Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#191

Post by MichaelZuo » Sun, Apr 21, 2024, 11:16 PM UTC

starbugs wrote: post #133

MichaelZuo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone claimed technological changes will impact every group and subgroup on a literally equal basis? Some will have better prospects and others will have worse. Since roughly half the population must have below median average prospects by definition.

> Has anyone claimed technological changes will impact every group and subgroup on a literally equal basis? No, but too much inequality is not sustainable. Since in a democracy everyone has an equal vote, there will be a force that balances things out over time one way or another.

How does this relate to the parent?

Plus the point seems confused, far from every adult impacted by technology has a vote.

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#192

Post by Nevermark » Sun, Apr 21, 2024, 11:19 PM UTC

xg15 wrote: post #188

Nevermark wrote: post #186

Automation can eliminate lots of jobs without replacement jobs. But other times will also created new higher level jobs. Especially when automation impacts a companies total cost for a high-demand independently consumed service or product. So that decrease costs can translate into decreased pricing for an upwardly elastic demand. And the revenue growth results offsets the need for fewer workers per revenue. — But mos…

This seems a bit backwards. Most demand for automating existing jobs is driven by the specific goal to reduce workers and labour costs, so of course there will be fewer jobs afterwards than before - otherwise the automation didn't fulfill its goal from the companies' POV.

Automation is to reduce cost per revenue, by reducing jobs per revenue.

Which is not quite the same as an absolute desire to eliminate jobs.

The result is initially lower employee count, but in cases where the automation significantly impacts total costs, and therefore pricing, of an independently consumed product or service, with upwardly elastic demand: the lower cost & pricing will trigger growth that also creates a job growth effect.

But those are special conditions.

As I point out, and you do too, in most situations efficiencies reduce jobs and improve profits, more than they increase demand that would create more (or mitigate lost) jobs.

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#193

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sun, Apr 21, 2024, 11:21 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #99

air7 wrote: post #52

It's clear that technological development creates a shift in jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a result. Whether the total #jobs increases or decreases is debatable. The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set. (You wouldn't displace 100 manual labor workers with a machine that requires 105 workers to maintain). So by definition, the…

The chain of logic is falsified by the Whitney cotton gin: it was a labour saving device, which saved enough labour to make cotton much more profitable, which led to the growth of the cotton plantations in southern USA, which led to increased slavery, and those slavers actively prevented their slaves from learning to read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-literacy_laws_in_th…

The assumption here is that an AI with IQ 100 could do anything a human with an IQ of 100 could do, only cheaper. But that's just averages. Really it would do half the things better and half worse, and then people have jobs doing the things that it does worse.

That would continue until it doesn't do anything worse, which may or may not ever happen, but if it did and we're all still alive then the result would be post-scarcity and nobody would need a job.

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#194

Post by mickael-kerjean » Sun, Apr 21, 2024, 11:25 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #59

techdmn wrote: post #20

About 20 years ago I was a programmer at a manufacturing company. I worked on a project to automate part of materials requirements planning. The woman who was in charge of it was spending about 20 hours per week wrangling Excel spreadsheets to figure out what materials they needed. It was all based on data we had: inventory, orders, etc. A few weeks later, and with a fair amount of her help, I'd automated the whole t…

I have been contributing to open source software for more than 20 years. My contributions have always been to help save other developers time. How does the impact from that on jobs differ from the impact had by AI tools like LLMs or robotic automation? It certainly /feels/ different, but I'm having a little bit of trouble explaining why.

With better oss tools, we've been able to achieve more with less people but for a long time there was more demand for skilled developer than what is available in the pool, hence the decent salaries coming from the market squeezing that pool. If robot takes over and the pool of available labor expand instead of shrink, the effect is the exact opposite, pressure on salaries from the remaining participants, worse conditions, ...

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#195

Post by bonestamp2 » Sun, Apr 21, 2024, 11:28 PM UTC

shrubble wrote: post #152

This is self-reported: remember the 1000 Indians that were watching people shop at the Amazon Go stores? Amazon told us it was all "sensors" because it fit their company narrative to do so. I am not saying that Amazon doesn't have 750k robots and hasn't laid off 100k people... but they usually have some seasonality, plus, the quoted number is from 2021, the height of at-home shopping. "The world's second-largest priv…

They've also laid off a lot of office workers, who were not replaced with robots... so we can't correlate the robot number and all of the changes in head count.

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#196

Post by xg15 » Sun, Apr 21, 2024, 11:30 PM UTC

Nevermark wrote: post #192

xg15 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems a bit backwards. Most demand for automating existing jobs is driven by the specific goal to reduce workers and labour costs, so of course there will be fewer jobs afterwards than before - otherwise the automation didn't fulfill its goal from the companies' POV.

Automation is to reduce cost per revenue, by reducing jobs per revenue. Which is not quite the same as an absolute desire to eliminate jobs. The result is initially lower employee count, but in cases where the automation significantly impacts total costs, and therefore pricing, of an independently consumed product or service, with upwardly elastic demand: the lower cost & pricing will trigger growth that also creates…

Yeah, that's essentially saying, "yep, your slice of the pie will become ever smaller, but that's fine, because what you get in absolute terms will stay the same - the pie just has to keep growing exponentially forever".

It's obvious that this is not a sustainable solution.

(And that's assuming the company fully passes the reduced labour costs on to the consumer and doesn't just pocket it as increased profit margins)

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#197

Post by varenc » Sun, Apr 21, 2024, 11:36 PM UTC

shrubble wrote: post #152

This is self-reported: remember the 1000 Indians that were watching people shop at the Amazon Go stores? Amazon told us it was all "sensors" because it fit their company narrative to do so. I am not saying that Amazon doesn't have 750k robots and hasn't laid off 100k people... but they usually have some seasonality, plus, the quoted number is from 2021, the height of at-home shopping. "The world's second-largest priv…

Agreed. These numbers are being cherry-picked. From Amazon quarterly filings[0][1], here's their employees count:

  - Q3 2019: 750,000 employees
  - Q4 2019: 798,000 employees
  - Q1 2020: 840,400 employees
  - Q2 2020: 876,800 employees
  - Q3 2020: 1,125,300 employees
  - Q4 2020: 1,298,000 employees
  - Q1 2021: 1,271,000 employees
  - Q2 2021: 1,335,000 employees
  - Q3 2021: 1,468,000 employees
  - Q4 2021: 1,608,000 employees
  - Q1 2022: 1,622,000 employees
  - Q2 2022: 1,523,000 employees
  - Q3 2022: 1,544,000 employees
  - Q4 2022: 1,541,000 employees
  - Q1 2023: 1,465,000 employees
  - Q2 2023: 1,461,000 employees
  - Q3 2023: 1,500,000 employees
  - Q4 2023: 1,525,000 employees

The 1.6M count was a clear seasonal/stay-at-home blip.

[0] https://ir.aboutamazon.com/quarterly-results/default.aspx [1] https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2023/q4/...

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#198

Post by fragmede » Sun, Apr 21, 2024, 11:38 PM UTC

Kerbonut wrote: post #187

jairuhme wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> remember the 1000 Indians that were watching people shop at the Amazon Go stores? > Amazon told us it was all "sensors" because it fit their company narrative to do so. I think you, like many others, fell into the trap of just looking at the headline. The 1k people were labeling training data, not watching you shop like a puppet master..

Per the articles I read, they did more than label training data. They also did other things to facilitate the checkout process. They didn't get into what those things were however. > "Associates may also validate a small minority of shopping visits where our computer vision technology cannot determine with complete confidence an individual's purchases," the spokesperson said.

"may also" still doesn't suggest that the remote observers were doing all the work and the computer vision systems didn't work and it was all a farce though. spot checking that the system works isn't the same thing as doing the job of the whole system

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#199

Post by ehsankia » Sun, Apr 21, 2024, 11:41 PM UTC

Kerbonut wrote: post #187

jairuhme wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> remember the 1000 Indians that were watching people shop at the Amazon Go stores? > Amazon told us it was all "sensors" because it fit their company narrative to do so. I think you, like many others, fell into the trap of just looking at the headline. The 1k people were labeling training data, not watching you shop like a puppet master..

Per the articles I read, they did more than label training data. They also did other things to facilitate the checkout process. They didn't get into what those things were however. > "Associates may also validate a small minority of shopping visits where our computer vision technology cannot determine with complete confidence an individual's purchases," the spokesperson said.

The whole discussion around that headline has always been so confusing. It's honestly unclear. What I'd like to know is, what % of actual costumer checkouts required a human being vs what % was 100% automated.

Some of the headlines and negative discussions make it sound like 100% of the checkouts required human approval. If that is true, then that's clearly terrible. If on the other hand it was anywhere below 5-10%, then I think that's a fair target for training the model in more difficult edge cases.

Something like Waymo also has humans constantly monitoring and helping, but I don't see much discussion about that being "controlled by humans".

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#200

Post by golergka » Sun, Apr 21, 2024, 11:52 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #161

RGamma wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democracy won't survive the tech trillionaires. At that point you can buy the executive.

We already are at the point where the ultra rich just buy politicians. Hell, we were ever since oil production was mainstreamed and the oil tycoons were able to tell the US to go to wars for oil.

Are your sure these were the oil tycoons and not voters who remembered 70s gas issues?