community but you can also look
at the history of Jewish immigrants in the US and Chinese emigrants anywhere
really.

------
ThomPete
O'Reilly confuses Amazon as a single example with the industry in general.

It's the same broken argument that people make all the time by pointing to som
factory that automated and had to hire new people.

What people tend to forget here is by automating that company is gaining and
advantage over others who aren't and will ultimately drive them out of
business. So while the individual company might see an increase in jobs the
industry in general doesn't necessarily.

It's way more complex than even this as you can be in industries with growing
demand ex due to globalization.

But at the end of the day the same rule always apply. Companies in order to
survive need to be more productive than their competitors and so technology
will be used more and more until there isn't any jobs or only very few left.

Also another thing that is often missed by those who claim new jobs will be
created. Even if that was the case those jobs will be easier and easier to
fill by AI. So it's not an argument for anything.

------
suprgeek
This is a very pernicious take on AI (and Amazon's usage of said AI). Amazon
has hired 300000 professionals wohoo! more jobs!

All those jobs are poorly paid, very labour intensive have almost zero
benefits and usually not full time. If AI is giving us these kinds of jobs for
the many for the instant gratification of consumers then we are worse off NOT
better-off.

Face it - the Advent of better AI (Robots, Driverless cars, etc) will lead to
massive job losses and disruption of (currently) well paying jobs - the
technology is advancing much faster than the ability of "blue collar" worker
to retrain or adapt.

It is indeed a "massive failure of imagination" \- of the author to understand
the real world limitations.

~~~
ninkendo
If folks are interested in this subject, Kurzgesagt recently put out a great
video on this subject:
[https://youtu.be/WSKi8HfcxEk](https://youtu.be/WSKi8HfcxEk)

------
delegate
This article follows a similar line of reasoning as people who go "What global
warming, look how cold it is outside!".

The author brushes off the fact that Amazon has caused (is causing) countless
retail shops to go out of business all over the world.

As others have noted, 'just-in-time' consumption is insanity - cities are
becoming perfectly oiled consumption and garbage making machines. I suspect
(just speculating, no numbers) that this efficiency has a huge impact on
climate. Similar to cars being 20% more efficient, but increasing number of
cars by 50%.

As for the jobs, I wonder how many kids dream of working at Amazon fulfillment
centers when they grow up... meaning that it sounds like a pretty bad job -
people used as transportation units by the algorithms.

So not everything is rosy and shiny with Amazon. I try to avoid binging on it
as much as possible. I applaud the efficiency and the 'You want it, you've got
it', but I think the cost of that is hidden somewhere else and we all
collectively pay it.

------
petra
It's actually interesting to think about Amazon's platforms. Most often what
they do, is take some part of a startup or small business, a part that is
relatively safe[1], over the long term for that business, and often serves as
a part of moat, and let people do it on their platform, and leaving that
business with a much higher ratio of risky-tasks/stable-tasks.

The end result is that businesses are becoming much more risky(over the long
term), more hit-driven, and much more hollow(job and knowledge wise).

And it doesn't seem like something good for the economy.

[1]For example, printing a shirt(and owning that printing machine). Or
installing servers. Or keeping in-touch with customers and branding.

------
jhoechtl
> Amazon expects to hire another 100,000 workers in the next eighteen months,
> many of them in its fulfillment centers

Those are all extreme low wage jobs. Nobody can expect them to pay any
substantial tax. Also jobs like these require little education, trapping
children of these workers to do any better than their parents.

------
narrator
Jevons Paradox in action: The more efficiently a resource is used , in this
case labor, the higher the demand for it will be. This unfortunately is not
something your average arm chair economist will figure out intuitively and
leads to the same mistakes in analysis being made over and over again.

~~~
Applejinx
Sure. Example: 'horsepower'. Our transportation uses more horsepower than
anyone could possibly have imagined in 1902.

And no actual horses.

This is exactly the same. In the future, the amount of labor that's done will
be staggering, unimaginable, a real Jetsons future. …and no human workers, and
no humans being paid to do any of it. Not even management. Think about it:
should be equally obvious. Labor == horsepower.

------
sharemywin
ummm...way to ignore all the retail jobs disappearing from e-commerce.

Don't get me wrong companies do a great job of automating things and growing.

And investors do a great job of betting on the things that have the best odds.
I don't have a plausible solution. Besides lottery don't have a fair way to
invest irrationally.

But, if society doesn't find a way to retrain(invest in) those people that
were replaced we lose all the potential they had to offer.

~~~
nck4222
Retail jobs are growing, not disappearing, and they're expected to continue to
grow.

[https://www.bls.gov/ooh/sales/retail-sales-
workers.htm](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/sales/retail-sales-workers.htm)

~~~
sharemywin
Not sure where their going to be working:

[http://clark.com/shopping-retail/major-retailers-
closing-201...](http://clark.com/shopping-retail/major-retailers-
closing-2017/)

Maybe Amazon's new retail stores.

~~~
saint_fiasco
I'm guessing maybe minor retailers? Some small store close to your
house/school/office when you can't be bothered to wait for shipping.

~~~
Applejinx
I would not dare to try and open some small store and gamble on people not
wanting to wait for Amazon. If you think that's still something that can be
done, try it.

Better still, get a business loan to launch something like that. I'll wait.
It's hard to even think of a thing more self-evidently doomed.

~~~
saint_fiasco
The last sentence is just not true. More doomed would be to invest a lot in
infrastructure and economies of scale and try to beat Amazon at their own
game.

So don't do that, open a small convenience store instead. Where else are all
those retail jobs coming from? Not a rhetorical question, I really don't know.

------
theprop
This article is misleading and wrong in some of its ideas. Every company wants
to employ as little expensive and unreliable-relative-to-a-machine human labor
as possible. Trying to cut down costs is in fact not short-sighted or somehow
"wrong", it's efficient and great (as long as you're not treating people
unethically or polluting the environment, etc.). Amazon is simply growing
tremendously quickly...it's not that they're trying to create jobs.

In the past 200 years there's been a tremendous increase in leisure for most
people (except perhaps ironically for the best paid but that's a lot by
choice), and also there has to date been no end to human desire. It used to
take 80% of the labor force just to create food, now it's around 4%. It used
to be 150 years ago the average American had 1 pair of paints and 2 shirts.
Today the average American has 20 pairs of blue jeans.

What's creating new jobs is not that a company is trying to create jobs but
that human desires keep expanding.

~~~
bamboozled
_In the past 200 years there 's been a tremendous increase in leisure for most
people_

My anecdotal observations don't align with that statement, most people I know
work more than ever. It's almost madness. I would love to see some hard
evidence to suggest otherwise.

While technology is supposed to be making things more efficient (and sure it
can do that), it's also making certain things more complex, and I'm not sure
most humans have the desire to cope with the complexity very well (nor should
they). This can create a time consuming quagmire of technical debt, I deal
with it daily.

A simple example of this growing complexity in society is food and beverage
packaging. It's become too complex for most people to know how recycle things
properly, and it's not really something people go out of their way to
understand so it rarely gets done correctly, thus creating new problems.

~~~
golergka
How many people you know are from third world countries?

~~~
bamboozled
Funny you should ask because I would say, more than you might imagine. I've
actually spent time in third world countries volunteering and travelling and
made some longer term friends out of it. The biggest problems they face are
fallout from mass manufacturing and consumerism (rubbish dumps literally
overflowing with western companies mess), deforestation (for palm oil) and
climate change.

Apart from being less materially well off, there are a lot of happy people in
the third world who seem to be living a way more relaxing lives then people I
know in the developed world who are up to there eyeballs in debt and working
for high profile tech companies.

But I think people just see what ever they want to see to justify their views
and beliefs.

------
PeterStuer
The kind of 'jobs' Amazon is creating in fulfillment are exactly the kind of
things that we should have robotized out of existence time ago. It is only
because we tolerate modern slavery that these still exist. 'Jobs' are not a
good thing. People don't need 'jobs', they need a life.

------
justboxing
> As long as we use the productivity gains from technology to create value for
> society, and ensure that value is widely shared so that customers are able
> to afford the cornucopia of goods on offer, we will find new ways to put
> people to work.

Mmm, I'm sorry but how is the example of Amazon's productivity gains from
technology that uses ROBOTS in a lot of places (and not people), putting
people to work?

------
bertlequant
Something a tad irksome in the way a corporate behemoth is praised. We all use
Amazon, but we all used to shop at Wal-Mart. Difference seems to be everyone
always seemed to at least sligtly detest Wal-Mart, but people talk about
Amazon with awe and an almost joy-like appreciation.

Some of my friends worked at fulfillment centers, and if most of these 100,000
new hires mentioned are headed to those places, the author fails to mention a
very important part: retention. Since he seems very impressed by wheels, one
could also compare the fulfillment centers to a gristmill, where people are
ground up and discarded. Ever seen an ad for an Amazon fulfillment center
hiring event? It's akin to seasonal hiring, where everyone who shows up at
event is hired on the spot, knowing a lot of them will quit early on. If a job
isn't retained past a certain point, it can't really be seen as a win. It
would be interesting to see data about how long the average fulfillment center
worker stays in a fulfillment center position.

Many of us have read about how grueling it is to work in an Amazon fulfillment
center, and after hearing my friends' stories I agree.

The good thing for Amazon is that the customer never has to see this. They
don't have to feel bad seeing what all went into getting them that tea kettle
in under 6 hours. Sure, there is a lot of amazing logisitics and technology
involved, but there is also a human element that is hidden. In Wal-Mart, you
can walk right into a store and see the effects & signs of mass consumption,
cheap products, and cheap labor. I think its visibility has driven a lot of
the protests and blowback against Wal-Mart, successful or not.

I think not being able to easily see the dark side of Amazon plays into
Amazon's customer satisfaction in some ways. You order something and a box
arrives. The only interaction you see is the one you made with your computer.

------
anotheryou
He wouldn't have bough the cattle if it wasn't delivered same day?

And as Amazon grows, percentage of tasks done by humans shrinks. In this case
and time amazon grows faster enough to employ more, but with a bit less growth
and a bit better AI this caculation might be totally different.

(and as others mentioned, one has to look at the net jobs beyond amazon)

------
olewhalehunter
These arguments come up a lot when discussing this topic and there's some
points that don't really hold, usually because the apologist either doesn't
know the world of sweatshops or doesn't want to bring it up.

The people working in sweatshops start as young children, often sold by their
parents to pay debts. Often pay is withheld and they just become slaves or
they are fed just enough to keep their fingers moving and their brains
starved. The sweatshop may provide enough income for that child to grow up to
produce more children, who then become sweatshop workers themselves, child
prostitutes, or slaves, or they may just die on the job.

Nutrition deficiencies and stress get baked into their genetics:
congratulations you now have a permanent underclass living worse than some
animals, and similar to livestock, crowded populations, poor medical
administration, and hellish living conditions result in festering and evolving
pathogens that you and Paul Krugman may soon be more interested in. The result
of providing just enough for them to survive to make children is not "less
poverty", it's more poverty, more death, more child slavery or prostitution,
and if emotional arguments don't register with you, exotic pandemics coupled
with antibiotic misuse just might.

Secondly, America does not have a clothes shortage. The unfathomable amount of
(often expensive) clothing thrown away by both consumers and suppliers in
disgusting. Shrewd families from the lower income to the middle class buy used
or keep hand-me-downs. Once or twice during move out season on campus my
partner and I raid the rich dormitories and find upwards of thousands of
dollars worth of designer clothing among other things. Many stores throw their
out of season clothing straight into the dump.

The defense of a situation where hundreds of millions live in hell to produce
mountains of goods that end in landfills, on an economic argument, is absurd.

~~~
reality_czech
And yet, the countries which had sweatshops, like China, India, Vietnam, etc.
have had huge success in bringing their population out of poverty. The
countries which didn't, like most of Africa, did not. Population growth also
tends to go down with industrialization, not up. So you are basically
completely wrong when you say that sweatshops trap people in poverty.

Speaking of wrong... Suicide rates per capita are also higher in many rich
countries than in many poor ones. It's the "per capita" part that people don't
understand. Foxconn literally has 1,300,000 employees. At the standard US rate
of 13 suicides per 100,000 people per year, we should expect 169 suicides at
Foxconn per year. But people see a headline about a dozen suicides at Foxconn
and think it's a crisis, because math is hard.

Despite your disgust with the poor, no major pathogen of the last few decades
has been traced back to sweatshops. AIDS and Ebola came from people
interacting with apes, not from factory workers. Bird Flu came from birds. So
I call bullshit on your claims that the poor are breeding super-diseases.

We can all agree that capitalism has some bad aspects and maybe the
governments in these countries should be doing more to help. Spreading a lot
of ridiculous nonsense about how these people are worse than animals is just
that, ridiculous.

~~~
FullMtlAlcoholc
> . But people see a headline about a dozen suicides at Foxconn and think it's
> a crisis, because math is hard.

Although you're being dismissive, your math and intuition is a bit off.
Workplace suicides are rare in places like the US and make up approximately 1%
of all suicides. That one company has a number of suicides all at one facility
known to have poor working conditions does indicate a trend. So, it's not 13
out of 1.3 million, it's 13 out of 230000-450000 (estimates). Not only that,
but the company adapted by implementing suicide prevention measures.

You also neglect to mention that around 150 people at Foxconn threatened to
commit mass suicide in protest of the working conditions.

If there were a rash of suicides at Ohio State University and they all were
freshmen or transfer students, and they all jumped from buildings, that would
indicate an alarming trend, not some statistical anomaly.

Math isn't hard. We would expect the suicides to be more random. Also, and I'm
just speculating, it's not crazy to think some others were covered up.

> Spreading a lot of ridiculous nonsense about how these people are worse than
> animals is just that, ridiculous.

I'm not the OP and that is a bad comparison. Treated worse than dogs is
perhaps a better one.

> So I call bullshit on your claims that the poor are breeding super-diseases.

I wouldn't call it complete bullshit. Poor people in India who bathe in the
open sewer known as Ganges, one of the most if not the most heavily polluted
waterways, is a recipe for breeding a super disease. Though, this is caused by
lack of education, it is not entirely, completely disconnected from poor
wages.

> We can all agree that capitalism has some bad aspects and maybe the
> governments in these countries should be doing more to help.

Yes, we agree. We tolerate the profit off of human misery and suffering.
Progress has almost always been driven by misery and suffering. And we are all
responsible for it.

~~~
ahakki
> Workplace suicides are rare in places like the US and make up approximately
> 1% of all suicides.

This might be true, but Foxconn employees mostly live at their workplace, so
all suicides of Foxconn employees are technically «workplace suicides». That
doesn't really tell us a whole lot though.

~~~
FullMtlAlcoholc
I think only 25% live in dormitories where the suicides took place. I
seriously have doubts that Foxconn/China aren't playing down and under-
reporting this. Also, as mentioned, the company enacted a sweeping suicide
prevention program, including taking measures such as installing nets in
places to prevent jumpers from killing themselves.

~~~
saint_fiasco
How is that a bad thing? Most people who attempt suicide and survive say they
regret the attempt.

In the US it's not fashionable to kill yourself at work, but people jump from
bridges a lot, so lots of bridges have safety nets. They don't just delay
suicides, they outright save lives.

~~~
FullMtlAlcoholc
It's not a bad thing at all. I'm sorry if I gave that impression, but it's
another reason why simply looking at 13 out of 1 million as the suicide rate
isn't quite right

