Amazon’s latest warehouse machine demonstrates the slow drip of automation
A few jobs lost here, a few lost there; it all adds up
By James Vincent May 13, 2019, 9:35am EDT
We’re continually told that robots are coming for our jobs, but when exactly this will happen, nobody seems to know. That’s because the process of automation — like climate change — is ponderously slow and hugely complex. Its effects are diffuse, spread out over time and space so much that we can trick ourselves into thinking it’s not happening, or, at the very least, that it’s happening to someone else.
A new report from Reuters on Amazon’s latest effort to replace workers with machines can help dispel these notions.
The news agency says Amazon is trialing technology in its warehouses that can package orders five times faster than humans. Workers place items on a conveyor belt, and the machine builds a box around them, processing up to 700 orders an hour. Reuters says the machines have been installed in a “handful” of warehouses, but Amazon is considering bringing them to “dozens” of locations. In each case, it would mean the loss of 24 jobs.
A spokesperson for Amazon confirmed the story, telling Reuters the technology was being piloted “with the goal of increasing safety, speeding up delivery times and adding efficiency.” In a bit of optimistic spin, they added: “We expect the efficiency savings will be re-invested in new services for customers, where new jobs will continue to be created.”
In some ways, this story doesn’t seem that exciting.
The technology Amazon is deploying isn’t new. It’s been around at least five years, and it’s not flashy: it doesn’t involve cool robots, just anonymous assembly line machinery. (You can see it in action in the video below.) What’s more, the scale of the job losses Reuters reports isn’t too big. The news agency estimates that these machines could remove some 1,300 positions in Amazon’s warehouses in the US. But that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the 196,000 jobs US employers added in March alone.
continues with video and more text at theverge.com
[Actually, I've seen huge printing presses box books automatically at the end of a long run, with the number of workers for each press reduced to 4 guys--one in a cab, one watching the boxing process and two watching both the paper and the line, looking for jams or accidental spills off the line. The press literally did everything by itself except load the paper and clear jams. It was really quite incredible. And that was almost 30 years ago.] |
