
As Amazon Pushes Forward with Robots, Workers Find New Roles - prostoalex
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/10/technology/amazon-robots-workers.html?mabReward=ART_CTM1&recid=34cea0ca-c023-4fb8-6ca8-9047ebcd5412&recp=0&moduleDetail=recommendations-0&action=click&contentCollection=Politics&region=Footer&module=WhatsNext&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&src=recg&pgtype=article&_r=0
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franciscop
This feels quite political. I agree that robots are the future, but I think
that some structural changes will be needed. Trying to sell it like no jobs
are lost is quite naive at best, and purposefully misleading at worst.

If I remember correctly (don't quote me on that) Amazon used to employ quite a
lot of temporary workers and had a high turnover (hire/quit) rate. Then they
would no need to purposefully fire anyone to reduce their headcount. Just not
temp hiring those people would be enough. Or not hiring as many people as
befoe as they grow. Or ... My point: there are many ways of making it look
good on paper; but when a robot does a human job, that job is not needed
anymore.

What IMO we need to do is to keep on discussing structural unemployment from
all points of view.

~~~
microcolonel
> _Trying to sell it like no jobs are lost is quite naive at best, and
> purposefully misleading at worst._

Well, the article does literally say "No people were laid off when the robots
were installed, and Amazon found new roles for the displaced workers, Mr.
Clark said.". Either Mr. Clark is lying, or this point is moot.

~~~
sokoloff
I'm not following. Suppose they "normally" ran 150 full time employees and 150
temp workers for holiday peak. Suppose they have a 25% attrition rate. (37 of
those 150 employees quit voluntarily.)

After the robots, they could have 115 employees working and still not laid
anyone off. Yet, in terms of full time employment, they went from 150 to 115
and in terms of temp labor went from 150 to 0.

Did the robots destroy jobs in such a case? I'd think "yes". (I still support
the deployment of robots in such cases; I'm only responding to the logical
argument here, not the philosophical implications thereof.)

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
They also remove the need to make future hires, expanding the workforce to
match growth. There is a lost "opportunity cost" of unrealized employment
caused by massive automation.

The reallocation of labor during the throes of the industrial revolution
worked because the new technologies needed constant care and babysitting.
Reliable machines that need infrequent service will not need much maintenance
staff.

~~~
microcolonel
The reallocation of labour also worked because demand for consumer goods
increased dramatically as mere living effectively became cheaper.

------
petra
This is the historical wage share of gdp of workers:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_share](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_share)

And i'm sure the story for the bottom 50% of employees is even worse.

The trend is downwards, and the internet accelerated it. Does anyone think
that robots and a massive technology boom that may soon happen won't
accelerate it ? Why ?

And from that trend, given minimum wage, it seems that at some point in time,
we'll have large unemployment.

~~~
hammock
Why is that necessarily bad? Does everyone need ongoing employment? Why can't
more people build and own a business (or a robot, or other productive capital)
instead?

~~~
rtpg
There's a reason why "I started my company with only myself, a garage, and a
$3 million dollar inheritance" is an apt description of so many founders'
stories.

Perhaps seizing the means of production is the way to go ;)

In all seriousness though, Even starting a small business requires a decently
large buffer that most people simply don't have. Hard to build one if you're
surviving on mimimum wage + food stamps. Living paycheck to paycheck is a real
thing. Especially if you have family

~~~
hammock
Well, how many super wealthy people's stories are described by "I worked
really hard for 45 years and got every promotion and now I have a pension and
SS check"?

------
wongarsu
So in short, robots do the boring and physically demanding tasks, making the
humans more efficient. No workers were laid off.

I see the benefits of "relieving" humans of boring jobs, but most of the
article seems like a weird PR spin. Nobody got fired because Amazon is
expanding its warehouses rapidly enough that those people have work to do
despite the robots. Without this modernization Amazon would have needed to
hire more workers, meaning this is still a net job loss.

~~~
GCA10
Very few parents say: "I hope my child can get a shipping center job stacking
bins, day after day, and hold that job for 40 years."

Shipping-center automation is going to move people out of rote jobs in the
same way that farm automation sent a lot of workers off the land. From this
story, it sounds as if the people working at Amazon shipping centers have
found mildly more palatable jobs that could lead (with more training) to
better paying careers in industrial operations, design, etc.

We can (and should!) argue about how fast "better" jobs are taking shape. We
can explore ways of making that happen more systematically so that children of
pallet stackers have a brighter future. But it's a dim world if we think rote
labor like pallet stacking ought to be preserved as long as possible.

~~~
jdietrich
>Very few parents say: "I hope my child can get a shipping center job stacking
bins, day after day, and hold that job for 40 years."

For a lot of parents, the possibility of their children having a secure full-
time job is a lofty aspiration. Millions of Americans are trapped in cycles of
unemployment or in low-wage jobs with no security and no benefits. Vast
swathes of the US are blighted by long-term unemployment, crumbling
infrastructure and a lack of inward investment.

Amazon aren't buying these robots out of some altruistic desire to lighten the
burden of their workers. Their treatment of warehouse staff is notoriously
dreadful. If Bezos could fire every single worker in his warehouses, I have
absolutely no doubt that he would.

Better jobs would be great, but at the moment we just need jobs.

[http://articles.mcall.com/2011-09-18/news/mc-allentown-
amazo...](http://articles.mcall.com/2011-09-18/news/mc-allentown-amazon-
complaints-20110917_1_warehouse-workers-heat-stress-brutal-heat)
[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/amazon-
devas...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/amazon-devastating-
expose-accuses-internet-retailer-of-oppressive-and-callous-attitude-to-
staff-10458159.html)

~~~
sol_remmy
If you work in a software company, why don't you stop using calculators and
hire a team of 20 women to do computations on slide rules? That's 20 jobs for
salt of the earth, hard workin' families.

Your on a PROGRAMMING forum and your advocating for doing things less
efficiently just to keep people employed

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darawk
The fact that nobody was laid off _does not_ mean that no jobs were lost. If
efficiency increased, and nobody was laid off, what does that mean? More
product/service was produced. That marginal additional product/service _would
have_ required more workers, had they not had this efficiency gain from
automation, and I think it's only fair to consider those jobs to be 'lost'.

That being said, I think this is all wonderful, in spite of the misleading
framing.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _I think it 's only fair to consider those jobs to be 'lost'._

Is that like someone losing a child because they decided never to have any?

~~~
stephengillie
It's like a recording studio claiming they lost sales because people
downloaded the album they produced.

~~~
NegativeK
Or like complaining that physical media is crashing and burning while paid
digital media is exploding.

------
SapphireSun
Robots are cool. Even though amazon is hiring, they employ robots for a
reason, it means that fewer employees are needed per a unit of work. In the
absence of robots, more employees would be hired.

I like efficiency. I think abundance is great. Our economic system ensures
that those things will not help the great mass of people in our society.

~~~
jackcosgrove
Whoever said it, the quote about digging with spoons instead of shovels and
backhoes comes to mind.

Productivity is the root of economic surplus. It's the lodestone of the
economy. If we stop increasing productivity, the pie stops growing.
Productivity is the reason the poor today live better than a king or emperor
of old.

~~~
jdietrich
It's patently obvious that the freshly baked pie is being hoarded by an elite.
Average wages and compensation have been almost entirely stagnant since the
1970s. At best, this unequal growth is irrelevant to most people; in all
likelihood, it's driving rampant inflation of house prices, rents and an array
of essentials like healthcare and education.

If trickle-down economics ever worked, it certainly doesn't work now.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/05/08/resea...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/05/08/researchers-
have-answered-a-big-question-about-the-decline-of-the-middle-class/)

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forapurpose
The article prints Amazon's claims and vision - even their animated VR
presentation about future robots - but doesn't tell us the warehouse workers'
reality or their point of view. I think it has one short quote from one
worker. So we know the former, which is interesting, but we have no idea how
it really works out for the employees.

If someone asked your boss about your experience of your job, or someone a
couple of levels above your boss (much of the article quoted "Dave Clark, the
top executive in charge of operations at Amazon") and didn't ask you, how
accurate a picture would they get? Can Amazon's (effective) COO really tell us
what it's like to be a factory worker there?

In my experience of being in the position of the interviewer, as a consultant,
the boss and even the immediate supervisor usually have little idea about
their subordinates' actual work, challenges, frustrations, etc. Unless you ask
the person doing the work, you really have no idea what's going on. A common
experience: The boss says, 'the new system works great!'; the subordinate
says, 'it's awful and I just have to work around it'. But I shouldn't have to
talk about consulting fundamentals here; I thought that was a journalism
fundamental too.

~~~
RQJSOKJVVRPM
I don't really have an answer, but you may be interested to know that the
retail half of Amazon has a program in place whereby all employees (up to a
certain level) are required to visit a one of the warehouses. This is a 3 day
affair with a mix of "classroom" time and floor time. While this is obviously
far from the unfiltered reality of associates, we (corporate) are at least not
totally oblivious.

I don't know about Clark, but I'd imagine he has a rough idea, at least of the
general state of affairs. The quote about wanting associates to have less
monotonous jobs rings true- I've heard that notion before, and it's good to
know that it comes from that high.

~~~
forapurpose
Thanks for responding. IME, the types of things you discuss are things
"corporate" and executives talk about and sometimes believe, but often are not
reality on the ground.

Without evidence, why do you believe it? If you were given that sales pitch
about something core to your job, would you buy it at face value? If corporate
actually cares, why isn't this issue taken as seriously as other Amazon
projects? Wouldn't they be collecting data to evaluate the results? Why is
there no regular, quality, anonymous objective survey of the warehouse
employees?

For all I know, there is, but there's no evidence of it in the article (the NY
Times dropped the ball on it too - and they are supposed to be the skeptical
journalists). If not, how do I, the NYT reader and Amazon customer, know if
it's not just feel-good stuff that eases hearts and minds not on the factory
floor, but in the corporate offices and in the customers' homes.

------
c3534l
Does anyone know why Amazon has such visually striking facilities? I'm not
used to seeing a warehouse like that. I imagine there is some sort of reason
for it (reduces workplace accidents by making certain things stand out), but I
suppose it's also possible that Jeff Bezos just thought it looked pretty.

~~~
RQJSOKJVVRPM
What makes them striking to you?

I work at Amazon in operations, so I'm a little more able to answer than most,
but to me it's just a warehouse. The buildings are built as huge boxes. The
only thing I can think of is that they're brightly lit. There is an eye toward
safety.

~~~
c3534l
Everything is the exact same shade of yellow with a splash of red for danger
and occasionally blue. However, after seeing the video (I read this on mobile
initially), there is more photoshop going on than I gave it credit for.

However, there is still a high degree of color-coordination, even when you're
not looking at shots emphasizing the orderliness of the place with the colors
brightened.

There are lots of very clear, systematic horizontal lines. Part of that is how
all the equipment is the same, and those self-moving crates are all the exact
same height, but they went to the trouble of painting the bottom of poles
yellow and the rest white. When you do see red, it's all on the same
horizontal line, too. The bottom of the self-moving crates are red, then
nothing until you get the tops of the poles, which are all at the exact same
height. If I didn't know anything about the company, say it was Walmart's
warehouse, I'd expect it to look more like this:
[https://imgur.com/a/A8ALC](https://imgur.com/a/A8ALC)

~~~
RQJSOKJVVRPM
The photos are definitely unusually bright. That said, the 360 video in there
seems strangely "dusty" as well. From my recollection, reality is somewhere in
between. The photo composition is also having an effect on things- they are
crafted to show, as you say, order.

It's also worth considering that there may well be an intentional effort
towards aesthetics. These are frequently hard and unglamorous jobs. If white
poles and good lighting help make the place feel less oppressive, then I think
we'd consider those merits.

Side note: I liked "self-moving crates". Those are Kiva robots carrying pods
around. They're fascinating and oddly adorable.

------
Robotbeat
Automation is good. It enables greater productivity.

The kind of automation here doesn't seem actually much different from the 19th
century when hand weavers were replaced by power looms. Except we're talking
about warehousing and fulfillment instead of weaving thread. But same case of
workers now moving from doing something themselves (weaving or stacking) to
overseeing (multiple) machines doing the previous task faster. But this
doesn't mean the old jobs required less skill; oftentimes automation actually
REDUCES the required skill level.

...and so overall, more stuff is made. And this can reduce worker leverage
(especially if combined with devaluing of skill... such as skilled spray booth
technicians replaced with people tending automated spraying machines). And
THIS is where the negative part comes from.

So we need some way to give leverage back to workers. Whether minimum wage,
labor unions, tech cooperatives, etc.

Automation pays for the $15 or $20/hour minimum wage. $20 minimum wage also
drives automation. If employment is maintained and innovation in automation
continues, this is a virtuous cycle that COULD benefit everyone.

But there's also this:
[http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

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empath75
> “For me, it’s the most mentally challenging thing we have here,” Ms. Scott
> said of her new job. “It’s not repetitive.”

This is a really important statement. If you ever feel like your job is
boring, unchallenging and repetitive, that is a sign that it could be done by
a robot. Either you need to figure out how to automate it and get a promotion,
or you're eventually going to be replaced and let go.

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magerleagues
I really love the 360 video here. Makes the content much more interesting when
you can see all around.

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throwme211345
HS dropout. I used to build windows and doors when i was nineteen at an
industrial park for wage. I wrote poetry and prose, d&d adventures and
designed games + drew maps. Later I fixed cars on the side but wasn't very
good at it. Studied philosophy in comm college and on my own.

Eventually I started coding and building/modding PCs and became a TKD
instructor and international FC fighter. I've since become an experienced SA
and systems programmer.

Where is the alike progression to be found now?

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jupiter90000
Does that mean that the info in [1] is no longer true? I don't think so...

[1] [http://www.limitstogrowth.org/articles/2016/10/13/tech-
secto...](http://www.limitstogrowth.org/articles/2016/10/13/tech-sector-booms-
but-job-creation-is-falling/)

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comencan
We tried to create this system in Turkey with AltaTech technology and we can't
find a solution about virtual routing.Workers can't find a job in the future
because even the backward countries try this system.

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eeZah7Ux
The captions "Human pickers followed instructions on computer screens" and "A
robotic arm in Florence" are swapped, depicting a robot and a human
respectively.

Oh the sad irony.

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ThomPete
The truth is that Amazon will most likely be adding job, but the industry as a
whole wont.

At some point Amazon will start dropping jobs too.

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annon23
Until they further automate... this ride is just getting started ... lol

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ravirajx7
Whether you read article or not it is quite clear the Robots will eradicate a
lot of working force though not very soon for delivering products but even
that after some time considering the development of drones.

~~~
vlunkr
At a quicker rate than they already have been for decades now? New tech has
always displaced workers but we've survived it before. Unless you foresee
major unprecedented advancements in AI, I don't think it's going to be
catastrophic.

