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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

#471

Post by goatlover »

jtolmar wrote: post #464
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.

Automation itself is a good thing. The way our economy is structured to respond to automation is predictably bad for the workers though. Consider a hypothetical world where, every time a job was automated away, the person who lost their job got a pension equal to the difference in operating costs (they were paid $15/hr, the machines cost $6/hr, this person gets a $9/hr pension). In this world everyone looks forward t…

Not sure I follow this logic. Are you saying everyone tries to have their job eliminated so they can get paid less money to not work? Some people would like that, but a majority couldn't justify the reduction in their standard of living. And there are quite a few people who find work meaningful and wouldn't want to be paid to not work.

I do understand the point about people being upset at not receiving a pension for the difference in their job being eliminated, but that's different from working toward less pay for not working.

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

#472

Post by egypturnash »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #45
egypturnash wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bezos’ pockets.

And from there?

Pretty much nowhere given my experience as a non-software person living in Seattle.

Well, nowhere except fighting attempts to do things like “make big businesses pay their fair share of taxes for once”.

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

#473

Post by glglwty »

asdfman123 wrote: post #114
amedvednikov wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI. Then we can be gleeful about more automation.

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…

You can play world of warcraft to feel useful to others. Or mine cryptocurrency. Both are well-designed proof-of-work systems.

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

#474

Post by marcosdumay »

m463 wrote: post #440
petra wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's #1. It depends on the sellers accepting the extra tasks, and doing them competently while harming Amazon's brand if they don't. It also prepares those same services to sell though other intermediaries that can not compete today with Amazon's logistics.

Why would Amazon comoditize its greatest competitive advantage? (Yet, it seems that they are, so the question is not rhetorical.)

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

#475

Post by marcosdumay »

csours wrote: post #12

Is there a field of study associated with job creation? The answer is not actually obvious. There's a lot of research into efficiency, which is almost synonymous with job destruction. Edit: Thanks for the answers below. I was thinking of academic areas of research. For example, Macroeconomics, Labor Relations, Governance, Management Theory etc.

Automation means some people are richer (mostly the machine sellers and end-consumers), with more to trade for the products of some other kind of job.

People create new jobs about as fast as they destroy old ones, and that has little relation to the kind of jobs and technology involved. There are some second-order factors that create the bad kinds of unemployment, but the ones that currently are relevant have little relation to automation.

That's not saying that automation unemployed can not become relevant. It certainly can, and has done so a few times in history, with results varying from bad to disastrous. I'm just saying that job creation and destruction aren't different phenomena, and you delude yourself if you think somebody can study one without also studying the other.

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

#476

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

Picking things is surprisingly hard. It will by automated at some point, but it may be one of the last jobs to disappear from warehouses.

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

#477

Post by megaremote »

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.

Sure, if they could stay where they are. $13.75 buys a lot more in Bangalore than it does in the US.

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

#478

Post by m3kw9 »

pryce wrote: post #465
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.

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…

Yes let’s make everything manual in an entire factory

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

#479

Post by cavisne »

nerdponx wrote: post #327
o_p wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>machines bring lower prices Do you have any source about this? If the costumer is already willing to pay a price there would be no point in lowering the price just because you automated the process. Or better said, theres no point in investing in machines if your profit margin is not going to get wider.

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…

Thats the nice thing about Amazon, because of the "flywheel" (customers will always want lower prices and wider range) they've built a reputation of operating like a utility, and customers love them for it.

I dont see why they would ever sacrifice this, when they can easily keep growing by taking this same mindset into new industries (groceries, cloud computing, pharmacies).

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

#480

Post by AmericanChopper »

mikeash wrote: post #249
lukewrites wrote: post #220

I'm all for this as soon as we change the laws so companies pay payroll taxes on automation commensurate to the number of paid positions taken by the equipment. Automation is what we should be striving for, but only if workers and society see material benefits from it. ("Your labor potential can be reallocated to a position of higher need"/"You now have the opportunity to retrain" isn't a material benefit.)

That seems tough to determine. Does an autonomous bulldozer count as one employee because you would have had one person driving it? Or does it count as five employees because you run it 24/7? Or does it count as five hundred employees because that’s how many people you’d need if they were using shovels?

Shovels? How many people would it take to do the job without shovels is the question you should be asking yourself.
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