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What skilled worker? This is a low skill worker they are replacing.
Have you read the article? "The fastest humans at this task are like Olympic athletes. They’re far faster than the robots, and they’re able to store items in pods at much higher densities."
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That is one of his ways of extracting value from society - by selling his junk.
Crazy right? It's almost like the people buying stuff are idiots who don't understand their own needs and values.
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We're more automated than we've ever been & unemployment is close to all-time lows. Why don't you get back to us with this when it's at least 6 or 7 percent...
Are you somehow connecting low unemployment with high purchasing power by your median worker through a bunch of logical hoops?
Inflation-adjusted wages are at all time highs in the middle.
Inflation-adjusted wages are at all time highs at the bottom.
https://data.epi.org/wages/hourly_wage_percentiles/line/year...
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We're more automated than we've ever been & unemployment is close to all-time lows. Why don't you get back to us with this when it's at least 6 or 7 percent...
Unemployment being at all time lows means nothing if those employed with the minimum wage cannot afford the same quality of life than people did in the past earning the minimum wage of their time, because it means you aren't really comparing the same thing.
https://data.epi.org/wages/hourly_wage_percentiles/line/year...
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Plenty of people who don’t work for Amazon already buy stuff from there. I guess I mostly see the jobs as exchanging labour for something that society values and so by automating, there is more labour available to do things society values and so society gets more of what it values. And if you think working for Amazon is bad for people then you should be happy if automation is decreasing the number of people suffering…
The ultimate endgame is either a significant reduction in global population, or UBI. You can’t just keep automating every non-knowledge job away and just hope people find something else to do. All those jobs in Detroit that went away were replaced by…? As best I can tell they were replaced by poverty and crime.
It's more an example of how racism and reliance on singular industry can quickly create pits that are largely insurmountable. Similar cases can be found in coal country in Appalachia. The lesson isn't to prop up local industry to maintain job and economic stability. The lesson is to stage out disruption. ILA recently took this on with automation in shipping. The goal isn't to prevent automation but to not give companies a blank check to mass fire workers and replace them with automation.
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AFAIK it would be more fitting to say it is of little comfort to a factory worker who lost their job, that there are now 1.5 more jobs, better jobs, now available to other people. The reason for AFAIK, my understanding is it is more common for people to be left behind than to transition entirely to a new industry. (That is my memory of seeing some data around that, not saying I'm correct, but that I find it just as p…
That's true as well. Also, the timeframe for those new jobs probably won't be just 1-2 years. But I was trying to use the most favorable scenario for tombert's argument to show that, even in that case, it still isn't enough.
I wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to forcing companies to pay some amount per month to people whose jobs were automated away for N years, and/or providing job training for a new career.
Does this have any potential to get costs down for customers though?
I'd rather see quality improve, even at a reasonable cost increase, and the disappearance of the alphabet soup brands and similar.
It's interesting how Amazon is embedding robots in human-designed warehouses whereas Ocado has humans overseeing a robotic warehouse. The later is a much easier problem.
It takes hundreds of millions to build a warehouse. Amazon has tons of them. Retrofitting things is capital intensive.