People have complained that Amazon factory warehouse jobs are marked by poor conditions and low pay, but this may be less of a problem in the not to distant future. Amazon has acquired robots maker Kiva systems for $775 million and they are planning on replacing warehouse workers with autonomous robots. The New York Times reports:
…Kiva Systems’ orange robots are designed to move around warehouses and stock shelves.
Or, as the company says on its Web site, using “hundreds of autonomous mobile robots,” Kiva Systems “enables extremely fast cycle times with reduced labor requirements.”
In other words, these robots will most likely replace human workers in Amazon’s warehouses.
Despite the ugly conditions that can reportedly occur at Amazon warehouses, I don’t think the workers will be better off when these jobs are replaced by robots. The article also reports on the general trend of Robots Are Stealing Our Jobs:
Robots have been in factories for decades. But increasingly we will see them out in the open. Already little ones — toys, really — sweep floors. But they are getting better at doing what we do. Soon, if Google’s efforts to create driverless cars are successful, cab drivers, cross-country truckers and even ambulance drivers could be out of a job, replaced by a computer in the driver’s seat.
In the video below you can see Kiva robots perform The Nutcracker.
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Sunday ~ March 25th, 2012 at 8:53 pm
Ben Carper
Player Piano, anyone?
Sunday ~ March 25th, 2012 at 9:15 pm
shulgin
Let’s create jobs by banning motor cars and reintroduce horse drawn carriages then! (Isn’t an engine a robotic horse after all?)
Eliminating repetitive, debilitating jobs is a net positive. These guys may need a little help moving on to doing more useful things, but in the end they will surely manage and you cannot possibly advocate they should be kept enslaved in obsolete debilitating jobs.
Monday ~ March 26th, 2012 at 4:11 pm
Mint
In principle, but the process makes wealth redistribution more appealing and eventually probably inevitable. Complete automation would be awesome, theoretically, but then who would own the automated factories, and where would their profits go in the long run?
Monday ~ March 26th, 2012 at 8:44 pm
cig
No reason for automation to change the profit rate, in the presence of competition. Complete automation means the proportion of the economy that’s spent on mechanical activities shrink. Agriculture was 3/4 of the economy a couple of centuries ago, it’s something like 2% now. Industry will probably be 2% in a few decades and the rest of the economy will be non-mechanical activities (education, law, art, medicine, finance, entertainment, etc).
Monday ~ March 26th, 2012 at 3:21 pm
Noumenon
I work in a factory and I’d rather be walking all day than standing still on my feet trying to keep up with the robots crowding around me.
Thursday ~ March 29th, 2012 at 2:24 pm
Zlati Petroff
I’ve conjectured for some time now that the future of work is managing technology and figuring out creative ways to deploy technology. Of course, there will also be jobs for people that manage transaction costs via human interaction/relationship building (aka salesmen, lawyers/arbitrators, etc.)
I don’t think employment has to go down at all as a result of automatization. We just need people to reconfigure their skillsets towards the creative management and use of technology. That’s by no means easy and we ought to be very concerned about it. Skill reconfiguration is going to be extremely difficult for many Americans. But it is inevitable so we might as well get to it.