29
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Amazon grows to over 750,000 robots as world's second-largest private employer replaces over 100,000 humans
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- Authors
- Caleb Naysmith
- Published
- Apr 11 2024
- Word count
- 612 words
Automation has been replacing human labor since the invention of the first machine. These robots are performing menial, manually laborious jobs that nobody really wanted to do in the first place.
As somebody who does one of these jobs that no one wants to do (I'm a housekeeper at an old folks home. I clean up piss and shit on a regular basis) it's hard for me to agree that if my job were automated tomorrow and I lost it, this would somehow be beneficial to me. Sure, these things are inevitable, but that doesn't mean we need to give amazon props for finding a way to make more money by employing fewer workers.
As a customer, I'm giving them (and others who invest in automation) props for managing their operational expenses, so that they can offer goods and services at higher speed and lower cost to me (and their other customers). The cost (both time and dollars) is the primary driver for why use them instead of other options.
I know that's not a popular viewpoint because everyone loves to hate Amazon around here, but I'm looking at this as a customer of their service.
As an employee, although a knowledge worker, I am aware that if this trend goes to an extreme that we will have hoards of starving dangerous people on the streets and I might be one of them.
I have little faith that there will always continue to be sufficient work to feed the masses without policy intervention.
I don't see much reason to fret. We've always found more new work for humans to do, and I doubt we've run out of opportunities yet. The Luddites have been wrong for 200 years, and I still think they're wrong now.
I'm not sure. Systems are not linear. If we look at things from a first principles perspective, we can see that we're approaching an inflection.
For the past 200 years, we have done a good job at automating away menial labor. When we no longer needed William Bucket to screw on toothpaste caps, there was more than plenty of non-menial physical labor left that were difficult to automate, and there was plenty of intellectual labor.
But now we're seeing that with advanced computer vision and robotics, we can begin to automate intermediate physical labor; with AI, we can begin to automate basic intellectual labor. Already some intermediate intellectual labor is being made redundant by technology.
AI and automation will leave advanced physical and intellectual labor as the dominant viable domains left for the labor force. This has a few problems:
If we're truly at the point where practically all labor is automated, I think it makes the most sense to lobby for UBI and redistributive policies.
However, I really can't find any evidence that we're running out of jobs or there's too much labor. Humans will always have some comparative advantage, and most economists just say we'll invent new service industries to pour our newfound wealth into. Increasing automation has only increased global wealth and well-being since industrialization (inequality under serfdom and the like was much much worse).
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.29.3.3
And yet 100,000 people are now without a paycheck. Doesn't that sound like a problem to you when we live in a society that thinks housing, medicine and food must be earned with cash?
Automation can easily be good, but not so much when you have a world where basic necessities are considered privileges.
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Has Amazon laid off 100,000 people doing menial labor? Or have 100,000 people found different, perhaps better-paying jobs, perhaps doing something with AI over the course of three years? That company has incredible turnover as people change jobs for unrelated reasons. The article is unspecific.
That'd be all well and good if it wasn't still an issue. The reality is that there are still less jobs available, and people need jobs to buy food. If we want automation to be a good thing, we need to fix the latter.
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US unemployment is extremely low right now, at around 3.8%, so I have a hard time believing that there are “less jobs [fundamentally] available”.. I see how automation can be a problem in an extreme situation, but inefficient societal uses of resources (such as to pay workers to do a menial task) is not ideal. It is more useful for effort to be expended in places where humans excel, which appears to be the case here (or at least could be the case).
There are so many ways society can spend capital. Any of those ways will put food on the table. I’m certainly not opposed to government intervention in order to ensure that people aren’t left without a support mechanism—New Deal-type work to do useful things while also providing employment. I just think there is a tendency for progressive minded people on our website to “CORPORATION BAD” in these discussions when what’s happening is just the market shifting over time. (I say this as someone very skeptical of corporations… see my ~enviro threads.)
I'm willing to bet that Amazon has had more than 100k employees quit on their own accord in the past year or two. They're known for having high turnover. Amazon is not the only place to work, and walking around a warehouse to grab items to toss into boxes is not the only job.
Whether they quit or were fired is honestly missing the point, really. The problem is that the more things get automated, the less jobs there are,1 which means affording food and shelter gets harder. That's what needs to be addressed, I think.
1. ...Generally. Sort-of. It depends on what's being automated, and what might replace it. Computers make accounting easier, but create programming jobs, so it's not universal. But many forms of automation create less jobs than they eliminate.
Automation only takes away jobs at the factory micro level. If I automate one factory, I eliminate 90% of human jobs going from 100 to 10 employees. However, on a macro scale, it's now cheaper and easier for me to create 10 new factories with the cost savings. Each factory uses fewer workers, but I'm still employing the same number of people.
Amazon's work force hasn't shrunk. They're just increasing efficiency and putting humans into different and better jobs. This also makes everyone richer because society is producing more for less (even if the benefits flow unevenly, you almost certainly benefit from lower prices due to increased efficiency).
This is what happens at a society level with automation and reskilling. If workers are having a hard time reskilling then we should increase education access rather than limiting automation.
Even assuming this can work (which I have my doubts about), it's not a panacea. The usual trend is that a worker gets paid more as they gain experience. If you have to quit your field and move to a completely different one, that trajectory gets interrupted.
Agree, and it's awesome. Hell, even a conveyor belt replaces a human who would have otherwise had to walk a box back and forth.
The problem always being that rather than the workers getting reduced workloads for this automation, because there's now less work for the same amount of people, there's just less workers and everybody else has to work as-hard or harder than before.
Imagine if we had 1990's-level comforts, but only had to work 20 hours a week. This is (in theory) the kind of thing we could have been striving for instead of perpetual infinite growth.
It's also the picture that high level executives paint, when they talk about technology "not replacing" workers but rather "complementing them" and "making them more efficient". Sure, and individual worker may now be more efficient, and their job is not 100% being replaced by the technology, but they say it's not replacing the workers, and then in the same breath they use the increased efficiencies as an excuse to lay off or not backfill positions. So the end result is the same. The technology does in fact, replace workers, even if it's not a 1 to 1 job description.
Replacing human labor with automation isn't in and of itself a bad thing. If automation can make a task more efficient and still have the same or better outcome with less people, then great! Use those people for other tasks in the company. It just really irks me the wrong way and feels extremely dishonest when high level executives try to paint it as some sort of helping hand to their employees when the reality is they are still turning around and reducing headcount as a result, oftentimes with worse customer experience in the process.
It's absolutely possible. But greed is legal and encouraged. Greed should be a crime.
Well that would be great if only the people replaced by robots had better job opportunities to turn to. Which I'm guessing they don't, because then they would have left those menial, manually laborious jobs already.
Honestly, good for them. If they need robot-like efficiency, let them get it from a labor pool that doesn't need to pee in a water bottle to keep up with the expected rate of packing.
With the caveat that it doesn't make it a deathtrap for the remaining employees. My understanding is that is already a bit of a problem.
It's honestly ridiculous how dangerous Amazon's warehouses and delivery operations are. Their injury rates are almost double industry averages, and the injuries are generally more severe too. Unions would help a lot.
The 100,000 employees is a fairly small percentage but it's possibly a trend
I remember reading that they were running out of people willing to do warehouse work because of firings and people quitting. I guess this is one way to deal with it.