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Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs

#361

Post by nitrogen »

andrewmutz wrote: post #348
nerdponx wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 happ…

Who are Amazon's most likely competitors?

Re: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs

#362

Post by jodrellblank »

androidrebel wrote: post #207
asdfman123 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People need to feel useful to others. Right now, in the US, we fulfill that need through work. Work is an integral part of our culture. If you make a whole swath of the population feel redundant, especially practical, no-nonsense people who are used to having work define who they are, they are not going to adjust well. They are quite different than college-educated hippies who would rather get more education and go s…

UBI encourages parasitic drag on the economy.

UBI encourages the disinterested to leave the workforce, instead of taking a job they hate because they must have a job, and doing as little as possible, resisting change, lowering coworker's morale, and being a drag.

It frees companies to only hire people who are interested in what the company is doing and enthusiastic about it.

It frees people to do constructive, contributing things they might want to do, but which wouldn't pay enough, or which they wouldn't be able to do full time but can do part time.

Re: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs

#363

Post by jrockway »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #107

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

I think we've reached "peak profession". The reality is that there will be fewer and fewer types of jobs going forward, and that you probably can't merely retrain a coal miner to be a software engineer.

This doesn't mean we should stop automation. It does mean that we need to figure out a real solution to give these people a secure future. Companies are already innovating on how to not need employees. As a society, we need to innovate on how to give these people that aren't need to pack Amazon boxes a productive and fulfilling life.

(My answer is basic income, paid for by the government. It seems that other people's answer, though, is that Amazon should have to pay for not needing employees. I don't foresee that working out. You can't put the security of the collective in the hands of a profit-seeking entity.)

Re: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs

#364

Post by j-c-hewitt »

sandworm101 wrote: post #35

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, boxe…

This would be impractical. For one thing, scuff-resistant packaging material is also necessarily less attractive than glossy and colorful packaging that holds high detail photographs & illustrations better.

This would also be very inefficient because you would have to store the postal-ready boxes at the fulfillment warehouses in an inefficient way instead of just putting them into bins. When shipping products to customers, also, it's often more efficient to pack multiple products into a single box to ensure both durability and cost efficiency.

Most of the goods available on Amazon also do not come direct from the factory. They come from various intermediaries. Not all products are shipped from the Amazon FBA warehouses, either. So, there are many reasons why it is impossible.

It is possible to ship to customers direct from the factory, as some other comments have mentioned. However, as you might imagine, this is impossible for many businesses. Processing customer orders is time and labor intensive particularly because it involves making many tiny shipments versus shipping out entire truckloads at a time only. Furthermore, contract manufacturing is very common. A given factory may be manufacturing products for many different brands at the same time and a certain brand can have its products manufactured in entirely different countries at the same time.

Re: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs

#365

Post by tomc1985 »

abakker wrote: post #349
tomc1985 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

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…

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)

Re: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs

#367

Post by gridlockd »

sim_card_map wrote: post #280
sokoloff wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a UBI supporter in theory. It's the practical math that always leaves me hung up. Even $600/mo/adult citizen is a seemingly prohibitive amount of money (works out to approximately the entire amount of all individual income tax payments, or about half of total receipts, including FICA). And of course, $600/mo/adult is an extremely meager existence.

Current social security spending gives us $9k per household. Cutting military spending in half (utopian, but so is UBI): $3200 per hh. Raising income tax to a simple flat 50% rate gives us extra 0.7 trillion or $7k per hh. Single payer would give us about $1k per hh plus free healthcare for everyone. No more insurance payments. That is already about $21k per year per household.

> Raising income tax to a simple flat 50% rate gives us extra 0.7 trillion or $7k per hh.

If income tax was raised to 50% flat and you keep all the social security and single payer spending, your paycheck would net maybe 25% of your salary. Who works full time for 25 cents on the dollar when they can just retire?

So then people won't work full time, your tax revenue, your single payer money, your pension money, it all goes down. It can't pay for your UBI.

Even worse, all this spending you are talking about redistributing isn't even paid for today. It's funded by debt. With the boomers retiring, there are huge amounts of unfunded liabilities.

It may not be obvious to you, but what you are proposing is that we can just all sit back, work less, print money and everyone will be better off. It's a fantasy.

To be clear, I support a UBI, but one has to be very careful about the actual amount.

Re: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs

#368

Post by notatoad »

nitrogen wrote: post #361
andrewmutz wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 happ…

Who are Amazon's most likely competitors?

wal-mart or aliexpress

Re: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs

#369

Post by gdy »

dzmien wrote: post #350
smpetrey wrote: post #303

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.

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 po…

"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.

Re: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs

#370

Post by canada_dry »

Animats wrote: post #358

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…

Here's a vid of the actual packing machine noted in the article: https://youtu.be/0eqtqKDbV1Q

It is pretty slick, and an obvious improvement to packing things in over-sized/generic boxes.

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