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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

#501

Post by asdkhadsj »

crazygringo wrote: post #500
asdkhadsj wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair. It would be interesting to have data that compares all of the job classes out there and the number of workers out there, against the worker education. Ie, how many millions of food service workers, manual laborers, and drivers (for trucks, taxis, etc) could move upward in career depth? Where would we expect them to be absorbed? I definitely think this is hairy waters, in the sense that I want to see stud…

Just a quick point: they don't necessarily need to move upward. They can move laterally. They can work in package delivery, in restaurants, at Starbucks, in health care, in tourism, in solar panel and home battery installation, in environment cleanup sites, in converting homes to greater energy efficiency, and so on. Honestly a lot of the new jobs 20 years from now we have a hard time guessing what they'll even be (i…

Well that goes back to the original point though. Which is, that no education jobs will theoretically dwindle. If we have machines capable of handling all, repeat all no education manual labor jobs; things like picking fruit, delivering boxes, etc. Where will those people go?

They will be forced to acquire more education or skill oriented trades.

The concern is if humanity will be able to adapt to something it has never seen. Where creativity and thinking oriented jobs become more and more required.

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

#502

Post by Rapzid »

dmix wrote: post #297
Rapzid wrote: post #296

They really need to wrap the books with a piece of butcher paper or something. I keep getting books that slid around and got scuffed to heck by contact with the boxes. Since I have been buying more pricey collection quality books, I have been sending them back :|

Isn't that what the bubble wrap is for? Although they don't fit well in the smaller standard book boxes that Amazon uses...

Well, I didn't see any bubble wrap in that video :) My recent return and its replacement had zero protection between the book and the cardboard.

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

#503

Post by ak-47 »

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…

> No human should be made to do such mindless work.

In the US, nobody is _made_ to do such work. However, until it is automated there will always be a price for it in the labor market.

> And for $13.75 an hour, it definitely isn't worth it.

Presumably the mindless nature of the work increases the wages. Do you recall the minimum wage in that region at the time?

I’m trying to arrive at is a logical sequence of steps like: the less desireable work is, the higher it’s price in the labor market. It’s more profitable to automate more expensive labor. Thus, by quitting you shortened the time-to-automate.

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

#504

Post by muttled »

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/

Looks like the Theranos Edison. Except it works apparently.

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

#505

Post by irrational »

welly wrote: post #165
irrational wrote: post #5

This sounds like good news. I've read lots of negative stories about the working conditions in Amazon warehouses. It would be great if all the jobs could be automated.

That's the strangest take on this story I've read. Any pearls of wisdom for all those people who are now going to be made redundant?

I've seen a number of articles on what jobs are least likely to be automated. I'd concentrate on doing whatever is required to get my foot into the door of one of those types of jobs.

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

#506

Post by pryce »

dorgo wrote: post #490
pryce wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we are being honest, this isn't being installed to "improve the livelihood of warehouse workers", it is being installed in anticipation of improving the bottom line for Amazon's shareholders. There may be benefits or detriments to the workforce along the way; considerations like the "wellbeing of the workforce" are effectively given a weight of zero in these decisions. People's values can and will diverge on wheth…

Of course, nobody tries to only "improve the livelihood of warehouse workers". Isn't the idea behind economy that if everybody tries to improve their bottom line then everybody wins (even if it was not intended)? And this story seems to support this idea.

> if everybody tries to improve their bottom line then everybody wins

This idea is given fairly often as a rationale that economies should be organised around capitalism, yes.

Whether the principle holds up in practice seems, to me, the kind of question that would be answered best by seeking a very wide range of data, rather than by attempting to draw conclusions from a handful of news articles.

Some areas of the economy that are often proposed as counterexamples to the above principle include healthcare and the environment, where critics claims that 'everybody trying to improve their bottom line' results in inefficiencies & unnecessary complexity, socialization of costs (eg pollution, morbidity & mortality), or in some cases direct harm.

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

#507

Post by dmix »

Rapzid wrote: post #502
dmix wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that what the bubble wrap is for? Although they don't fit well in the smaller standard book boxes that Amazon uses...

Well, I didn't see any bubble wrap in that video :) My recent return and its replacement had zero protection between the book and the cardboard.

I've bought two books in a reecent box and they weren't padded either.

I never had any scuffs or damage on the hundreds books I've bought through Amazon though. How bad are the scuffs? My apartment is close to an Amazon outlet factory so it doesn't have to very far to arrive.

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

#508

Post by amibang »

sneak wrote: post #158
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Amazon stack up against other warehousing jobs in those areas?

In such a way that people choose to work for Amazon instead of those other employers, so Amazon’s jobs must be fairly attractive to them.

Amazon is attractive to consumers. Workers... have to go with that.

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

#509

Post by no_identd »

nwrk wrote: post #372

"The new machines, known as the CartonWrap from Italian firm CMC Srl, pack much faster than humans." Here is the product link: https://www.cmcmachinery.com/portfolio-item/ecommerce1-cmc-c...

https://youtu.be/0eqtqKDbV1Q

Here's the YouTube link.

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

#510

Post by NotSammyHagar »

sokoloff wrote: post #115
NotSammyHagar wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's much higher than I expect, citation? I was told there would be math.

Did you make any attempt to solve it yourself? Googling: Amazon warehouse worker $14/hour. 2080 hours per year = $29K. US Adult population 252 million. Multiply: 7.4 Trillion. US GDP (2017) 19.4 Trillion. Taking only US citizen adults, the figure is still >90% of the above.

Yeah, I could do it myself, I was being sarcastic but maybe no one could tell. One question is always what is the UBI amount. Say 1k for kids, 2k for adults. Wikipedia says 18% are 14 y.o. or under, so say 25% will get 1k, 75% get 2k each month. Use 325 mil as population. 325m * (1/4 * 12k + 3/4 * 24k) = 6.8 trillion so basically the same as you. I want people to say what their vision of the size of UBI funding is. It's ambiguous, kind of like what is brexit?

The other side of it is we are a consumer spending driven economy. If consumers, especially poor people, had more money they'd spend it (unlike say overpaid software engineers like me). We'd get a big boost in the economy. Just like reducing unpayable college loans will free up much more money for the economy.

Instead of thinking about the % of the gdp, think about tax revenue. It's 3.6 trillion a year. Tripling tax overhead to fund this new thing would actually hurt the economy, even I can see that.

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