Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs • Hacker News Board

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

#431

Post by CodeCube » Mon, May 13, 2019, 9:38 PM UTC

0xffff2 wrote: post #268

cies wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax on labour (or housing) is quite weird if you look at it with fresh eyes. Don't we want to support people working and living in a house? Then why tax those? Is it a relic from the past? Thought experiment: what if we (only) tax pollution? All taxes end up being paid by the consumer anyway. But this get the incentive straight to deliver products/services "cleanly". Just a thought...

"Taxing housing" isn't weird at all. We don't tax housing. If you rent, you pay rent to your landlord and that's it. You don't also pay taxes on that rent to the government. I'm guessing what you actually mean is that we tax property. This seems inherently fair to me. Why should you get to squat on a piece of land for free in perpetuity, especially when for most land, the value of the land is inherently improved by g…

Semi-related ... I feel like we should tax rent-seeking way more than we do. Selling a piece of property/house is one thing, but to extend your metaphor, why should one get to seek rent on a piece of property in perpetuity (if the tenant stays long term)?

Of course, I understand how valuable short-term living arrangements are for a number of reasons; my issue is with long term landlords, who can evict a tenant who's been there for decades at any whim ... and they reap the profits, while the tenant is out on the streets with nothing to gain from their many years of payments.

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

#432

Post by CodeMage » Mon, May 13, 2019, 9:38 PM UTC

Yhippa wrote: post #409

CodeMage wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I am saying precisely that. The key word here is "systemic". It doesn't mean that "Amazon is systemically oppressing the working class", as you put it in your second question. It means that Amazon participates in a larger system that oppresses the working class. It follows that Amazon cannot, on its own, completely eliminate that oppression. That, however, does not mean that there's nothing Amazon can do to make…

We all want to get rid of drug cultivation?

Sorry, I had limited time to type out that particular comment, so I didn't have the time to place a footnote there that would offer a more nuanced view.

No, we don't all want to get rid of drug cultivation. We do all want to ensure that substance abuse doesn't affect our lives and our families. Of course, that's a vague sentiment and it's hard to get everyone to agree on the specifics of what it means. That didn't stop certain politicians from exploiting that and manipulating general opinion and passing laws and foreign policies that ended up creating a whole lot of suffering for a whole lot of people in different parts of the world.

As a result, there's a whole lot of systemic oppression involved in drug cultivation these days. Unlike child labor, it's not the drug cultivation itself that we should strive to get rid of, but that doesn't negate my original point, which is that just trying to solve the problem in the most direct way possible is going to make things worse.

If you think about it, the other two examples I gave can also be adapted to become something that isn't pernicious in and of itself. If you legalize prostitution and make it a safe profession that adults can choose, instead of resorting to out of necessity, then sex tourism isn't necessarily something you want to get rid of. Similarly, if my kid wants to mow neighborhood lawns to get some money or sell lemonade or babysit other kids, that's not the kind of child labor we're trying to get rid of.

Going back to the topic of drug cultivation, I would recommend reading "Lacrónica" by Martín Caparrós. In one of the chapters, he describes the situation in Bolivia in 1991. One of the many things that fascinated me in his account was the fact that, at that time, a farmer could get 100-150 bolivianos (local currency) for a hand-carried load of coca leaves or 1 boliviano for a hundred oranges. That meant that, to make the same amount of money for one load of coca, a farmer would have to sell 15,000 oranges and there's no way -- even if there's enough demand -- to carry 15,000 oranges in one trip.

I mention this because I think it's a fascinating insight into the systemic oppression I've been talking about. These farmers were not getting rich off their drug cultivation. On the contrary, they lived in quite precarious conditions and they had to cultivate coca leaves to be able to feed themselves and their families.

So yeah, maybe we don't all want get rid of all drug cultivation, but we definitely want to get rid of it in its present form.

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

#433

Post by mises » Mon, May 13, 2019, 9:41 PM UTC

cadence- wrote: post #106

Theodores wrote: post #23

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 s…

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…

The biggest issue is not America, it is the third world.

Billions of people are employed by outsourced manufacturing. When they are replaced, no one will be able to afford any kind of safety net for them. There is not enough money to pay for every one's stuff. China, India, Africa, and S. America have all grown on the backs of this outsourcing. When that goes away, we will have many billions of angry, hungry, restless young men.

That is how wars start and how civilizations fall. Previously, countries have typically dealt with an inability to feed their people by starting wars. Those that have not have typically collapsed or starved them (which, in turn, results in collapse). There will need to be some kind of solution. Even if they are all fed, people without purpose are always trouble. As the saying goes, idle hands do the Devil's work.

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

#434

Post by aey » Mon, May 13, 2019, 9:42 PM UTC

cheeze wrote: post #236

aey wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t become more revenue. It maybe a cost reduction which in turn may increase profits, or reduce consumer prices. Either is a good thing. Amazon has a long track record of aggressively reinvesting its profits.

Sorry, that's a much better characterization of it.

Amazon is the best of what capitalism can offer. They have basically crushed competition by focusing on providing better value, not building a monopoly through lobbying or a legal moat.

Given that, I wish us economic policy was focused on allowing more Amazon’s to exist in more industries, and a social policy that focused on helping the folks that are acutely negatively impacted by competition.

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

#435

Post by bin0 » Mon, May 13, 2019, 9:47 PM UTC

CodeMage wrote: post #375

ekianjo wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Increasing the productivity of a job does not eliminate it. Of course it does. Not on an individual level, but if suddenly one employee can do three times more work, there is no need to recruit 2 more full time jobs to address the increasing needs. So on the whole, productivity will destroy jobs, but the good news is that the additional returns will create other jobs in other areas.

That's just a disingenuous distortion of semantics. You're deliberately ignoring the key difference between skill-based, white-collar jobs and unskilled, blue-collar jobs. The former are not "destroyed" by productivity, as you put it. They change what the workers have to do, but the workers are, for the most part, able to adapt. None of the advances in software development have eliminated software development. Hell,…

He may not have phrased it perfectly, but his point is good. Picture this: you are hired to do a contract job. The tooling today is arguably better than 20 years ago. You bill by the hour, and take fewer hours.

Now, extend that to salaried positions. There is a certain amount of work that must happen. Tooling improves, devs become more idle, management consultant fires one (over time).

This has been somewhat negated only because the role of computers has been growing quickly and outpacing the growth in efficiency. That will change at some point. As you said, there won't be a case where swathes of people are suddenly out of work, it will be gradual.

A guy I know is an economist and does consulting for factories to optimize production. He has talked about how some areas these days have removed large groups of humans and replaced them with single humans observing machines. Eventually, development could reach a similar place.

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

#436

Post by yhoneycomb » Mon, May 13, 2019, 9:48 PM UTC

lifekaizen wrote: post #419

yhoneycomb wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was literally just a robot arm with a human brain attached to it, and for what? This is how I felt as an undergrad working in a research lab. Endless, annoying pipetting. Labeling tubes. Bitchwork that the postdoc didn't want to do. I kept thinking... there's no way they can't come up with a robot to do this. My guess is the technology to do it is there but the motivation isn't - most undergrads (me included) wor…

There is a pipetting robot now: https://opentrons.com/

This is awesome! But...

PIs everywhere: “Why would I buy this robot when I could get an undergrad to do the work for free?”

Although if they hated taking the time to train undergrads maybe they’d give it a shot

Then again, they don’t train the undergrads, postdocs do

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

#437

Post by oliwarner » Mon, May 13, 2019, 9:50 PM UTC

EugeneOZ wrote: post #99

oliwarner wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's certainly one way of looking at it but I would worry if your answer to "those workers are being abused!" is always "make them redundant via automation". Amazon's warehouse workers were abused because Amazon , not because those jobs should have been automated. They could have had more break time. They could have had lower targets. Pay them more. Paternity leave. So many things you can do to improve working cond…

> Pay them more Why, if Amazon can replace them by robots?

Then Amazon eliminates yet another cost that other retailers have to burden, further out-competing them.

I have no love for retail —it was my Saturday job growing up— but it does employ a huge pile of people, from warehousing through to the shop floor. As consumers, we bitch and whine about the cost this adds, and the hassle of mooching into a busy town to go and get something... So we sit back and use Amazon instead.

This is killing retail and it could also kill off manual warehousing. Retail employment in the UK us 10% of the workforce.

So what happens when Amazon replaces them too? Fewer and fewer jobs for unskilled workers. Across the board. Much more desperate people. Much more abuse.

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

#438

Post by badrequest » Mon, May 13, 2019, 9:52 PM UTC

gdy wrote: post #369

dzmien wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"accept your scraps, peasant, there's folks with no plausible way of ever enjoying them who would"

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

#439

Post by badpun » Mon, May 13, 2019, 9:55 PM UTC

lukewrites wrote: post #416

clarkmoody wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would kill the entire economy almost immediately. How many "paid positions" does Microsoft Excel replace every day? A single for loop could replace a thousand jobs doing manual computation. How many farm laborers are replaced by a single piece of modern equipment? You can't "strive for" automation, while at the same time essentially locking in labor costs by taxing that automation as human labor.

> How many "paid positions" does Microsoft Excel replace every day? I don't know, could you tell me? I don't think that we actually can point to people working in the position of calculator who are rendered unemployed by Excel version bumps. Arguing that we'd be putting Bob Cratchet and other clerks from the 1800's out of work rings of reductio ad absurdum. MS Excel seems to lack the one-to-one correlation between a…

Email, MS Office and cell phones have put almost all secretaries out of their jobs. Automated billing system (in a telco) has put my aunt out of her job.

Office jobs are disappearing by the millions, just like physical ones. Lucikly, at least until now, new ones were created in their place.

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

#440

Post by m463 » Mon, May 13, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

petra wrote: post #128

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…

So there are 2 options: 1. Amazon changes the market(a huge challenge). it's now easier for manufacturers and other retailers to do e-commerce. 2. Amazon becomes the best in the world in packaging, and keeps the skill to itself. It's now harder to compete with Amazon. Naturally Amazon prefers #2.

what about #3 - amazon tells sellers to ship to buyers, does no packaging, still makes money

Of course, there's no reason #2 can be a check-and-balance against #3 becoming too expensive/independent.