It's so strange that a site full of software developers reacts so harshly to the idea of robots. What exactly is it you people think you are building? You automate stuff for a living.
Is it okay to automate sales and customer service and marketing, but warehouse workers are where you draw the line? Do you have any idea how many jobs this industry has already "killed"?
we realized that we don't want all the money/profit to circulate around the top 10 tech companies in the world where all of us are out of the equation...
HN isn't a monoculture. Many people visit this website to hear the criticism from a diverse constituent of software developers. If you expect any unanimous conclusion, I'd argue your expectations are the strange one.
My foremost concern is that robots, particularly American-made ones, aren't ready for primetime yet. Human bodies solve problems that aren't easily automated even with a perfectly capable humanoid robot and AI-powered IK solver. I've worked in the computer vision and factory automation fields, and outside a completely automated redesign I don't think robots will significantly reduce headcount in this field.
It's so strange that a site full of entertainment workers reacts so harshly to the idea of Madame Web. What exactly is it you people think you are making?
Well, a the scale at which AI and other things are proceeding to replace humans just for the sake of saving money for few top earning people. It's horrible. I shall say you should ban AI for most of the things where it can help solve issues! Now that's upto to humanity how it want to keep people eating food or have a proper life
Software jobs replaced administrative white collar jobs where instead of the bureaucracy being human interaction and paper forms, it is computerized and encoded in malleable and evolving code.
Sales underwent consolidation where the same human interactions scaled to bigger deals. Customer service was outsourced. Marketing still remains a mysticism with no clear evidence of a return on investment.
This news topic is also a thinly veiled replacement outsourcing. The engineers involved will replace these roles. When the robots fail, it will most likely have foreign pilots taking control.
The barrier to entry only gets higher, and the people left behind are stuck in a donut hole.
Before people bring their pitchforks to this headline, take a look at existing automation in factories [1][2] and ask yourself why would we ever want humans to do something that robots can do this well? Also despite the fact that humanoids are all the hype now (and included in the article), note that amazon has been investing in much more specialized approaches for quite some time [3][4].
There are so many things we can be doing with our time, and moving objects from a left-bin to a right-bin simply does not need to be one of them. The real question is if we have the collective will to get all these folks education and opportunities to do something else before they feel too much pain in the near term.
> Before people bring their pitchforks to this headline
In addition to your points, something people forget is that in the previous model of brick and mortar stores, the consumer is the person that did the walking around the store and picking the items off the shelf and carrying them to the checkout.
So a portion of what Amazon is automating used to be performed for free by the consumer. This was one of the big arguments about their business model for shipping books early on, the additional costs in a competitive retail market seemed like it would be unprofitable.
> if we have the collective will to get all these folks education and opportunities to do something else
I hear this often, but have not read a single explanation of what the "something else" is that these people are supposed to do (a "something else" that we aren't also actively trying to replace with AI or AI driven processes). Barbers? Nail salons? I think we have enough of those already.
We could be spending our time more wisely, but our addiction to quarterly cycles needs something now as opposed to a hypothetical better future for the displaced workers.
> Job losses could shave 30 cents off each item purchased by 2027.
This is incredible. It's far less than I would imagine. It represents how well optimized the warehouses are. If we roughly estimate a median product price to be $20, then the automation represents less than 2% cost saving. Of course, Amazon is at a scale that this is still net positive despite all the R&D cost. But if automation was to reduce the cost of living, there are probably better areas to focus on.
It represents how well optimized the exploitation of the warehouse workers is - extract maximum amount of work from employee while paying them as little as possible. And once the "cobots" (robots that work alongside humans) come along, they will feel even more like a cog in the great Amazon machine, until they probably quit on their own rather than waiting for their turn to be replaced...
There are barely any customers in this country now. We're operating off credit: the US (as a currency, not just the government) is 1.2 trillion in the red. It's an accounting identity, it can't be argued with.
It's an inevitability that people unproductive in the real economy will get cut off. You can't run an economy on gigwork that just makes parasitic upper-middle and upper-class lives more comfortable. Elite comfort isn't real production. You cannot feed, clothe, or house people with Uber rides and advertising. Instead, in the US, you feed, clothe, and house people with imports, purchased with borrowed foreign currency.
And the government takes whatever it gets and redistributes it upwards to capital-intensive industries and "US" businesses that are completely supplied by imports. It's almost an optimized destruction.
The same thing we are doing now: nothing. The poor already aren't customers, and what remains of the middle class is already being priced out of basic necessities.
Have no fear, they are gunning for the upper class, now. A quick glance at big tech gutting their ranks is just the beginning for high wage earners.
History shall repeat itself, and many of those jobs will vanish forever.
This is a discussion Jimmy Carter wanted to have when computers were just becoming mainstream --- the idea was the taxes on the sales of computers would be used to fund worker re-training --- cue old news stories about the compositor unions bargaining for sinecures and the last compositor retiring after decades of punching in and sitting in the breakroom all day.
LLMs and robotics look to be the first mainstream technological development in a long while which not only reduces the number of workers needed, but also doesn't have a commensurate increasing of the size of the economy in terms of increased wages through efficiency and profits being paid as wages --- instead, it is the concentration of profits by those who own the means of production as Karl Marx warned about and the Luddites feared.
If less work is needed to keep society running, why not have a reduction in the work week, and either pay folks overtime (in keeping with the increased efficiencies/profits) or have more workers (to reflect the added efficiency and spread out the workload).
I'm supportive of effort to mechanize work, but humanoid robots always seemed like a "horseless carriage" approach to me. The human body is powerful in its adaptability but most industrial processes are better enhanced by purpose-built machines.
Not to mention that general purpose robotics seem like they will always be more expensive to buy, run and maintain than a human is. Perhaps bountiful renewable energy will change that.
I see too many students treat a robot arm like an automation hammer when watching a few episodes of "How It's Made" will give you a much better view into true automation.
I know we’re living through turbulent times with a lot of disruption. I’m struggling to decide whether to keep my retirement investments in equities or move to something more stable. While AI and robotic automation clearly benefit corporate bottom lines, fewer people will have jobs. Who will be buying the products and services these companies sell?
> At the Shreveport facility, more than 160 people work as robotics technicians, and they make at least $24.45 an hour. Most of Shreveport’s 2,000 employees are regular hourly workers, whose pay starts at $19.50.
And this is for a prototype plant where you would expect the need for more and top-qualified technicians. (Most likely this does not count the robotics installers and tuners which might be from a different sub-company and classification - but still.) This might change when demand for qualified robotics technicians keeps increasing.
Another noticeable thing was that even with this automation push, Amazon is mostly planning to hire LESS. Not really reduce yet. It seems they are still growing beyond the potential improvements of robotics.
Still another is the insane capital-intensiveness of retail now! Wow.
> And this is for a prototype plant where you would expect the need for more and top-qualified technicians.
One would think, but that's not really the reality for the technicians. Amazon assuredly brought in some experienced techs from other facilities to help with launch, but most of the staff are just locals.
> At the Shreveport facility, more than 160 people work as robotics technicians, and they make at least $24.45 an hour. Most of Shreveport’s 2,000 employees are regular hourly workers, whose pay starts at $19.50
The associate pay sounds right, but the average starting pay for robotics technicians is in the low-mid 30s. The $24.45 figure is for apprentices, who are not a large part of any maintenance cohort.
The next disruption (possibly by Amazon) will be in getting products more directly from the point of manufacture to the point of use. Warehouses are an oversized cache for physical goods.
Normally I'd be against this kind of thing, but Amazon warehouse work is notoriously abusive and people would be better off out of it .. if they had alternatives.
There were some bad weather incidents where warehouse workers were not permitted to seek shelter from tornados = from which they died [0].
Additionally, the warehouses are staffed by contractors, who once laid off from the subcontracting company are permabanned from ever working for any other contracting company that Amazon will use. Amazon is literally running out of humans that they can hire. If they are unwilling to address their "one and done" policy, Amazon will have to use robots in order to stay in business.
I strongly feel the same way about agriculture. Farm work is back breaking, and the people who work in the fields are constantly exposed to pesticides and other environmental dangers, not to mention the physical severely dangerous work they do at times automating that kind of labor would be much safer for workers.
Amazon doesn’t do a good job of handling workers. So I guess this is a good thing. Mistreatment is a bad thing.
Prices will be lowered. And the appeal of warehouses will go up this way. But for the remaining workers, I don’t think Amazon will come up with a better work environment. I don’t think they have that skill set.
There was a reasonable argument floating around that Bezos decided to resign because they had burned both their blue collar AND white collar labor pools in the markets they were in- meaning people wouldn't work for them even at higher rates in that market. I guess this is their solution?
It is obvious that Amazon wishes to replace all its employees for cheaper alternatives. That is true for all big companies. How realistic is this plan that is the question.
American companies lie so often about the feasibility of future capabilities that it is becoming just background noise. If the plan is not realistic, if it is not based in well argued projects, then they are just lying to the public and to investors. Currently the bar is so low, that anything counts as "we just though that it was possible" so it is not illegal. That should be solved.
the desire to save money/replace workers is real (though I wish that they would start by recycling packaging/materials in the warehouses) and there are certainly a lot of ways in which this could be done --- the issue of course is how society will work through this --- I suspect we'd all feel a bit differently about this if Amazon were a public benefit corporation rather than one focused on profit for shareholders. Their motto is:
>Work Hard, Have Fun, Make History.
and it really should have included something about making the world a better place or doing good.....
> How realistic is this plan that is the question.
FTA:
Amazon has considered steps to improve its image as a “good corporate citizen” in preparation for the anticipated backlash around job losses, according to The NYT, reporting that the company considered participating in community projects and avoiding terms like “automation” and “AI.” More vague terms like “advanced technology” were explored instead, and using the term “cobot” for robots that work alongside humans.
You're not wrong, but an important distinction in this case (at least according to TFA) is that these were internal documents, not intended for the public/investors.
And this is why they don't care how many people they fire. The intention was always to automate the warehouses, and as long as they do it before they exhaust the workforce, turnover doesn't matter.
Every time this comes up there are the people who say, "but look at the Industrial Revolution, all the farmers found new jobs; so certainly everyone laid off by AI will find new jobs too".
I would like to hear, from one of those believers, _what_ type of _new_ jobs these laid off warehouse workers are going to get? (And no, they won't become AI prompt engineers.)
I have not heard a single satisfactory answer to this very simple question. And if no one has any idea of what type of _new_ jobs are opening up, then it's highly unlikely to happen.
In the Industrial Revolution, billions (for that time) were being spent on creating whole new types of jobs (i.e., factories). Which companies today are spending any money on creating new jobs?
isn't the dexterity and precision of the human hand to robotics as the problem solving ability of the human brain is to LLMs? Like, are robotics even close to that level of performance?
Yes, but you don't need to replace all human tasks, or come anywhere near the level of performance of a human.
If they can get robots to successfully handle any item packaged in a cardboard box, that is a tremendous boon, even if you still have to hire people to deal with blister packaging, bottles and other irregular shapes.
Hell, Amazon has enough market power with suppliers that if they say they only want to sell things in robot friendly packages, most suppliers will rapidly find a way.
Future-of-work stuff aside, I’m always confused when I see bipedal robots. Doesn't make any sense unless one is dealing with rough terrain — and there, four or six legs would probably be better. I guess they're cool for Boston Dynamics investor videos.
For floor work, wheels seem the most logical. There is the issue of loading trucks (which I did at UPS for a couple summers), for that I’m thinking maybe a ceiling-mounted arm that could extend the length of the truck?
I don't think it's particularly surprising that humans are better at things than robots, sometimes even purpose-built robots. The question is if robots are good enough that the difference doesn't really matter.
It's throwing shit in a box. Who cares how neat it is? As long as things arrive sealed and intact, it's fine.
its also not going to happen. They arent going to shave off 30 cents because thats just not how it works, they'll make 30 cents more an item. Realistically, they'll charge even more and make even more on top of that.
but what does this have to do with capitalism? (apart from it being the scapegoat for all problems as per the current narrative).
it's a cute phrase but I'd suggest 'late stage fiat' is more apt. I think this as with hard money instead, there's no need to perpetually eek a living, as the rising tide lifts all boats.
A key feature of “late stage capitalism” is that people move up the value chain, stop doing menial labor, and find better, more fulfilling jobs that don’t involve putting boxes in other boxes.
Robots can't unionize so of course they hope to replace everyone in the US.
None of it will matter anyway, they're shoveling enough money to the right people to have any regulations or oversight squashed, nevermind the sheer number of jobs that will be lost, I might be wrong but it would be a dent in the national unemployment numbers ?
nba456_|4 months ago
Is it okay to automate sales and customer service and marketing, but warehouse workers are where you draw the line? Do you have any idea how many jobs this industry has already "killed"?
hello_moto|4 months ago
we realized that we don't want all the money/profit to circulate around the top 10 tech companies in the world where all of us are out of the equation...
bigyabai|4 months ago
My foremost concern is that robots, particularly American-made ones, aren't ready for primetime yet. Human bodies solve problems that aren't easily automated even with a perfectly capable humanoid robot and AI-powered IK solver. I've worked in the computer vision and factory automation fields, and outside a completely automated redesign I don't think robots will significantly reduce headcount in this field.
gdulli|4 months ago
methuselah_in|4 months ago
pjmlp|4 months ago
CrackerNews|4 months ago
Sales underwent consolidation where the same human interactions scaled to bigger deals. Customer service was outsourced. Marketing still remains a mysticism with no clear evidence of a return on investment.
This news topic is also a thinly veiled replacement outsourcing. The engineers involved will replace these roles. When the robots fail, it will most likely have foreign pilots taking control.
The barrier to entry only gets higher, and the people left behind are stuck in a donut hole.
bromuro|4 months ago
tennisflyi|4 months ago
jolt42|4 months ago
unknown|4 months ago
[deleted]
unknown|4 months ago
[deleted]
chistev|4 months ago
Rebuff5007|4 months ago
There are so many things we can be doing with our time, and moving objects from a left-bin to a right-bin simply does not need to be one of them. The real question is if we have the collective will to get all these folks education and opportunities to do something else before they feel too much pain in the near term.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Sino/comments/1iwgb19/a_dark_factor... [2] https://www.fortna.com/ [3] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/amazon-vulcan-ro... [4] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/10-years-of-amaz...
RaftPeople|4 months ago
In addition to your points, something people forget is that in the previous model of brick and mortar stores, the consumer is the person that did the walking around the store and picking the items off the shelf and carrying them to the checkout.
So a portion of what Amazon is automating used to be performed for free by the consumer. This was one of the big arguments about their business model for shipping books early on, the additional costs in a competitive retail market seemed like it would be unprofitable.
insane_dreamer|4 months ago
I hear this often, but have not read a single explanation of what the "something else" is that these people are supposed to do (a "something else" that we aren't also actively trying to replace with AI or AI driven processes). Barbers? Nail salons? I think we have enough of those already.
CrackerNews|4 months ago
quanto|4 months ago
This is incredible. It's far less than I would imagine. It represents how well optimized the warehouses are. If we roughly estimate a median product price to be $20, then the automation represents less than 2% cost saving. Of course, Amazon is at a scale that this is still net positive despite all the R&D cost. But if automation was to reduce the cost of living, there are probably better areas to focus on.
rob74|4 months ago
hello_moto|4 months ago
mhuffman|4 months ago
apothegm|4 months ago
tartuffe78|4 months ago
pessimizer|4 months ago
It's an inevitability that people unproductive in the real economy will get cut off. You can't run an economy on gigwork that just makes parasitic upper-middle and upper-class lives more comfortable. Elite comfort isn't real production. You cannot feed, clothe, or house people with Uber rides and advertising. Instead, in the US, you feed, clothe, and house people with imports, purchased with borrowed foreign currency.
And the government takes whatever it gets and redistributes it upwards to capital-intensive industries and "US" businesses that are completely supplied by imports. It's almost an optimized destruction.
AmVess|4 months ago
Have no fear, they are gunning for the upper class, now. A quick glance at big tech gutting their ranks is just the beginning for high wage earners.
History shall repeat itself, and many of those jobs will vanish forever.
WillAdams|4 months ago
LLMs and robotics look to be the first mainstream technological development in a long while which not only reduces the number of workers needed, but also doesn't have a commensurate increasing of the size of the economy in terms of increased wages through efficiency and profits being paid as wages --- instead, it is the concentration of profits by those who own the means of production as Karl Marx warned about and the Luddites feared.
If less work is needed to keep society running, why not have a reduction in the work week, and either pay folks overtime (in keeping with the increased efficiencies/profits) or have more workers (to reflect the added efficiency and spread out the workload).
Or, perhaps it's time for universal basic income?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45590900
aeblyve|4 months ago
Bombthecat|4 months ago
djoldman|4 months ago
ChrisArchitect|4 months ago
xnx|4 months ago
aeblyve|4 months ago
solumunus|4 months ago
tananaev|4 months ago
nasmorn|4 months ago
MisterTea|4 months ago
cebert|4 months ago
unknown|4 months ago
[deleted]
creer|4 months ago
And this is for a prototype plant where you would expect the need for more and top-qualified technicians. (Most likely this does not count the robotics installers and tuners which might be from a different sub-company and classification - but still.) This might change when demand for qualified robotics technicians keeps increasing.
Another noticeable thing was that even with this automation push, Amazon is mostly planning to hire LESS. Not really reduce yet. It seems they are still growing beyond the potential improvements of robotics.
Still another is the insane capital-intensiveness of retail now! Wow.
MeanWeen|4 months ago
One would think, but that's not really the reality for the technicians. Amazon assuredly brought in some experienced techs from other facilities to help with launch, but most of the staff are just locals.
> At the Shreveport facility, more than 160 people work as robotics technicians, and they make at least $24.45 an hour. Most of Shreveport’s 2,000 employees are regular hourly workers, whose pay starts at $19.50
The associate pay sounds right, but the average starting pay for robotics technicians is in the low-mid 30s. The $24.45 figure is for apprentices, who are not a large part of any maintenance cohort.
Source: Amazon robotics technician.
xnx|4 months ago
The next disruption (possibly by Amazon) will be in getting products more directly from the point of manufacture to the point of use. Warehouses are an oversized cache for physical goods.
pjc50|4 months ago
Tangurena2|4 months ago
Additionally, the warehouses are staffed by contractors, who once laid off from the subcontracting company are permabanned from ever working for any other contracting company that Amazon will use. Amazon is literally running out of humans that they can hire. If they are unwilling to address their "one and done" policy, Amazon will have to use robots in order to stay in business.
0 - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/20/amazon-warehouse-in-illinois...
Simulacra|4 months ago
ChrisArchitect|4 months ago
xnx|4 months ago
ChrisArchitect|4 months ago
nashashmi|4 months ago
Prices will be lowered. And the appeal of warehouses will go up this way. But for the remaining workers, I don’t think Amazon will come up with a better work environment. I don’t think they have that skill set.
jppope|4 months ago
Frieren|4 months ago
American companies lie so often about the feasibility of future capabilities that it is becoming just background noise. If the plan is not realistic, if it is not based in well argued projects, then they are just lying to the public and to investors. Currently the bar is so low, that anything counts as "we just though that it was possible" so it is not illegal. That should be solved.
WillAdams|4 months ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/dmnuts/53mamazon_fulfi...
the desire to save money/replace workers is real (though I wish that they would start by recycling packaging/materials in the warehouses) and there are certainly a lot of ways in which this could be done --- the issue of course is how society will work through this --- I suspect we'd all feel a bit differently about this if Amazon were a public benefit corporation rather than one focused on profit for shareholders. Their motto is:
>Work Hard, Have Fun, Make History.
and it really should have included something about making the world a better place or doing good.....
hello_moto|4 months ago
FTA:
Amazon has considered steps to improve its image as a “good corporate citizen” in preparation for the anticipated backlash around job losses, according to The NYT, reporting that the company considered participating in community projects and avoiding terms like “automation” and “AI.” More vague terms like “advanced technology” were explored instead, and using the term “cobot” for robots that work alongside humans.
freedomben|4 months ago
nyc_data_geek|4 months ago
insane_dreamer|4 months ago
I would like to hear, from one of those believers, _what_ type of _new_ jobs these laid off warehouse workers are going to get? (And no, they won't become AI prompt engineers.)
I have not heard a single satisfactory answer to this very simple question. And if no one has any idea of what type of _new_ jobs are opening up, then it's highly unlikely to happen.
In the Industrial Revolution, billions (for that time) were being spent on creating whole new types of jobs (i.e., factories). Which companies today are spending any money on creating new jobs?
chasd00|4 months ago
dghlsakjg|4 months ago
If they can get robots to successfully handle any item packaged in a cardboard box, that is a tremendous boon, even if you still have to hire people to deal with blister packaging, bottles and other irregular shapes.
Hell, Amazon has enough market power with suppliers that if they say they only want to sell things in robot friendly packages, most suppliers will rapidly find a way.
Simulacra|4 months ago
ky_vulnerable|4 months ago
Eric_WVGG|4 months ago
For floor work, wheels seem the most logical. There is the issue of loading trucks (which I did at UPS for a couple summers), for that I’m thinking maybe a ceiling-mounted arm that could extend the length of the truck?
unknown|4 months ago
[deleted]
jasonpeacock|4 months ago
I forget the author, or the exact quote, but basically this. Brainless jobs should be automated, nobody should be an automaton.
This doesn't mean we give up on craftsmanship, but mass production and busy work should be eliminated from human roles.
_DeadFred_|4 months ago
nashashmi|4 months ago
skeezyjefferson|4 months ago
echoangle|4 months ago
How would you verify that your belief is correct?
aeblyve|4 months ago
Including in software.
kulahan|4 months ago
It's throwing shit in a box. Who cares how neat it is? As long as things arrive sealed and intact, it's fine.
code_for_monkey|4 months ago
etskinner|4 months ago
I know this is just a start (and just enough to make the ROI worth it, probably), but it sounds particularly dystopian / late stage capitalism
code_for_monkey|4 months ago
t1E9mE7JTRjf|4 months ago
baron816|4 months ago
bilekas|4 months ago
None of it will matter anyway, they're shoveling enough money to the right people to have any regulations or oversight squashed, nevermind the sheer number of jobs that will be lost, I might be wrong but it would be a dent in the national unemployment numbers ?
But who cares, they're paying the right people.