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.
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 pods were divided into indexed bins containing their random assortment of products and the computer told me to get product X from bin Y. Again and again and again. I was literally just a robot arm with a human brain attached to it, and for what? To torment it [me, the head]? I was in hell.
By the end of each shift I would be in a daze, wondering why the hell I thought this would be a good job, and by the end of my first month I started using heroin again (I had been clean for six months up until that point). Now I'm not saying I would have stayed clean if it wasn't for Amazon, but it definitely made relapse happen a lot sooner. And besides, the drug made me work like a machine. The 10 hour shifts that slogged by in sobriety began to blow by with blissful alacrity, and my numbers were excellent to boot. And eventually, well, I was fucking hooked on heroin again and I knew I had to stop. So I quit to focus on my recovery. It was the best decision I've ever made and I've been clean for over three years now.
That might be a stupid story, but the whole time I worked at Amazon, all I could think was "they are going to automate this job someday, and thank fucking god for that. What is taking them so long?" No human should be made to do such mindless work. It sucks. And for $13.75 an hour, it definitely isn't worth it.
> I was literally just a robot arm with a human brain attached to it, and for what?
This is how I felt as an undergrad working in a research lab. Endless, annoying pipetting. Labeling tubes. Bitchwork that the postdoc didn't want to do. I kept thinking... there's no way they can't come up with a robot to do this.
My guess is the technology to do it is there but the motivation isn't - most undergrads (me included) work in research labs for free with the hope of getting into med school.
Luckily, I'm in med school now so I don't have to worry about being taken advantage of in that way. But every time I think about how the system does this to so many premeds, it pisses me off.
That's why I was careful in my wording. I said I wouldn't be taken advantage of "in that way"
And yeah residency is kinda of bullshit. Not looking forward to it :(
I don't think anyone goes into medical school these days without knowing about residency, though. At least, I would hope not.
At least I won't feel like a robot could be doing better than me, though? Although that might soon change with AI advancements, depending on what I specialize in.
Overall, if I could do it over again, I would have just gotten a CS degree. I'm afraid to read House of God because I feel jaded enough as it is.
Spouse is a mid-level provider, so I pick up some of it via proxy.
While engineers (like myself) want to deal in absolutes, that is not the nature of disease and people. As such, AI may become a tool, but don't expect an AI in the near future to take over diagnostics. Additionally an AI isn't going to bring compassion to patients situation. To that point, learn the difference between empathy and compassion.
I think we mean the same thing but we're expressing it differently!
What I meant was - the motivation isn't there because you can just get people to do your bitchwork for way less than it would cost to invest in a robot.
I was wondering why my previous comment was dead as quickly as I had submitted it. I did a quick Google search and discovered OpenTrons is y combinator backed.
If censorship is the case, then may I make the point that instead of censoring people critical of y combination backed products/services, maybe you should listen to your potential client/customer base, as my opinion with this product is shared by others in academia. Your money would probably go a lot further.
Eh, I get mixed reviews from people who own this, which is why I opted not to get one for my lab. Some labs never use it to its fullest capabilities, either and use it for show. A student is cheaper, and arguably more reliable when fully trained.
There are better systems out there, but not every academic lab is willing to fork over the cash.
> No human should be made to do such mindless work.
In the US, nobody is _made_ to do such work. However, until it is automated there will always be a price for it in the labor market.
> And for $13.75 an hour, it definitely isn't worth it.
Presumably the mindless nature of the work increases the wages. Do you recall the minimum wage in that region at the time?
I’m trying to arrive at is a logical sequence of steps like: the less desireable work is, the higher it’s price in the labor market. It’s more profitable to automate more expensive labor. Thus, by quitting you shortened the time-to-automate.
I'm glad you made that decision for yourself and I think such perspectives are missing from the discourse about working-class folks dealing with addiction.
I did this exact work as well in 2014. Mind numbing task. Seeing the robots and the overall warehouse system work was fascinating. But fuck that place, worse job I've ever had.
Having dealt with addiction, I can confirm that particular jobs are unusually likely to incline me to go back to those addictions, or be tempted to. The closest thing to a pattern I've found is that these jobs are either boring-but-require-attention, or they're complex and emotionally draining. The former often involved Amazon warehouse type jobs, and the latter were often dysfunctional IT departments.
Automation and mechanization have always been about replacing dehumanizing, backbreaking, mindless toil. Maybe not intentionally, but that was the result.
Despite the fact that I might not be a rich man in this country, I am a very rich man in this world. I feel quite lucky and grateful to have been born in the USA. But to be fair, that was not a very good wage for where I live.
I think it's quite likely, but unknowable, that folks would accept the income:cost of living ratio of the US if it came with the associated sociological benefits. I think you're underestimating how disproportionately impoverished many people around the world are.
Except that the Chinese person is a prisoner in their own country, and the American could move to China to have a higher quality of life outside of the polluted cities.
You're right that a few people do, although I think most people realise how deeply fortunate we all are to have won to at least some extent a genetic and [entirely separate] geographic lottery.
I upvoted you because at first I decided you were a king writing this and telling us to feel more lucky and I felt angry, but then I pretended you were the poorest laborer writing this and telling us to feel more lucky, and I agreed.
I was thinking about people moving to the US and working there at an Amazon warehouse.
If we talk about working for that rate in their native country, I think it can be up to 5 billion. And a billion more will take the job without being too happy.
I worked two assembly line jobs. One feeding a robot with pre cut steel sections. The other wiring trucks. Both were non stop but just for 8 hour shifts. Both took physical energy and flexibility but were not back breaking (no more than the Amazon jobs anyway). I enjoyed them both and felt physically better at the end of the day than I do when I come home from a days coding. Everyone who worked with me needed the job and most were proud to have it. It was part of their identity.
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 whether the bottom-line driven approach described above amounts to an ethically defensible system, but we shouldn't be under illusions as to how decisions like this are made.
Of course, nobody tries to only "improve the livelihood of warehouse workers".
Isn't the idea behind economy that if everybody tries to improve their bottom line then everybody wins (even if it was not intended)? And this story seems to support this idea.
> if everybody tries to improve their bottom line then everybody wins
This idea is given fairly often as a rationale that economies should be organised around capitalism, yes.
Whether the principle holds up in practice seems, to me, the kind of question that would be answered best by seeking a very wide range of data, rather than by attempting to draw conclusions from a handful of news articles.
Some areas of the economy that are often proposed as counterexamples to the above principle include healthcare and the environment, where critics claims that 'everybody trying to improve their bottom line' results in inefficiencies & unnecessary complexity, socialization of costs (eg pollution, morbidity & mortality), or in some cases direct harm.
Arguing that we should be honest with ourselves about what precisely motivates corporate decisions to automate in the society we live in is not remotely the same thing as arguing against automation itself; neither in this specific case nor in the more general case (of automation across wider society).
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 to having their job automated and many people try to replace themselves or improve the efficiency of the machines that replaced them. And if this hypothetical world started doing this 100 years ago, everyone there is retired by now.
There are some flaws with that plan, but the gap between that world and ours shows that people are justified in being upset at the effects of automation.
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.
I threw that part in there because I was expecting someone to confuse themselves into thinking there's no motivation for progress under such a system.
Under the hypothetical, even if you want your current level of pay, you may want to automate yourself out, because that frees you up to spend your time on some other job, getting both paychecks.
(And if you really didn't want to have your job automated away... well it still works out better for you than our system of firing you and then nothing.)
I mean that's kind of a narrow view isn't it? Sure these are not fun jobs to have. I worked ten hour shifts at an injection molding company when I was in my 20's. Ten hours of open the door, remove the part, close the door, put the part in the bin, repeat. I would welcome a world in which no human ever had to be part of a production line again. But you know what also sucks? Not being able to pay your bills, feed your kids, obtain medical care, feel even a shred of dignity. So until we have some idea of how to structurally handle this transition, and until we've developed a mindset where the people who run corporations take such things into account, such unbridled enthusiasm for the elimination of "bad" jobs rings hollow.
On the contrary, this feels like a response of someone who maybe worked part time or had a summer job in a warehouse or factory, but knew they'd have opportunity for better options later on.
If the best job you can get is a factory job, and new technology comes along that can eliminate your job, you are definitely not going to be so happy that your kind corporate overlords have freed you from the drudgery of work.
I'm surprised that Amazon still uses boxes. They have the market power to insist manufacturers comply with amazon-specific packaging requirements. Why not just insist that all products be packaged in postal-compatible packaging? Then the amazon warehouse robot need only slap a label on the product and throw it in the shipping bin.
Another answer would be to have products packaged in standard, or at lease square, boxes that could be thrown into larger shipping boxes.
Or do away with the warehouse altogether and have products ship directly from manufacturers. I wonder if anyone has tried that?
You mentioned two processes that have been in place with Amazon Vendors/Manufacturers for many years.
1. Amazon Direct Fulfillment (dropship): Order is shipped directly from the manufacturer to the customer. Amazon pays for the shipping label and contractually "own" the item once it leaves the MFR doors. Amazon incentivizes Manufacturers by paying the freight and loosening shipment deadlines. [1]
2. Ships In Own Container (Amazon SIOC) certification puts the responsibility on the manufacturer to certify their products can be shipped without extra packaging. MFR pays for the testing/certification from a third-party. After July 3st 2019, Amazon will charge/fine manufacturers $2/unit received that are NOT SIOC certified and greater than a certain dimensional threshold. [2]
Its a tough economic balance for Amazon because they want to keep shipping stuff, but many MFRs will literally stop selling items to Amazon on July 31st because the costs of SIOC certification are greater than the estimated product profitability.
Source: I am a consultant for Manufacturers that sell to Amazon. [3]
> Ships In Own Container (Amazon SIOC) certification puts the responsibility on the manufacturer to certify their products can be shipped without extra packaging.
Sorry, but how can this be a good idea? I'd hate if I ordered something expensive, for example a digital camera, and every porch pirate (or shady parcel delivery subcontractor) immediately sees "this thing is worth a couple grand", compared with the usual Amazon grey packaging.
Its usually a brown cardboard overbox with a barcode that has extensive droptesting.
More common these days is for manufacturers to produce items, and separately purchase very durable over-boxes that are sent to eCommerce customers like amazon/walmart/bestbuy/etc.
Their retail team used to consist mostly of buyers. Most of those resources have shifted to private label.
Imagine a thousand people previously managing external brands now focused on finding/creating private label brands with the data of sales volume at their fingertips.
They have something like 150 private label brands right now.
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.)
Smart dudes have wrestled over those problems for years. I think the strongest case for dropshipping would be new cars. The dealerships have presented a problem for people for years, but they are politically well connected.
It's a lot easier for a manufacturer to send a boxcar of toilet paper to a warehouse (Amazon or otherwise) than to mail the case to you. Lacking Amazon or Safeway, they'd probably just recreate a similar system in the form of a co-op.
In any case, I don't doubt they've gamed and spreadsheeted the bejeepers out of dropshipping, returnable containers, standardized containers, third party (USPS) vs. self shipping vs. drones, etc.
> Smart dudes have wrestled over those problems for years. I think the strongest case for dropshipping would be new cars. The dealerships have presented a problem for people for years, but they are politically well connected.
I've been studying this lately, and it really seems to be more than that. Consumers love to compare goods based upon initial purchase price (or even loan payment price) with relatively little regard for the long-term cost of that good.
As evidence, take a look through AutoNation's annual report, in which they clearly make more gross profit on part sales & service, finance, and extended warranties than on actual car sales. It is to the point that it is questionable if the business would be viable only on the basis of new & used car sales alone.
A business that chooses to try to make profit without these addons will ultimately have to sell more expensive cars. Will consumers understand the difference?
My impression is that Amazon is kind of biased in that regard. There are valid reasons to keep the warehouse logistics in-house. And they did invest a lot of energy into that. It just bugs me that Dropshopping was never really pushed while the logistical powers to be ever so slightly pushed against it.
Nothing wrong with that, but it could very well be the first clue that Amazon is behaving more like an incumbent than a disrupter as described in the Innovator's Dilemma.
They have to strike a balance to optimize between shipping costs, time spent packing, packing material costs, claims due to damage during transit and insurance/theft costs.
If items are usually/never ordered by themselves, packing in a larger box might still always work out to be cheaper than paying for shipping for two boxes.
There's already enough of a problem with theft of generic 'Amazon'-branded boxes -- can you imagine if things were regularly shipped with $high_value-brand labeling on the outside (if not just glossy full-color retail box)?
True. In fact, they tend to ship big items in their original retail packaging. E.g. vacuum cleaners. Not good. In my case I got 2 damaged items out of 3 shipments with said boxing.
Now they have included a free option to wrap inside another bigger Amazon box. I guess they got too many damaged items and complaints from customers.
This would be impractical. For one thing, scuff-resistant packaging material is also necessarily less attractive than glossy and colorful packaging that holds high detail photographs & illustrations better.
This would also be very inefficient because you would have to store the postal-ready boxes at the fulfillment warehouses in an inefficient way instead of just putting them into bins. When shipping products to customers, also, it's often more efficient to pack multiple products into a single box to ensure both durability and cost efficiency.
Most of the goods available on Amazon also do not come direct from the factory. They come from various intermediaries. Not all products are shipped from the Amazon FBA warehouses, either. So, there are many reasons why it is impossible.
It is possible to ship to customers direct from the factory, as some other comments have mentioned. However, as you might imagine, this is impossible for many businesses. Processing customer orders is time and labor intensive particularly because it involves making many tiny shipments versus shipping out entire truckloads at a time only. Furthermore, contract manufacturing is very common. A given factory may be manufacturing products for many different brands at the same time and a certain brand can have its products manufactured in entirely different countries at the same time.
Or yet another complication: reconfiguring to manufacture a new product usually takes a lot of work. A product will be only produced for a week or two, but sold over a period of months or years. The factory isn't in the storage and shipping business, so why not send it to somebody who is?
I think you are diminishing the importance of brands and brand loyalty for companies. A lot of effort is spent to have boxes designed for retail; size, shape, color, etc. matter a lot for this use case. Resistance to weather and being thrown around are not the main consideration of this use case. Standard size boxes that are shippable might be good for Amazon and the consumer but companies always want the brand front and center.
The vast majority (95%, including lots of oddball pcbs, fasteners, etc) of my recent Amazon deliveries have come from an Amazon van. I'm almost surprised they don't offer a reusable bin or something of that nature. It feels wasteful to throw away so many boxes.
When I was in Seattle for an internship about a decade ago, I would get books and other sortable items thrown in with my Amazon Fresh deliveries— they would show up in the same rugged plastic tote as the pantry items, and the tote would be picked up again the next day. It was a great system.
Especially with the recent news that a lot of what we thought was recyclable really isn't. I presume that clean brown corrugated is still OK, but I don't know that for sure.
oh it is "recyclable", just (for several materials) takes more energy to recycle it than toss it in a landfill. You get to feel good that cardboard gets a "new life", instead of a new one (which extracts more carbon from the atmosphere) being created, we can burn more CO2 to have a second truck travel down your street to pick up renewable cardboard and haul it around town till it eventually gets cleaned and processed (at the cost of even more energy).
I mean, they probably don't have the market power to do that. Online retail is still only ~10% of total retail (in the US). Amazon might be dominant within online retail, but they still aren't quite enough I feel.
> Or do away with the warehouse altogether and have products ship directly from manufacturers. I wonder if anyone has tried that?
Erm... manufacturers have been shipping their own products for years... but they're not very good at it, compared to Amazon?
As in, they offer standard slow shipping (vs. same-day or next-day with Prime), shipping you have to pay for per item (vs. Prime), shipping that is often unreasonably expensive (vs. Prime) and have other issues resulting in a worse UX e.g. poorer website design, and/or signing up for individual accounts with every website (vs. Prime).
Even as big as they are, I don't think they have that much power. So maybe they could do that with some items, but they're still going to have to package some items.
In some cases, it might even be less efficient to do it this way. It means spending more up front on packaging, so the time value of money is a factor. Also, some products never sell, so why create packaging for them that will never be used? And an already-packaged product may take up more space on warehouse shelves. It might only be 10% more space or something, but 10% of everything adds up.
Also, sometimes people order more than one item. It is probably more economical to ship everything in one box. (Postage would be lower, and it might still cost less even if Amazon does the delivery themselves.)
"Amazon.com works with manufacturers to box products in Certified Frustration-Free Packaging, which reduces the overall amount of packing materials used."
Also:
"It’s designed and tested to ship to customers in its own packaging without the need for additional Amazon packaging."
The article wouldn't apply to drop-shipping situation. Drop-shipping means the upstream provider delivers directly to the downstream consumer, but that means it never goes through Amazon's warehouse and is thus not packaged or re-packaged by Amazon.
I think doing away with the warehouses isn’t compatible with conquering the last of retail; same day delivery. Even next day is cost prohibitive for drop shipping as it requires UPS or FedEx.
Amazon goal is same day delivery using low paid, Uber type contractors.
I'm surprised they don't have reusable crates that they can pick up when they ship the next shipment to you - at least for subscribe & save orders. Like the milkman used to pick up the bottles.
Dropshopping might just turn out to he the biggest missed opportunity for the fulfillment arm of Amazon. Just imagine a company that successfully bridges the gap between any supplier who wants to connect and the consumer using the internet. Imagine Amazon bought or developed Shopify themselves and integrated the POS tech for any shop with their fulfillment and retail tech. Damn, that would be a killer.
In my opinion, the first one to successfully do this on scale will be the next Amazon, just even bigger.
That being said, packaging for customer shipments is inherently different from B2B. The later usually uses some sort of bulk-level packaging for pallets and such. Cheaper for big volumes but unsuitable for B2C. Still, Amazon is pishing Ship-in-own-container (SIOC) wherever possible.
As someone in consumer-goods warehousing and distribution, automation is the only way forward.
The seasonality of demand and inherent monotonous nature of the work itself makes it near-impossible to scale and retain the workforce required to fulfill orders.
You have to automate what can be automated, and continue to aggressively hire just to keep up with order growth.
If it results in the elimination of oversized boxes it should save on cardboard, also reducing shipping volume. This would be financially and environmentally be a good thing. Maybe they could also include in the box sizing algorithm the optimization of shapes for efficient packing.
IIRC, some boxes are intentionally oversized, in order to completely fill the truck, so that things don't move around. That's not going to change because of this new machine.
Right but from a recycle / waste perspective, its a great thing. If manufacturers and distributors use less materials in their product packaging, that's less materials that end up in landfills. Not everyone recycles (even if the material, like cardboard, is recyclable), so the best way for Amazon to help fix waste is by reducing the raw output of cardboard.
Part of it could be privacy too. I ordered a computer monitor that was in its own cardboard box. However, that box had clearly printed "Gaming Monitor" on the box. This item was sitting on my porch for a few hours before I got home.
Amazon put it in one of their boxes, which did not have any labels about the package contents. Thieves are more likely to steal a box that says "expensive computer part" versus an unlabeled box.
Not to say that's always the case, but it depends on what the products box is like.
And maybe better protection for items not explicitly boxed to support mail-order/delivery? (Although as noted elsewhere in this discussion, maybe Amazon could use its power to require boxing better suited to their needs from the manufacturers...)
Amazon already (for some items, in the UK at least) makes you explicitly choose to have them re-box it in their own packaging, otherwise they just ship it in whatever box it's in. I imagine they'll do the same here, just not feed these items into the box machine in the first place.
This is a minor improvement in packaging. It's not automated picking, which will be a big deal if Amazon cracks that. They've been trying and failing for years now. Amazon gave up on their robotic picking challenge after 2017. Here's the winner of the last challenge.[1] Way too slow and not reliable enough.
Amazon has about 100,000 robots now. Most are Kiva machines, moving storage racks to human pickers. Here's what that looks like.[2] The pickers stay in one place, take things out of bins brought to them, and put them in outgoing bins. A laser pointer tells them what to pick. That's almost 10 years old, but Amazon has not yet been able to replace humans in that job.
Here's how one of the biggest online electronics retailers in Switzerland handles storage / logistics for their smaller items [1].
As is the case with your amazon example, putting the items in the storage containers and picking them for shipping is still handled manually. I'm really curious as to how this compares to the moving shelf idea efficiency-wise and how a possible "solution" (if it is a problem that needs solving...) for the picking could look like, e.g. standardized containers for small items that could be handled by a machine or something like that.
That's AutoStore. It has a limited size range. It's most useful for electronic parts and medical supplies, which tend to fit in AutoStore bins.
The Kiva system Amazon uses has a bigger size range. It's also more rugged. The only fixed infrastructure in the storage area is a flat cement floor with bar code tags for navigation. Shelving units and robot are easily replaced.
AutoStore has a human-carrying vehicle which can run on the AutoStore rails. It's 4x the size of the regular robots. So when something gets stuck, there's a way to unjam the grid. Still, if something falls out of a bin, it's a much bigger headache in AutoStore than it is in Amazon/Kiva.
Articles about Amazon are quick to mention the workplace conditions or robots automating something. Rarely do they mention that machines equal lower prices for the consumers 9 times out of 10.
You can think what you want about Amazon but I’m not complaining that I have 100’s of options for my phone case, all for 1/5 the price of the previous days buying them at Verizon or Apple.
Edit: would be awesome to hear about Amazon’s pricing practice from an employee
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 lowering prices, even as you cut costs. This is why monopolies are considered "bad", because they eliminate incentives for firms to care at all about the welfare of consumers.
In undergrad economics classes, you might learn that prices are set equal to marginal cost (including opportunity cost). But that is only true under specific and relatively strong equilibrium conditions, which I don't believe apply to Amazon.
The reason that this tends to lower prices for consumers is that these innovations rarely stay confined to the companies that invent them. If this lowers costs for amazon to fulfill orders, then these techniques tend to get adopted by their competitors.
And once adopted by competitors, when everyone's margins have increased, these companies do compete on price.
This process doesn't happen immediately but it does happen.
Might not be true as more problems are solved through machine learning. Amazon has or could generate the largest and most diverse dataset to train the object recognition problems needed to automate a warehouse. They also have the end to end pipeline to evaluate accuracy (damaged or incorrect orders, manual intervention needed in the warehouse).
Can a competitor actually catch up without this data?
Sure. The usual strategy would be a joint venture between the second, third, etc. biggest competitors to share the development (and relevant data) for such a technology.
>If your prices are already beating the competition, and you already have a solid reputation for low prices, there is no incentive to continue lowering prices, even as you cut costs.
If they could reach many more customers by lowering prices, even a monopoly could potentially find it profitable to continue lowering prices as they cut costs.
A monopoly could also continue to cut costs to head off the threat of antitrust litigation.
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).
Right, but amazon isn't known for low prices nor is it a monopoly. This will allow them to lower prices and become known for the lowest prices while still preserving their margin (if that's the market they want to target).
They aren't known for low prices? They are known for having the same prices as everyone else, with free or cheaper shipping, meaning that effectively the price is lower.
And no, I'm not implying that they are a monopoly.
They have that reputation, but be watchful. Lots of things are more expensive at Amazon, now. What they're selling me is convenience more than anything else. I can often find lower prices elsewhere but it's more work.
I actually suspect that one big competitor to Amazon will not be another online store, but local stores providing free or cheap local delivery, and by extension services like Postmates.
Sure there is. If they don't do it, someone else will be able to outcompete on price, eventually at least.
And yes, most of our history is full of examples of newer technologies lowering cost, that's kind of the whole reason that or civilization is more advanced (materially) than it was in the past.
There's also the "number of purchases * purchase price" equation which means you can make more money by reducing price if it means (enough) more people by the product, or buy more of them.
Amazon has been quite the monopolistic company lately. Just because a company started winning by outdoing the competition doesn't mean that will continue to be their only way of succeeding. Even the most principled companies will adopt a few anticompetitive practices here and there when they get big.
I think with Amazon building out their delivery and subscription options, they can hold back a lot of pressure to share the savings from automation with consumers.
Right now they have no need to lower prices. They can hold their lower production costs as a threat to any competitor who might be tempted to enter a price war, without ever needing to actually lower their prices.
>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.
Your margins is someone else opportunity. I believe Jeff said something similar along the line. By having a economy of scale in Warehouses, Automation, Transportation and consistently lower margin Amazon achieve a moat that can not be easily replicated even with billions of dollars.
Lowering costs gives a business the possibility of cutting prices, for example to try to increase market share. Whether they take it or not depends on the situation. But Amazon often does.
If you have number of competitors, then the ones that automate things can lower their prices due to decreased costs - they will gain a competitive edge, when all else is equal - as things tend to be in this industry (price and shipping are really the only variables, for the consumer)
But, on the other hand, if there are little to no competition, like a monopoly, then Amazon is obviously free to just keep their prices and increase their margins.
When you collect as much data as Amazon, you can start attributing incremental worker time spent picking/carrying down to the SKU level. This means that cost of worker time is less for things like books (a picker can carry many and move quickly) while a 60" TV might require two pickers moving slowly.
Better attribution of cost means more margin to play with and cost savings that can be pushed onto customers in a fairer sense - especially if your pricing is automated.
Interestingly Kiva may then selectively reduce the costs associated with bulky goods as they're probably better at moving big stuff and travel faster/shorter.
Lol, I think Americans figured out that whole story already. We've already seen decades of American jobs being slashed to lower costs, with something tacked on about reducing the cost to the consumer.
Another advantage is there that the frequent claim that amazon abuses its employees will finally be put to rest as there will be mostly machines doing the work. No workplace abuse is a big win.
It seems less relevant to compare the cost of a case at Verizon/Apple than purchasing through Amazon. Why? It's a completely different experience -- you get to see the selection in person, ask questions, try the case on your phone to confirm it actually fits, you know there is near-0 odds of it being a counterfeit or unscrupulous seller (unlike Amazon).
The mort apt comparison is the cost of the phone case when packed with human labor vs. packed by robots.
I think you are correct in that this is often not brought into such conversations.
I also think that the full extent of this conversation, that consumer interest is currently in opposition with our responsibilities as a society, is rarely considered by the mainstream media as well.
The problem isn't lower prices, it is lack of money by consumers who lose their jobs. The displacement of retail jobs is massive and really hurting people.
The industrial revolution helped spur the Progressive Era and the modern welfare state, the current technological evolution will likely bring about the next wave of Progressive actions. The US is more conservative than Europe, but sooner rather than later we are going to have to reckon with the fact that employment based health care doesn't cut it when the blue-collar jobs of yesteryear are eliminated by automation.
It's not Amazon's role to provide jobs for Americans, it's their job to increase profits -- it's the government role it tax Amazon appropriately and use those funds to support Americans disrupted by the changing landscape. It's time for all of us to accept what the future brings and act appropriately.
Contrarian (and biased) point of view based on our current success serving Fortune 500 customers - automation in warehouses is not a near-term solution, and acquiring and retaining talent is still a huge pain.
Reuters only 12 days ago published, "Amazon dismisses idea automation will eliminate all its warehouse jobs soon." [1]
Automation will continue to increase, but we're still seeing numerous job openings in warehousing. [2]
For now, it looks like robots in warehouses are displacing work, not replacing jobs. We do believe that automation and robots will eventually lead to the creation of more stable jobs with less turnover.
I visited either YYZ4 or YYZ3 a few months ago and I was incredibly disappointed. For a technology company, their warehouses were anything but sophisticated.
Their storage robots were surprisingly lackluster, their outbound/cubiscan conveyor belt was incredibly slow and often stopped.
Of course, I am just an outsider looking in, and I have no visibility into the underlying software that optimizes these process, but when you look at companies with fulfillment tech like JD, you really wonder how Amazon's retail arm is able to survive at all.
If you're interested in helping make it better, Amazon's got an office full of developers here in Toronto[0] working on these problems. It's a lot of fun, the pay is better than most in Toronto, and the 7 years I've been here have almost always involved me being mentored by really great folks. Feel free to reach out[1].
[0]120 Bremner, between the ACC and Rogers Center.
Off topic, but you're literally the first Amazon developer I've ever seen say anything positive about working there. Do you feel that the work culture is unusually good for your office compared to Amazon as a whole?
The hiring bar at Amazon is high enough that anyone unhappy would have little trouble getting a job elsewhere. Plus, there's an internal policy that any dev in good standing is welcome to join any team that wants them. So most managers treat their devs very well.
I had a coworker join in January. Very talented, great to work with. Wasn't really into what we did. So he found a team doing what he was interested in and transferred last week. Sorely missed, but better to have him happy in the company than unhappy until he leaves.
The culture itself is something special. The leadership principles mean something here. For certain types (of which I am one) it really works well. My only displeasure with the culture is the times the company makes choices that seem to go against the LPs.
It's awesome that the boxing machine is not patented by Amazon but is owned by an independent (? for now?) company. It means that others can access this tech and that Amazon won't close it before competitors. If it works, I believe Amazon won't wait for long with the takeover though.
It's great because Google et al tend to keep a lot to themselves, not offering hardware on the market (for example full version of the TPU).
I would like to remind you such machines are not built because it requires some genius touch in design, they are not built because there is little demand for them. But yeah, tool being not locked under some patent by some monopoly or the other is a good thing.
Do you have any pointers for articles stating that this is the case? I'd love to read more about such solutions - I thought that machines stealing our real jobs is still a matter of tech not being good enough.
"That would amount to more than 1,300 cuts across 55 U.S. fulfillment centers for standard-sized inventory."
... "removing at least 24 roles at each one, these people said. These facilities typically employ more than 2,000 people."
I'm surprised that number is so low. There's only a couple dozen people out of 2000+ that actually put orders in boxes?
The machines aren't going to operate perfectly at first. This is likely a trial run on very specific types of goods (dimensions, weights, etc).
After 6 months or a year, the lessons learned about what worked and didn't will get rolled into the next round of automation, or an entirely different approach will be taken instead.
I used to work at a water filter factory, and this is exactly what happened there. One production line used the old, 7 person crew, and a new, more automated one was brought in for a different filter size that needed only 2 or 3 people. The ways that the two lines could cause batches to fail varied, and the company gave it some time to figure out which line ended up being more cost effective over X investment payoff period.
I didn't stick around long enough to see which one "won" out, but the automated process wasn't a clear winner by the time I had left.
It sounds like a gradual transition to me, not replacing all packers overnight.
> A key to its goal of a leaner workforce is attrition, one of the sources said. Rather than lay off workers, the person said, the world’s largest online retailer will one day refrain from refilling packing roles.
and
> The machines have the potential to automate far more than 24 jobs per facility, one of the sources said.
'standard-sized inventory' is probably doing a lot of heavy lifting. If this the same machine several of the videos there's no bubble wrapping by the machine and no option to use dunnage to put several wildly different sized objects in one box, or deal with like a lamp or a toilet plunger. There's still gonna be manual packing it's just now there will by SIOC, automatic-boxed and manual-boxed categories when presorting for shipping instead of just SIOC and boxed.
It's no stretch to assume by "role" they might mean a job title, and that each role could possibly be being filled by 3 people (3 * 8 hour shifts for a 24 hours continuous operation), so now you're looking at 72 jobs. I've no idea if Amazon does run 24 hour operations though.
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.
I think hand-made "artisan" products is going to continue to be a large part of the future of "Jobs". Automation can mass produce high quality items that aren't unqiue, and 3D printers can make unique products that aren't high quality... but humans right now are the best at making high quality unique items.
But I do think things like UBI are still necessary, hand made items are always going to be in-demand, but unless you're selling only to the 1%, it's hard to charge enough.
Certain segments of the agriculture industry seem promising, since smaller scale operations could benefit from efficiencies in logistics and distribution that were traditionally drivers of consolidation.
Looks like it's not just Amazon
"JD.com Inc and Shutterfly Inc have used the machines as well, the companies said, as has Walmart Inc.
Walmart started 3.5 years ago and has since installed the machines in several U.S. locations"
And they are faster too
"They crank out 600 to 700 boxes per hour, or four to five times the rate of a human packer"
I was debugging firmware for a Dutch supermarket chain as a summer job while in high school in the 80s and at that time they were ‘very close’ to replace all packing jobs with robots. Did Amazon pull it off finally?
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.)
> How many "paid positions" does Microsoft Excel replace every day?
I don't know, could you tell me? I don't think that we actually can point to people working in the position of calculator who are rendered unemployed by Excel version bumps. Arguing that we'd be putting Bob Cratchet and other clerks from the 1800's out of work rings of reductio ad absurdum.
MS Excel seems to lack the one-to-one correlation between a worker on a fulfillment line putting things in boxes and a robot on the same line doing the same work (and doing it more efficiently, since the 'bot custom-fits the packaging to the product).
The farm and mining automation example do ring truer, and in each case we've seen large increases in productivity (as well as consolidation) while seeing people in these communities falling out of work and not being able to get back into the labor market. To pick the only mining county I can think off off the top of my head, the effect of automation continues to be felt in local economies:
Email, MS Office and cell phones have put almost all secretaries out of their jobs. Automated billing system (in a telco) has put my aunt out of her job.
Office jobs are disappearing by the millions, just like physical ones. Lucikly, at least until now, new ones were created in their place.
Tax on labour (or housing) is quite weird if you look at it with fresh eyes. Don't we want to support people working and living in a house? Then why tax those? Is it a relic from the past?
Thought experiment: what if we (only) tax pollution? All taxes end up being paid by the consumer anyway. But this get the incentive straight to deliver products/services "cleanly".
"Taxing housing" isn't weird at all. We don't tax housing. If you rent, you pay rent to your landlord and that's it. You don't also pay taxes on that rent to the government. I'm guessing what you actually mean is that we tax property. This seems inherently fair to me. Why should you get to squat on a piece of land for free in perpetuity, especially when for most land, the value of the land is inherently improved by government-provided services?
Semi-related ... I feel like we should tax rent-seeking way more than we do. Selling a piece of property/house is one thing, but to extend your metaphor, why should one get to seek rent on a piece of property in perpetuity (if the tenant stays long term)?
Of course, I understand how valuable short-term living arrangements are for a number of reasons; my issue is with long term landlords, who can evict a tenant who's been there for decades at any whim ... and they reap the profits, while the tenant is out on the streets with nothing to gain from their many years of payments.
Most paces have some tax for living there, usually related to the worth of the house. Weather that's collected at the owner or at the rent-payer, that's not the point as "all taxes are transferred to the consumer" anyway.
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?
Similarly, this also leaves open a big loophole - if you implement a tax on jobs eliminated, the incentive shifts to starting companies that that don't have jobs in the first place. Then you quickly arrive at the sub-contracted functions shell game where a company pays for a service rather than for specific workers to avoid the automation tax, and the fulfillment companies shuffle around as new automation tech allows them to eliminate more jobs.
I don't think taxation on automated labor really gets us anywhere. Wealth tax makes a lot more sense with fewer loopholes.
I find this notion ridiculous. There are many industries like farming and mining which are now highly mechanised and employ a tiny fraction of what they did. As a result, food and minerals are cheap, fewer workers have to put their lives at risk doing dangerous jobs, and the labour force for other endeavours is increased.
Mechanisation delivers benefits to society at large, although I agree that at an individual level redundancy is harmful. This harm is a humanitarian issue, which the whole of society is responsible for, not an ill which employers should be specifically penalised for.
Considering how badly Amazon treats their employees, I'm surprised they haven't allocated vast amount of resources already to automating everything in their warehouses. The number of times they've appeared in the news in the past regarding their treatment of employees, you'd think they despise humans and want to replace everyone with robots and that they would have done it already.
Well, if they could they would. They're keeping the workers they absolutely need and automating everything else possible. The endgame is a dark warehouse (no lights, the robots just sort of know what to do) but the workers still need some money so they keep working even though their numbers keep dropping.
This box robot saves material (little wastage of cardboard) and labor costs, and doesn't ever call in sick. Why wouldn't they want robots for everything?
Any machine eventually calls in sick when it undergoes maintenance and failure. Of course the failure modes are different than with human labor, but the point is machines also fail.
>Any machine eventually calls in sick when it undergoes maintenance and failure. Of course the failure modes are different than with human labor, but the point is machines also fail.
I think that robots are more fungible and predictable in failure than humans. You can plan around that, like plugging in spare hard drives and machines when they fail so throughput is not affected.
I should go back and read some older books on the wondrous future of automation. The idea always was, of course, that machines would do the boring part of a job. What people actually bring to the picnic is a subset of a job that is hard to do with a computer and/or machine manipulation, so you end up with deskilling of supermarket cashiers or bank teller gigs.
It always seemed to me that you could wipe out far more jobs than Amazon is likely to by simply removing the need to weigh items in grocery stores (like our local discount market). Generally, supersizing retail and the underlying supply chain has changed matters far more than laying off some warehouse employees.
I suppose that outsourcing has already 'automated' scads of US jobs in any case. The interesting automation will hit people who type for a living. Dunno how it will all it turn out, but I've got my comfy chair and a cocktail waiting.
That is a major feature. The inability of human packers to properly size boxes is merely wasteful for many products that come in their own packaging, but damaging and costly for Amazon's original product, books.
We've had so many book orders arrive damaged that we hardly ever shop at Amazon for books. They just toss them in a box that is too large, with some wadding material, and sent them off. Almost every time, the corners, covers and pages are damaged or torn. Returns more than once are frequent.
So, I'm very glad to see this on a micro level, and also on the macro-level of reducing waste, both in packaging material per box, and repeat shipments for shipping-damaged goods.
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 so good news, they don't have the scale Amazon does to have the robot support engineer on site. They have to pack the old ways, with lots of labour.
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 are gone. This will happen at some point. What do we do about it? The only thing that is happening so far are various timid Universal Income pilots. But those often hit substantial political pressure and are being labeled as socialist or even communist, and therefore unacceptable. So how do we prepare?
The biggest issue is not America, it is the third world.
Billions of people are employed by outsourced manufacturing. When they are replaced, no one will be able to afford any kind of safety net for them. There is not enough money to pay for every one's stuff. China, India, Africa, and S. America have all grown on the backs of this outsourcing. When that goes away, we will have many billions of angry, hungry, restless young men.
That is how wars start and how civilizations fall. Previously, countries have typically dealt with an inability to feed their people by starting wars. Those that have not have typically collapsed or starved them (which, in turn, results in collapse). There will need to be some kind of solution. Even if they are all fed, people without purpose are always trouble. As the saying goes, idle hands do the Devil's work.
This story started me wondering whether hardware, in this case Amazon order packing automatons, or wetware has a smaller net lifetime carbon footprint, assuming both are as green as possible. (Ignoring, of course global over-population and/or mass over-consumption of essentially disposable goods.). These days I am having a hard time imagining that technology could ever have the negative carbon footprint required to mitigate climate change.
I suppose the hope is that such eliminations come gradually enough that displaced workers are able to find other accommodations without too much difficulty, maybe with a little extra up-skill that gradually increases the necessary skill level for the average job. I think the doom & gloom "automation is killing jobs" narrative presupposes a sudden shift from manual to automation, which really hasn't been the norm.
This seems to simply wrap each item in a cardboard shell, is that protective? Also whenever someone complains about receiving a tiny item in a large box, the answer is usually that Amazon does so to optimize the filling of its trucks so that all the boxes are densly packed (no room for them to fall), wouldn't having each item its own custom sized box hinder that optimization?
This is going to be a shock to all of those people who were willing to give tax incentives for Amazon to build distribution warehouses in their city in exchange for "jobs."
Though, this is only the beginning. A few thousand jobs now, the majority of them later.
It's also totally possible that each warehouse will be made twice as efficient per employee... but also deliver twice the merchandise... maintaining the same total number of jobs.
Kind of the same way that automation of the past 100 years across the economy has still resulted in record-setting employment right now.
Although having a very low unemployment rate is better than a high unemployment rate, it doesn't help paint the whole picture of the American workforce. The other metric that ought to be mentioned along with unemployment is the labor participation rate, which has been trending worse for a while now [1].
Considering the two together, the economy isn't as rosy as it looks. [2]
For example, if I were to be chronically unemployed and quit looking for jobs altogether, I would actually help the unemployment rate look better since I'm no longer part of that metric.
Part of the problem can be attributed to automation in jobs and job duties, thus requiring a smaller labor force. For those who were laid off by automation in manufacturing or other sectors, many would likely have a hard time finding a job in their established career. Expecting most of such workers to get a job an an on demand skill like maintaining machinery or software development is a herculean task. Most likely they are the ones who fall prey to the poor labor participation metric.
Curiously, what does the homelessness & (true, ie not unemployment) jobless rate look like in that graph? Of course though, they're tough metrics.
More importantly though, we're on the cusp of some pretty hairy water. Imagine we drop all of the truck drivers, taxi drivers, Uber and Lift drivers tomorrow. How many millions of people will that be - where can they go?
I'm not against automation in the slightest, but to think it won't have an impact on employment seems farfetched. Imagine a robot tomorrow, humanoid capable of basic tasks. How many millions of people would that displace almost instantly?
I don't think the past 100 years even remotely indicates how we'll handle this as a society. We aren't talking about taking away one job. We're talking about taking away a skill category. No more drivers. No more basic manual labor.
And that's not even talking about how growth would need to expand to handle the increase in workforce. Imagine our workforce doubles tomorrow - who is going to consume it all? Do we even want more consumption?
I don't think it's as cut and dry as looking at the street cleaners and how they handled it when horses stopped being used transportation. We're talking about fundamentally categories of work becoming obsolete, and having no jobs that some people qualify for.
With that said, I'm curious to live in a world where the population is forced to be educated. No low skilled jobs might have a benefit of (basically) no low educated people. However I am worried about how it will affect the current populace.
> I don't think the past 100 years even remotely indicates how we'll handle this as a society. We aren't talking about taking away one job. We're talking about taking away a skill category.
We did it with farmers. 80% of jobs in early 1800's, close to 40% in 1900, 20% by 1930, 5% by 1965, and 1.7% now. A whole "skill category" like driving doesn't even come close to farming.
Automation, and even displacing drivers, is going to continue happening gradually, not overnight. E.g. only the easiest driving jobs in the easiest areas are automated first, then gradually more difficult ones... There's no "overnight". It'll take many years, and it will be fine just like it has each decade over the past century.
My view is that the loss of driving jobs can be handled normally, via existing free market and education institutions -- that it's no different from the loss of other job categories over the past 50 years.
That this isn't special, that we're not "on the cusp of some pretty hairy water", but rather that this is just par for the course.
I just don't see any statistics that suggest the scale or rate will be anything close to larger/faster than our economy can normally handle. If someone can show those comparative statistics exist, then I'll change my mind.
That's fair. It would be interesting to have data that compares all of the job classes out there and the number of workers out there, against the worker education.
Ie, how many millions of food service workers, manual laborers, and drivers (for trucks, taxis, etc) could move upward in career depth? Where would we expect them to be absorbed?
I definitely think this is hairy waters, in the sense that I want to see studies done. Planning for how it can be handled. Etc. Calling it fine in my view would suggest we don't even need to study it - which seems unfair. This degree of automation, assuming we can get over some AI hurdles of course, seems unparalleled - at least enough to warrant real data.
Just a quick point: they don't necessarily need to move upward. They can move laterally. They can work in package delivery, in restaurants, at Starbucks, in health care, in tourism, in solar panel and home battery installation, in environment cleanup sites, in converting homes to greater energy efficiency, and so on. Honestly a lot of the new jobs 20 years from now we have a hard time guessing what they'll even be (if you magically know, you'll make billions investing), which makes "planning" for it a bit handwavy anyways. (Remember, nobody "planned" for web developers to be an exploding new career.)
Well that goes back to the original point though. Which is, that no education jobs will theoretically dwindle. If we have machines capable of handling all, repeat all no education manual labor jobs; things like picking fruit, delivering boxes, etc. Where will those people go?
They will be forced to acquire more education or skill oriented trades.
The concern is if humanity will be able to adapt to something it has never seen. Where creativity and thinking oriented jobs become more and more required.
Looking at the state of my apartment I could really use a fulltime maid/cook. I can't afford that right now, but if the difference between the average income for the low income group and the high income group goes up enough, that would be a possibility (assuming computer programmers continue to get paid a high income, whereas maids do not).
They seem to be trying to convert these lost employees into "delivery companies"[0]. As much as I dislike the Uberfication of the world, seems like a clever way of shifting human capital from warehouse to delivery.
Aren’t the tax breaks often tied directly to the number of jobs? I believe that’s how the incentive structure for Amazon’s new NoVA headquarters works for instance.
If the company doesn’t create the job, the tax break is reduced by a certain percentage per job.
This is false, there are almost always specific job number requirements that must be met to be eligible for tax credits or the credits are tightly tied to hiring. The Joliet, IL Amazon warehouse incentive deal is a typical example. Amazon can credit employee withholding taxes against corporate income tax. If there are no employees hired, then there is no withholding tax, and no tax credit.
All of these situations are unique, but most of the time the benefits are awarded on a per job basis. So if the plan is to hire 2000 people, the reward will end up being divyied out depending on how many of the 2000 people are hired.
They really need to wrap the books with a piece of butcher paper or something. I keep getting books that slid around and got scuffed to heck by contact with the boxes. Since I have been buying more pricey collection quality books, I have been sending them back :|
I've bought two books in a reecent box and they weren't padded either.
I never had any scuffs or damage on the hundreds books I've bought through Amazon though. How bad are the scuffs? My apartment is close to an Amazon outlet factory so it doesn't have to very far to arrive.
Is it odd that the headline and article imply Amazon created the tech, then halfway through it's clear they are implementing a solution many other competitors have?
Seems like marketing copy regarding Amazon, possibly being behind in implementation of a common solution.
Is it me or does it feel like the door to economic advancement is closing faster and faster every day?
In this thread people are suggesting UBI, but I can't see that as anything more than an economic uncertainty (trying to predict how market forces will respond and adapt), which will be exploited by the oligarchy that is already exploiting the systems we have now (as you might expect anyone to). To think we could successfully create a good UBI system despite the fact that we can't get other very important pieces of governance right in many parts of the world seems ludicrous.
People are suggesting that new jobs will be created as jobs are automated but there's no proof of that except history and this time seems different -- humanity has never had the tools it has now, the step change in ability/utility over the last few decades is insane. In a world with high levels of automation, where does advancement come from? Up until now, it's mostly been differentiation through some form of work. Do creative endeavors become the new work/only way to differentiate if we spend most of our time on leisure? But then what if someone automates that away too?
It seems like once we evolve past work the economic system and the big & small players in it will freeze in place. If you had enough capital to be on the right side of the split then you get to stay on that side, but if you didn't you seem all but condemned. Dystopia seems inevitable. I'm not saying that I think work is good in and of itself but it's disconcerting to happens when that particular music stops -- it's run so much of the world up until now.
Another thought -- the good 'ol revolution/riot path is going to get closed down in a few decades I think. Weaponization of autonomous machinery will happen, and the efficiency of oppression will reach untold heights. Security will be a highly sought skill and those most able to pay for it (with resources/money/whatever) will be able to purchase it.
amazon is on a downhill decline for me. their scale and automation of both humans and machine yields a disconnected service. a large percentage of books i receive from them, which is substantial, are damaged upon arrival. but what do they care? they just initiate a replacement with no questions asked, but now i have to repack the material and go to ups or an amazon locker. i am now working for them for free! my time and effort is explicitly being used as quality control, and this is undoubtedly factored into their statistics.
In related news, Amazon has announced it will give $10000 to any employee that wants to start a delivery business. Seems like a reasonable move, from packer to delivery person.
Can you elaborate? I routinely get smaller boxes, but I also routinely get boxes that are comically oversized and contain an item that would easily fit in one of the smaller sizes. What requirements are making that happen?
In a lot of cases it's optimization for a truck loadout. The loading setup is usually automated to maximize the number of packages in a truck while minimizing empty space, so you can easily end up needing a larger box to fit a specific gap in the truck.
There are also some products that are marked as "fragile" and require a minimum amount of empty space in a box to prevent them from getting smashed. The exact definition of "fragile" and amount of space required is some kind of arcane black magic.
Candidates are discussing immigration, tariffs and outsourcing because that's actually affecting jobs in the US and people who work on the factory lines know it.
Automation is a scary specter off in the distance but it's not as actively harmful to people's livelihoods.
> According to our estimates, one more robot per thousand workers reduces the employment to population ratio by about 0.18-0.34 percentage points and wages by 0.25-0.5 percent.
> No single factor such as tech-driven worker anxiety determines local political behavior. But there’s no mistaking that districts that voted Republican in the 2018 election are subject to higher levels of automation exposure.
Amazon's push to reduce costs always ends up going after the obvious, but their cost structure is more like an iceberg, and they're going after the least effective parts. The majority of the costs have little to do with direct labor, but rather planning. Inventory costs, logistics costs, warehouse utilization, sales forecasting, etc.
There is far more to shipping costs than distance. A split shipment (two items in two boxes) will typically increase costs for an order by $3-6, whereas receive/stow/pick/pack labor costs are only on the order of $1/unit. And yet, nearly every order I place comes in multiple shipments.
Kiva has O(n^2) efficiency degradation with respect to the size of their fulfillment centers. They solve this problem by having smaller fulfillment centers. But that also means more fulfillment centers, which means more split shipments, and much higher shipping costs. They're literally spending dollars to save pennies.
Reverse logistics are incredibly expensive. I'm talking $10-20/unit in some cases. The Amazon marketplace, and their associated quality control problems with fake reviews and counterfeit products, have increased their product returns by several fold over the last decade.
15 years ago, Amazon's inventory turns were something like 17, now they're 6. That directly translates to increased holding costs...for every sqft of storage space they needed in 2005, they need three today to ship the same amount of product.
And fulfillment costs aren't the only place they're making dumb mistakes with priorities. They did their whole HQ2 search shenanigans, only to settle on the two cities that offered the highest tax subsidies. But if they chose to instead prioritize lower cost of living, they could have saved an order of magnitude more, considering the fact that they are planning on having several tens of thousands of high paid workers in their HQ2 cities. The COL increases alone from locating in expensive cities with obstructive housing policies will eat up far more than those tax subsidies are worth.
In the funniest of ironies, Amazon's growth-first mindset that defied Wall Street expectations has led to an invariably laser-focused expectation on revenue growth that they are now a slave to. The P/E premium that Amazon has relative to its industry competitors, carries an implied expectation that Amazon will one day be ~10x bigger than it currently is. And Amazon's equity-first compensation philosophy means that their compensation budget inherently relies on the stock price. Therefore, any decision that may be in the long term best interest of the company (such as dumping the brand perception nuclear bomb known as the Amazon Marketplace) is now no longer feasible: it will cut revenue, killing growth expectations, lowering stock prices, and forcing Amazon to pay more cash compensation, which will just cause prices to tank further.
If we were to judge how Amazon is doing based off of how well their PR releases jive with wall street ideas of what good business decisions look like, they are doing everything right. Unfortunately, wall street ideas are shit for actual profitability. And Amazon is suffering for it.
A couple weeks ago, I toured the Amazon fulfillment center in Tracy, CA. Some observations:
It was very impressive. Watching the yellow plastic tubs flying around on conveyor belts, being sorted into different tracks automatically. It reminded me of the scene in "Monsters, Inc." where are the bedroom doors are flying around on different tracks.
Work was divided into different stages:
1. Taking delivery from supply trucks, checking that contents were correct and in good shape. Contents placed into tubs that were conveyed to multiple different areas of the warehouse.
2. Storing items. Tubs of incoming items were delivered to a storage station. Robots brought storage pods (6-7 feet tall) with many cubbies up to the station. Different pods had different sized cubbies. A storage worker would scan each item from the tubs, and choose some cubby to put the item into. It looked like a camera watched which cubby they stored into to record it. cubbies could hold multiple different items. Apparently they are careful to never put two similar items in the same cubby, to make it easier for the next stage:
3. Picking items from storage. When an order needs to be fulfilled, the robots would bring a line of pods up to a person who would pick the needed item out of the correct cubby of each pod. All the items would go into a tub, to be conveyed to somewhere else for packing.
4. Packing the items for shipment. A person gets the items out of the tub, puts them in the correct sizes box, adds the air pockets for protection and seals up the box, which is then conveyed to another machine that weighs them and labels them for shipment.
5. Outgoing shipping distributed to different trucks based on geo location to ship to.
We walked around the warehouse with a few guides, and headphones to be able to listen to them. Our guide was excellent in being able to explain things and genuinely enthusiastic about the whole process. At the end they gave us branded water bottles too.
I asked our guide what he thought would happen as they began to automate more and more of the jobs. He said that they would shift people over to new roles and gave an example of a time in the past when they automated some job and instead split up roles to have a separate person do QA / checking of orders where before the same person had to fill an order and check it. He also spoke of another fulfillment center in Southern California where they automated a job, then later reversed course and went back to all manual because the people at that center decided that it was done better that way for them. I was surprised that decisions over automation were made locally at each center.
We hung around the building afterward, and bought lunch from a taco truck outside, and ate at some picnic tables where many employees also ate. I talked to some of them to try to get a less biased perspective from the employees. When I asked them how they liked working there, the most common answer I got was "It's a job." They said that expectations were high and they had to work hard. Some shifts were more desirable than others. One man said that it was tough, but he was very loyal because a year before Amazon had chosen to pay for his cancer treatment and he said they didn't have to. I left with a positive impression of the operation.
I'd recommend taking the tour if there's a fulfillment center nearby. You need to register in advance for a time, but it's all free.
Such a shame that this is the top comment here. People at that level are watching their job options shrink at an incredible place. Qualify your statement; robots are only "better" because they are cheaper.
Well, Robots may be cheaper, but they may also be more accurate. In my 20 years shopping with Amazon, I have very occasionally received the wrong items, so maybe robots will combat that, or reduce the need to double check, etc.
I agree, low-skill jobs are shrinking, but we should not expect companies to solve that. We have a government and we vote. Ideally, we should all be asking the government to propose solutions to this problem, not expecting it to be inside the corporate charter.
If my anecdotal experience of Amazon deliveries is anything to go by, the mistakes may well have been made by a computer - on a couple of occasions I've received the wrong item, then gotten in touch with Amazon whose customer service have apologised big time, then sent me another item - only to have another incorrect item arrive a few days later. Another E-mail to Amazon, another apology, another incorrect item in my mailbox a few days later. My guess is the bins containing the items have been labelled incorrectly, thus leading the poor warehouse worker to pick the wrong item time and time again.
Robots will make the same mistake, only faster. :/
With the current political gridlock voting is not enough. Workplaces -- the very entities that provide the jobs we need to earn a living -- need to shoulder more of the burden they inflict from the zero-sum game that they're paying. They hold a disproportionate amount of the world's wealth and they need to take responsibility for it.
I understand that completely. The way to hold companies accountable is to increase taxes on them, or increase regulations.
Companies solve to a given tax burden and regulatory regime. Their solutions can be influenced by changing the rules or the rewards.
Personally, I find it likely that no amount of regulation will solve the problem of creating employment opportunity for low skill workers. I think that we either need to create those jobs through the government (e.g. WPA, CCC, etc), or raise taxes to improve the amount of dollars spent supporting underemployed people, or investing in the skills.
The economy is not a zero-sum game, nor are corporate profits. Increases in productive efficiency create objectively more wealth overall, and those benefits diffuse out to every socioeconomic class (the classic conservative snark that even poor people have cars, refrigerators, and air conditioning, living better than medieval kings in many ways, is not inaccurate). We are living in an era where megacorporations and their related efficiency gains will rapidly increase the "standard of living" for a population which is (nonetheless!) going to get more miserable over time.
Stepping past the "zero-sum" claim, though, I agree that corporations should take responsibility for their incredibly powerful role in modern society, but I don't see a mechanism by which this could happen. The entire point of a regulated liberal democracy is to create a legislative landscape which modifies the incentive structures of businesses to "coerce" them into providing more social benefit than cost.
There is also nothing wrong with some level of redistributism, as long as it doesn't blindly ignore economic reality (a la communism). Many of the right-leaning nerds here on HN are in favor of universal basic income for that reason.
If that is true then why is wealth inequality so high? I have a hard time believing the argument that that wealth manifests as tech toys and amenities when the amounts of money that are in question here outweigh technology a million-fold.
UBI's an option -- one that I'm in favor of -- but as long as it is an idea and not reality there are still millions of people getting shafted without a lot of recourse, short of restructuring one's entire life and starting over in a new career. An expensive and emotionally draining transition that weak-ass severance packages fail to adequately compensate for.
If corporate tax payers were actually paying taxes and not sitting on a dragon's hoard of cash I might be more in favor of increased automation, but the fact is reserves being as high as they are means that automation is not so necessary in many sectors short of unreasonable and unethical shareholder demands.
Wealth inequality is because capitalism. We collectively permit a very large share of wealth to return to owners of capital. Frequently, this is concentrated because of a variety of financial realities (e.g. large amounts of liquid collateral make it easier to gain leverage, which can increase returns, etc.). OTOH, this return to capital has made the retirement funds and investments of many people's pensions possible. After all, Vanguard and others like them are probably the biggest beneficiaries of the great return on capital (who do you think "Shareholders" are?).
Balancing that return, is of course the relatively lackluster returns on cash. Companies sit on cash not because they enjoy counting it, but because they cannot find appropriately productive uses of it. They also hold it because it helps them cope with uncertainty (of economic reality, regulation, opportunity, etc). Taxing cash is fine, but companies will just change how they balance their uncertainty with other methods.
It sounds like what you are concerned with is that labor is not receiving an equal share of the output, compared with capital. this is likely because true labor productivity has not been great (https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/below-trend-the-us-pro...) and also because capitalists (including pension fund shareholders, often the workers themselves) are engaged in rent-seeking on behalf of their capital. I think in many cases this reflects a shift in the role of savings from the employee to the employer. In eras past, the employee received relatively more pay compared to shareholders, but was required to save for themselves. Corporates that offered pensions had to set aside money to managed those obligations directly. In modern times, corporations tend to create retirement benefits that come from an employee's salary and the company's money, but which have been underfunded due to the assumption of future returns. This "optimistic" assumption about rate of return on the 401k/retirement fund/pension funds of today drives a lot of capital into the role of rent seeking from corporations. Corporations respond by trying to meet their shareholder demands, and corporate officers tend to be the beneficiaries of generally capital friendly activity, since they themselves are shareholders.
There's a lot to unwind here, and a lot more that I haven't written, but I think it is best to not assume that there can be a single solution to a very complex problem which results from a system built of many interacting components.
I'll agree that individual pension-holders and retirement-account holders create something of a perverse incentive, since decisionmaking about capital markets generally improves them less than they think and incentivizes their demise, but how many private-sector jobs nowadays even offer a pension? I imagine the pensioners' argument will hold less and less weight going forward as these populations retire and die off.
I am not saying there is a single solution to the complex problem of low-level work disappearing. However, there are many countries where the business culture is more willing to hold on to labor (non-english-speaking western europe, the specific example I am thinking of is big-box retail in France and Germany, though I've also seen this with the lack of self-serve gas stations in parts of South America); these are still successful businesses doing well in their sectors and in many cases out-competing American entrants to their markets. (And yes the reasons for their success are often better cultural fit than foreign entrants versus comparing where the spend their money) Yet the American zeitgeist seems to be heading full-on into mass automation with its eyes wide shut, when there is already so much money floating around that it doesn't really seem necessary. What labor crises are there that necessitate the deployment of automation? (I don't think rising minimum wages nor increasing threat of unionization count as they do not raise costs above what can be absorbed by capital hoarding)
Agree that there are fewer pensions, however, I think the incentives for rent seeking in 401Ks are still quite strong, and the 401K is quite common for professional jobs.
I'm not in full agreement here. Having spent nearly a decade in customer service, I've found that it requires:
+ Lots of empathy
+ The willingness to learn and be wrong
+ A ton of training
Even then, human-based customer service is still subjected to the whims of:
+ Gut checks
+ Power trips
+ Misinformation/misinterpretation of policy (whether intentional or not)
+ Lots of emotion on both sides of the interaction
Not every single customer service interaction requires a human behind it. At some point, there are simpler and more efficient ways of solving a problem besides throwing another human's time at it. Robots can easily process replacements without requiring a human being hear about why it needs to happen. They can quickly identify when something is late and proactively issue a credit.
Piling on to this, customer service isn't just an interaction with an [entity] when something goes wrong. I would fairly categorize the initial shopping & fulfillment experience in the context of Amazon's e-commerce product as "customer service". If it solves your problem correctly & reliably, I'd call that "good customer service".
On the flipside, I hate nearly every non-human interaction introduced in the last few years that I have to make. With the exception of withdrawing money from an ATM (later edit- and some kinds of online shopping), automated customer service experiences have always been worse, mostly because they always seem to be programmed with a very narrow and optimistic set of goals in mind. Life would be even more of a hell if I couldn't mash 0 to speak to an operator in a lot of cases; as it is that option is already hidden.
There isn't a lot of good reason to be optimistic about the future either; chatbots and fast food kiosks were a flop (and rightfully so) and most of these other styles of interaction feel forced and constricting.
Humans may have their flaws but you can't beat the fact that they're what other humans are comfortable around.
The issue isnt that low-skill jobs are being replaced by robots, since many of them are kind of shitty and/or physically harmful by being repetitive, etc. So it's not necessarily a bad thing to see them disappear.
The problem we have is with the existing low-skill workforce: how can we re-train them in an effective manner.
This is a platitude that is said often, but there is no evidence to support it. There is no law of the universe that says whenever a job gets automated, a new type of work pops out of the aether to employ displaced people. It is wishful thinking at best.
Well, if you look at history it keeps happening. Imagine if you said in 1900 that almost all farm jobs would be eliminated in 100 years. The future would be almost unimaginable, but we've turned out okay.
However I think the problem is we're at a point where things are churning so rapidly that many are being left behind. Your 50-year-old truck driver is not in a position to learn a new skill every 5-10 years to stay afloat, or uproot his life and move to a new city where they need workers.
Furthermore, there's conceivably a point when we won't need very many unskilled workers at all -- when we finally run out of things for average people to do -- and humans don't tend to treat other humans very well when they aren't needed. However, that's further off than the churn economy we have right now.
It doesn't "keep happening", it's happened exactly twice, in the two industrial revolutions, in each case the new type of work that needed millions of human hands was obvious. There is no guarantee that it will happen again, especially given that new industrial inventions require no human intervention at all.
To fall back on an example that is not my own, imagine a conversation in 1900 between two horses:
Horse 1: I'm worried about these new automobile things, they might take our jobs
Horse 2: Don't worry, every technological development that displaced horse work in the past has led to more newer and better jobs for horses, there will always be work for us. Just look at trains, we don't have to pull big loads anymore, now we just draw carts and support riders, who knows what great jobs are just around the corner.
The world's horse population peaked in 1915, and is now down by 70% in the US.
In many of those past cases, the new way to do something involved new machines, which required new or expanded manufacturing to build, new or expanded supply chains to provide the materials to make the new machine, and created new jobs to operate and maintain the new machines.
Much of the new present day automation does not involve new machines. It often instead involves just interfacing a computer to an existing machine and writing software to let that computer replace the human operator of the machine. Those computers and interfaces are commodity items, largely built in automated factories.
Look at how retail has changed in the past 30 years. I usually point out video rental stores as an example of technological disruption. Rental stores and stores that offered rentals as part of their mix made up something like 45,000 locations, and maybe about 125k jobs. They were replaced by maybe 20k jobs or less, with redbox and netflix combined only accounting for 8kish jobs.
Retail changed from a career that offered full time jobs to one making use of a just in time workforce, and has suffered tremendous consolidation over that period.Like entre chains and concept stores have declined; something like Media Play is dead and no longer able to be revived. Even Gamestop suffers, as the amount of physical releases declines.
I think retail shows it can be pretty dire indeed.
I don't need evidence to the contrary, what I said is the null hypothesis. If there's proof that every job lost to automation will necessarily mean one additional job opening in a different field, you are welcome to provide it. In absence of such evidence, I'm going to stick with the default belief: a job lost means a job lost, period.
And what is stopping that small business from starting up right now? Considering how terribly Amazon treats their workers, people should be lining up around the block to apply.
Dollars to donuts, the answer is the small business can't afford to start up because Amazon uses its monopolistic power to crush it, and that power will only grow as they continue to automate.
Where are the new opportunities here?
Does the number of people employed designing and manufacturing these machines come close to the number of people put out of work by their creation?
Let's not pretend that Amazon is some benevolent force here. It's the same company that sets work targets high enough to force employees to have to pee in bottles and penalises sick and pregnant workers for taking time off or breaks. [1]
>Yes, now those workers won't have such horrible conditions.
Instead of working in "horrible" conditions, these workers are now simply unemployed. Do you think they see that as an improvement of their position in life?
This sounds like good news. I've read lots of negative stories about the working conditions in Amazon warehouses. It would be great if all the jobs could be automated.
Sure, it's good news, just not for the people you're thinking of. Think about people who work in Amazon warehouses despite those conditions. Why do they do that? Because the alternatives are worse. This just removes these jobs and leaves them to face those alternatives.
I think HN's tune would be quite different if someone came up with a technology that eliminated half of all programming jobs. Not quite so many people would be saying, "This is great! I for one look forward to technological advancement."
I do think the future should involve more automation, I just think we should be -- I dunno, a little less gleeful about it and think about the people it's impacting.
Tools to improve speed of development have existed for ages, twice the speed = twice less developers in a blunt way. (that includes even programming languages)
Personally I'd consider it an improvement - if I job can be automated, it should be.
> twice the speed = twice less developers in a blunt way
Except that's not how that works. Increasing the productivity of a job does not eliminate it. A job is eliminated when it's no longer necessary.
Unless you live in a parallel dimension, we're both in the world where there's more and more software development being done every day. Twice the speed results in twice the output, not half the developers.
> Increasing the productivity of a job does not eliminate it.
Of course it does. Not on an individual level, but if suddenly one employee can do three times more work, there is no need to recruit 2 more full time jobs to address the increasing needs. So on the whole, productivity will destroy jobs, but the good news is that the additional returns will create other jobs in other areas.
If suddenly one developer can do the job of 3, then the other two will be assigned to some of the other unstaffed things they could be doing to also make the company money. Most places I’ve worked have a huge backlog of unstaffed work just waiting to be picked up.
That's just a disingenuous distortion of semantics. You're deliberately ignoring the key difference between skill-based, white-collar jobs and unskilled, blue-collar jobs. The former are not "destroyed" by productivity, as you put it. They change what the workers have to do, but the workers are, for the most part, able to adapt.
None of the advances in software development have eliminated software development. Hell, there are still job openings for COBOL developers. CI hasn't resulted in a whole swaths of people suddenly out of work because they were running tests by hand and now there's nothing else they can do.
He may not have phrased it perfectly, but his point is good. Picture this: you are hired to do a contract job. The tooling today is arguably better than 20 years ago. You bill by the hour, and take fewer hours.
Now, extend that to salaried positions. There is a certain amount of work that must happen. Tooling improves, devs become more idle, management consultant fires one (over time).
This has been somewhat negated only because the role of computers has been growing quickly and outpacing the growth in efficiency. That will change at some point. As you said, there won't be a case where swathes of people are suddenly out of work, it will be gradual.
A guy I know is an economist and does consulting for factories to optimize production. He has talked about how some areas these days have removed large groups of humans and replaced them with single humans observing machines. Eventually, development could reach a similar place.
It depends on the demand "function." We only need so many socks. If sockmakers get more efficient, there'll be fewer sockmakers and prices will come down shrinking the industry.
In some cases, if productivity increases, and the price performance follows, we will consume far more of a thing, growing the market and employing more people.
We have way more work than we have time for (or the budget to hire that many more developers). If automation allowed each of us to do 3x more work, it probably still wouldn't be enough.
There are two types of products in this world, lawyers and cigarettes.
If manufacturing cigarettes gets more/less expensive, people will pay more/less for their cigarettes. If it takes fewer people to make cigarettes, fewer people will have jobs making cigarettes. The number of cigarettes smoked stays constant.
If you have more lawyers, you'll have more lawsuits, contracts and legal letters. If it gets easier to do contracts or lawsuits lawyers will take longer lunches. Lawyer fees stay constant.
> twice the speed = twice less developers in a blunt way
I think you mean half fewer developers, not “twice less”, but...
No, twice the speed means twice the value produced per unit labor, which means at the same labor price level, more, not fewer, programmers will be hired (or, at constant employment level, pay should increase); the actual result is some increase in pay and some increase in employment.
Technology that provides output multipliers on a job are different than technology that replaces the function of workers at lower cost.
Another angle to what you're describing is that a huge percentage of programmers' jobs serve to eliminate other jobs. That's been the case for newer technologies since at least the beginning of the industrial revolution.
That said, the long term effect hasn't been to reduce jobs. Ultimately, not paying someone to do X ends up also creating jobs by freeing up money to pay someone to do Y.
Obviously that's small solace for someone who lost their job and isn't finding a new one. But we can frame the story in different ways that allow us to find different places to place the blame, and different ways to find alternative solutions. I personally don't like blaming technology because that implies that the best solution is to slow or halt the development of any technology that automates or eliminates the need for things that could be done by humans. As a human who enjoys eating out at restaurants and having access to high-quality medical care, and does not enjoy mowing wheat with a scythe and re-thatching his own roof, I'm not fond of that framing. As someone who dislikes memes that assume that learning is something that ends in your 20s, or that the world is teeming with people who have 6 years' experience in 3 year old technologies, I'm much more interested in looking for framings that look to improve everyone's access to new jobs instead of trying to preserve the old ones.
"technology that eliminated half of all programming jobs"
Technology changes so much that half of all programming jobs that exist today will be gone in 10 years. Some new ones will be created though.
The scary thing to me though, is if industry truely embraces open source/block chain. We could get into a state where most software is open... and fixing it is a bounty system, then 20% of programmers would make 80% of the money as they build AI to indentify opportunities, and solutions.
I pretty frequently see people answer these things with studies showing automation isn't (yet) causing structural unemployment.
And, ok, it's good to have those studies, but they're not a final word on the topic. We also know that people who are displaced into other industries mid-career generally see permanent setbacks in wages, are frequently forced to move, and take long-term hits to their emotional wellbeing comparable to other major life crises.
If automation is 'just' accelerating the sort of turnover that's always existed, that still implies we should be deeply concerned and start finding better ways to support the people it affects.
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 surfing for a few years while they write bad poetry.
I mean imagine living in a rural, middle-of-nowhere US town where everyone pretty much lives on $800/mo from the government. What would you do out there? Would you care about high school if it's totally okay to not do anything? Maybe you'd go off to college, but then come back when it gets hard because it's totally okay if you never amount to anything. I would probably just spend my life on the internet and playing games while feeling guilty. Others would escape through drugs.
It is possible to change our culture and attitudes to work, but that's a really big change.
> Maybe you'd go off to college, but then come back when it gets hard because it's totally okay if you never amount to anything.
I would say, it's totally okay for any person, in rural US or urban, to not go to college if they don't need it. I am a huge proponent of higher ed, including making it freely available to all, but this idea that you have to go to college to "amount to something" is damaging.
Additionally, your use of "amount to something" is showing your own bias towards feeling that white-collar work defines success in life. Not everyone feels like this -- as you've noted, but it's not limited to "college-educated hippies." I know many, many people who work solely to put food on the table and find their fulfillment elsewhere. This could be via volunteering, art (not only hippie art), mentoring others, or pursuing dream jobs in their free time. Imagine if the safety net of UBI existed -- how many more people would feel confident taking the risk to open the restaurant they've always dreamed of opening, or art gallery, or other cottage-industry?
Furthermore, It's not about preventing people from working if they want to. It's about ending minimum-wage slavery -- making sure people don't need to work two or three minimum wage jobs just so their children have food to eat and a roof over their heads.
> I would probably just spend my life on the internet and playing games while feeling guilty.
You say this, but I kind of doubt it. That guilt would spur you to do something of value.
> Others would escape through drugs.
There is currently an epidemic of drug use in the US due to all the people trying to escape from the misery of their $7.25/hour existences.
> practical, no-nonsense people who are used to having work define who they are
These people can still let work define themselves, with less competition and more responsibilities which would make them more happy.
> Would you care about high school if it's totally okay to not do anything? Maybe you'd go off to college, but then come back when it gets hard because it's totally okay if you never amount to anything.
I think this is totally okay. Every time there is a topic on college there is the debate of whether college should be job training or overall growth of individuals. This solves that problem altogether and all the way to high schools. Also, when those people enjoyed enough of their free time and want to go back and learn, they will be able to do so without pressure. We cram 12-16 years of school on kids because most of them can't afford to not to. We already see middle class and wealthy children taking gap years to explore life, this just let everyone do that.
> I would probably just spend my life on the internet and playing games while feeling guilty.
Do you spend all your time on the internet and play games after work? If you don't, why would you when you don't have to work?
> Others would escape through drugs.
I'd say more people escape through drugs due to pressure in life than the lack of pressure.
I think that you would find that people reorganize their value structures pretty quickly when not forced to work. Think of anyone you know who is retired. In the current scheme we think of people as 'earning' their retirement, but whether or not it is earned or given, every retired person has to figure out how to fill their day. Most I know do this by being more active in their community and spending lots of time with friends and family.
I one hundred percent agree with you on what the results would be-- without there being repercussions for not persevering with anything, and with all bad choices safely having the corners rounded off by UBI, most people won't do anything much. And as much as they feel like they don't want to do work now, this lack of any motivation from outside themselves will have a deleterious effect on people. I mean, picture what the average person does with their free time! Watch TV, scroll Twitter, stuff like that. And they're constantly complaining about how much they regret not using their time wisely and blaming Netflix for eating their time, etc. Now imagine if no one had to do anything, if you totally failed at something or just didn't bother to do anything, the government would prop you up. Imagine the social issues that would bring. Imagine the difficulty.
Where I disagree with you, however, is the assumption that finding life meaning and purpose and a sense of usefulness and competency and enjoyment out of work is a thing limited to specifically today's culture, a thing that we can just change. For one, most people don't have the introspection and willpower to self-actualize and create their own meaning in life. This is a huge reason we have depression and nihilism and existential dispair. Two, we have stories from history and interactions from other cultures that show that finding meaning in work holds true for them as well.
The problem with not using free time wisely is that there is usually supply and fragmentation issues -- not enough free time (or at least feels like it) and chunks that feel small enough that you have trouble fitting anything significant in before you have to drop everything and go make another buck. So the time is spent on useless things that are easy to pick up.
For example, unless currently possessed by a Strange Mood (in Dwarf Fortress artifact making sense), it takes me 4 free days to even start (or resume) something productive more complex than general housework stuff. That excludes most of weekends out, since they are too short.
People who would have trouble finding valuable (to them) things to do under UBI regime, have even more trouble now, unless they lucked out and consider the job they must do now to be more valuable than the money it brings. And not a soul sucking waste of time that doesn't leave enough time and energy to even realize something fulfilling can be done.
Okay that's a good point. Also I love the DF reference, DF is my all-time favorite game.
My original comment somewhat lacked empathy, perhaps because I don't suffer from problems with free time fragmentation because I'm always possessed by a Strange Mood. I still think my point stands though. I meet a lot of people with what I know to be fairly large chunks of time that don't do anything with them anyway, not because they feel like they can't achieve something in that time but because they don't have any hobbies or ideas, or particular skills. In fact, that's true for most people I meet, and it's actually difficult for me to tell whether that's an artifact of perceived free time fragmentation or not. And this is in a culture where people are 100% encouraged to develop skills and hobbies.
But think about it, as much as we hear about retired people doing epic things, we also don't hear about retired people, like my grandparents, being terminally bored and ending up back to the workforce.
Here's the thing. As much as jobs can be boring and soul-sucking, to an extent they provide more of something then doing nothing while on UBI does. In addition, they provide a lot of training for life, like perseverance through boring things, and people skills (this is my experience at least) that you can't really get anywhere else. Plus, while jobs might be unfun, developing any kind of skill and competency at something genuinely gives people a sense of self-worth. Often, jobs provide the sort of skill that is easier to master than, say, art or poetry. Unless UBI comes with some sort of education or structured skill development, it really won't be good for people in the way you're suggesting.
I'm willing to consider it possible however that there might be more people capable of learning skills and achieving self-actualization than we currently see manifest in society, and that with UBI those people will be freed up to do things. I just don't think that it's a totally positive thing. Besides all kinds of other logistical issues and issues like it ending up subsidizing drug addictions and such.
You might have too high of an expectation what it means to lead a good life given your own drive. That itself is a part of "work or other productive endeavors define worth of people" culture I think. This is a good stance (consequentially) to have in society when unproductive members are a drag on everybody else.
But the main premise of UBI is that you just don't need economic output from all the people you have. So the only question remaining is how it would affect those people, the ones lacking the drive and ability to become useful. That is not the question of societal judgment -- if UBI ends up funding lots of mindless candy crashing it is only bad insofar as it affects the person. If they are satisfied, that's the end of the question.
I agree that a sudden transition for people who worked whole life and are finding themselves in effective retirement might be harsh, but the alternative here is sudden job loss and poverty, which is more immediately dire.
Might be a question to be resolved with data and studies I suppose. But my expectation (given that you don't need people to be economically productive anymore) is that benefit of having free time will be positive on balance, and the negative outcomes would be just another logistical challenge of education and motivation.
Consider also all the people in golden chains, who had ability and drive (which is arguably just another form of ability) to get good jobs, but who would rather apply those talents to something else.
Interesting. I don't think in the current society unproductive people are necessarily more of a drag on everyone else than they would be under UBI. We still have to fund UBI. And if UBI doesn't fund good things, that's a lot of other people's work that's being wasted paying out UBI. Also, who knows how much of the workforce we'd lose without the necessity to hold jobs, and how much economic output would be damaged, which in turn could make UBI untenable.
Keep in mind that (quoting a random UBI plan that seems fairly representative), a universal payment of $12,000 per year to each adult U.S. resident over age 18 would cost roughly $3 trillion per year... And according to the IRS, in 2016 people payed a total of $1.4 trillion in taxes[1] meaning we'd have to triple current taxes. Even taxing the top 1% at 100% income tax wouldn't pay for that.
Also, there are some studies recently started concerning UBI, so we'll see.
The other thing is that that money isn't free, it has to be taken from someone, and given to someone else... So the question is, why do the people receiving that money deserve it? If UBI is an almost entirely good force, and isn't mostly just wasted, then maybe it's worth considering, but even then the amount of money needed and morality of it is iffy. Without the garuntee that it would do anything good, I'm even more dubious of it.
Most jobs in the near term that will be automated are going to be low paying clerical (secretaries/data entry)/predictable physical jobs (think fast food prep). A lot of these people have to work multiple minimum wage jobs to support their families. You're delusional if you think all those people working at McDonald's get a sense of pride and worth every time they fill a container with fries.
I disagree with your assumption about education. A lot of people take pride in their knowledge. Most great scientists throughout history were basically trust fund babies. That's how they could afford to not work in a field and instead get educated and study science.
I want us to look at this the way we look at the invention of agriculture and not some dystopia where everyone is living in a slum. Agriculture freed up a lot of people from worrying about finding food. Do you think they were against growing grain and lost their sense of purpose because they didn't have to spend days running down deer? I seriously doubt it. This then led to people specializing in other fields. We see people becoming masons and building grand structures. Moving from militias to standing armies. Studying the stars leading to the ability to navigate the oceans. I think it's going to free up a lot of people who would have other wise been minimum wage indentured servants to have the ability to study and become great scientists or writers or doctors or whatever. Who knows how many great minds were wasted toiling away as a serf to some lord.
No, UBI discourages “parasitic drag” on the aggregate economy compared to conventional means-tested welfare, while more effectively addressing the distributional issues which create the problems means-tested welfare is instituted to address.
UBI encourages the disinterested to leave the workforce, instead of taking a job they hate because they must have a job, and doing as little as possible, resisting change, lowering coworker's morale, and being a drag.
It frees companies to only hire people who are interested in what the company is doing and enthusiastic about it.
It frees people to do constructive, contributing things they might want to do, but which wouldn't pay enough, or which they wouldn't be able to do full time but can do part time.
UBI is a social security measure, not a way of maintaining a fair society. If one's job is automated, they get pushed to the lowest class of the society. UBI just guarantees that their life will be a bit less miserable.
Having one third of the value created by everyone pooled together to distribute to everyone sounds completely fine to me. I'd say the society as a whole plays a role that is on average greater than 1/3 on your success.
First of all, GDP is a bad measure for "value created". It's more of a measure for "money spent" and that generally includes a lot of long-term and debt, especially in the US.
Secondly, you can't actually redistribute GDP. You could (in theory) take 100% of the profits of all businesses, that would add up to about 12% of GDP:
Notice the drop around 2008? That's what happens when a lot of debt can't be serviced anymore.
Lastly, "society as a whole" doesn't contribute to anyone's success. Just because you are a member of society doesn't automatically imply you have done anything for anyone. If I was offered a UBI on an Amazon's worker's salary, I would just retire, or at least drastically reduce my workload. A lot of my money goes towards my retirement anyway, so why bother?
This is entirely different from a "subsistence UBI", which I do support in principle.
It would overlap with a lot of what you are already paying. It completely overlaps with social security and partially overlaps with the taxes that goes to social welfare.
For the rest of your tax money, there are concrete places that those are going to and if you don't like them, we can altogether as a society do something about it. And guess what, with UBI people will have a lot more time and freedom to spend on actually participating in politics.
Sure, in the end it might bumps it up from 1/3 to 1/2 maybe, but you are getting a lot of that back anyway as UBI to yourself. Even at 1/2 I don't think its unfair.
I'm a UBI supporter in theory. It's the practical math that always leaves me hung up. Even $600/mo/adult citizen is a seemingly prohibitive amount of money (works out to approximately the entire amount of all individual income tax payments, or about half of total receipts, including FICA).
And of course, $600/mo/adult is an extremely meager existence.
> And of course, $600/mo/adult is an extremely meager existence.
Well the good news is that once UBI is implemented all future elections will boil down to politicians promising a bigger UBI increase than the other guy. Problem solved!
If we take all the money the Netherlands spends on social security, welfare, pensions, etc, and add extra money from increased taxes (make it flat 50-60%), every single household can have a UBI of about 42 000 euros/year.
The numbers are similar for other western economies.
> If we take all the money the Netherlands spends on social security, welfare, pensions...
Okay...
> ... add extra money from increased taxes (make it flat 50-60%)
No. You can't presume anything about increased revenue from extra taxes. If you taxed income for any amount of work at 50% and you give every "household" 42,000€ (which I assume is livable in NL) you would drastically reduce the incentive to work and pay taxes, so your actual tax revenue goes down.
> The numbers are similar for other western economies.
The numbers generally say that if you pool all the social spending, you can redistribute it to everyone and it will pay for a subsistence level of living. However, a big part of that pool is pensions, which are liabilities in proportion to the amount paid by the individual. A lot of pensioners would be subsidizing people who never paid into the system. That's the main problem.
>add extra money from increased taxes (make it flat 50-60%)
Good luck passing a bill that raises my effective tax rate from 17% to 55%. Obviously if you take a whole lot more money from everyone else there will be more to hand out to others.
The effective total rate of taxes may not be 55%, but the rate on income earned would be. Who would work full-time in an ordinary job if it was taxed at 55% when they simultaneously get paid a generous UBI?
Also remember you counted in pensions into your budget, those are separate from taxes. So the net profit from working would be maybe 30% or less - ridiculous!
Current social security spending gives us $9k per household.
Cutting military spending in half (utopian, but so is UBI): $3200 per hh.
Raising income tax to a simple flat 50% rate gives us extra 0.7 trillion or $7k per hh.
Single payer would give us about $1k per hh plus free healthcare for everyone. No more insurance payments.
That is already about $21k per year per household.
> Raising income tax to a simple flat 50% rate gives us extra 0.7 trillion or $7k per hh.
If income tax was raised to 50% flat and you keep all the social security and single payer spending, your paycheck would net maybe 25% of your salary. Who works full time for 25 cents on the dollar when they can just retire?
So then people won't work full time, your tax revenue, your single payer money, your pension money, it all goes down. It can't pay for your UBI.
Even worse, all this spending you are talking about redistributing isn't even paid for today. It's funded by debt. With the boomers retiring, there are huge amounts of unfunded liabilities.
It may not be obvious to you, but what you are proposing is that we can just all sit back, work less, print money and everyone will be better off. It's a fantasy.
To be clear, I support a UBI, but one has to be very careful about the actual amount.
> one has to be very careful about the actual amount.
And limits/process on how/if it can be raised. Otherwise, it's likely to devolve into people literally voting themselves an ever-increasing share of money from the treasury...
I'm not sure if I support UBI or not. There are good arguments on both sides. I suspect that there are unintended consequences of it that are currently completely unknown (I don't know if they are good or bad).
If I'm to support UBI it would be a meager existence: enough that you can eat. Like socialism UBI need to account for eventually somebody needs to do something. Food needs to come from someplace, that means somebody had to work for it, and that somebody should get some reward for it.
The answer? 2,754 people with a combined $9.2 trillion to their name.
In other words, half of US GDP, or one and a half years of UBI as proposed here. That assumes of course all the billionaires in the world can be "convinced" to give up all of their wealth for UBI in the US.
This is the part that confuses me about UBI. Why would anyone work if it became widespread? You could just stay at home and read, work on hobbies, do art, serve other people, play games, etc. instead of going to work. I pay tens of thousands of dollars in taxes, but if UBI was implemented I'd be paying nothing in taxes (assuming my UBI is not taxed - though, they tax social security, so they probably will tax UBI).
UBI haters somehow never fail to pretend as if no one has put an ounce of thought into how to pay for a proposal that intends on giving everyone free money.
It is a huge amount of money. Though the real question is the feedback loops UBI creates IMHO... The money will be injected straight back in the economy as people are still living paycheck to paycheck at that wage, so given studies show every $1 given to people on lower income results in around $1.2 in GDP* you'd expect overall GDP to grow provided its the UBI level and tax system is properly balanced.
Clever use of UBI also allows redoing many labour laws & protections because having UBI to fall back on will substantially improve the bargaining power of workers so they won't need the same protections.
* Sorry don't have a reference, seen this discussed a few places as common knowledge.
Googling: Amazon warehouse worker $14/hour. 2080 hours per year = $29K. US Adult population 252 million. Multiply: 7.4 Trillion. US GDP (2017) 19.4 Trillion. Taking only US citizen adults, the figure is still >90% of the above.
Yeah, I could do it myself, I was being sarcastic but maybe no one could tell. One question is always what is the UBI amount. Say 1k for kids, 2k for adults. Wikipedia says 18% are 14 y.o. or under, so say 25% will get 1k, 75% get 2k each month. Use 325 mil as population. 325m * (1/4 * 12k + 3/4 * 24k) = 6.8 trillion so basically the same as you. I want people to say what their vision of the size of UBI funding is. It's ambiguous, kind of like what is brexit?
The other side of it is we are a consumer spending driven economy. If consumers, especially poor people, had more money they'd spend it (unlike say overpaid software engineers like me). We'd get a big boost in the economy. Just like reducing unpayable college loans will free up much more money for the economy.
Instead of thinking about the % of the gdp, think about tax revenue. It's 3.6 trillion a year. Tripling tax overhead to fund this new thing would actually hurt the economy, even I can see that.
I agree with UBI is principle, but implementation is where the dragons are.
For one, doing UBI in a single country will cause whole number of problems. Do you keep borders relatively open and recall Europe's migrant crisis as a cute little inconvenience, or do you close them shut deal with political consequences of that -- generally people who are for closing borders are also against taking personal hits to prop up others. (and dealing with that involves doubling down on nationalism and other ugly notions).
With a planetary government and mostly automated industrial base (that likely needs more power over individual countries than US federal government has over individual US states), it will probably work. Good luck getting there.
Or with most of the countries (by population) implementing comparable UBI regimes mostly at the same time. So we'll have to wait for at least China and India to catch up.
I’d bet half of the programming jobs continually disappear in a cyclic way.
What proportion of bare metal system administrators is there left now that AWS/GCP/Azure has taken the world ? What proportion of people still work in C ? etc.
Programming is perhaps different because people expect from the start the floor to move under their feet, and try to stay ahead and keep learning new stuff constantly.
> I think HN's tune would be quite different if someone came up with a technology that eliminated half of all programming jobs.
We could easily eliminate half of all programming jobs if we just stopped creating work for ourselves. As it stands, we're the gatekeepers, our work is so opaque that no outsider could accurately estimate how much time we are wasting.
Luckily for us, markets aren't very good at eliminating this kind of inefficiency, see "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber.
> Think about people who work in Amazon warehouses despite those conditions.
I thought everyone wanted these jobs to disappear because Amazon was like a sweatshop or something? Now that Amazon is getting rid of such tedious jobs people are complaining? You can't have it both ways.
First of all, if you think the worst thing about these jobs is that they're tedious, you really should take a better look at the reports about the working conditions involved.
As for "having it both ways", you're presenting a false dichotomy. You're implying that the society must: either 1) preserve the status quo that makes those people work in those conditions, or 2) eliminate those jobs in a fashion that makes it worse for those people. Those are not the only options.
This is not really a completely new situation that humanity has never faced before. Throughout our history, there have been numerous examples of undesirable jobs being so tightly entangled with the economy that getting rid of them is problematic.
A few examples that come to mind are cocaleros in places like Bolivia, sex tourism for pedophiles in places like Sri Lanka, or child labor just about everywhere. I think that -- despite the horrific lack of empathy present in some other comments -- we can assume most people would agree that these are things we need to get rid of. If you study the history of the efforts to do so, you will find that going about it in a ham-fisted way only makes things worse. Despite that, nobody will argue that the only alternative is to just preserve status quo.
I mean, it's like the people automated toll booths displaced. I'm sure sitting in a small box all day doing a menial task is not good for you, yet people still lament when those "jobs" go away.
Unemployment is still pretty low, so hopefully they were able to find something a little more fulfilling.
Increasing wealth concentration in certain desirable areas where prices will continue to skyrocket because the people there can afford it (those that receive the most return on capital vs. those just working on return on their own labor). Meanwhile the majority of the population decays alongside them, but at a distance that can be kept by well paid security forces.
There is the possibility of some philanthropy, perhaps. Maybe even some government policies that help change this, but I'm not sure if those are the most likely outcomes.
I guess there's always the guillotine / riot approach to bring things into check if it gets really bad, but typically that requires some sort of middle class to get things going. We also have not seen this occur at large scale in places where this already happens on earth.
EDIT: Please do not mistake my use of the word "labor" and "capital" for me identifying as some form of communist. Those are actual terms used by reasonable people (including economists!) I'd say most students of history and present day sociology might agree that this is a possibility for how wealth manifests in the future given large scale automation and no public policy changes.
'trickle down' implies a watershed, where water/wealth collects in small tributaries that come together to form a main River where wealth/water is most concentrated.
Actual trickle down economics is trickle up economics, so no shit it doesn't work. Let's just dump a bunch of water here at the mouth of the Amazon and watch it flow up into the Andes.
The 20/80 rule applies in all aspects of life. Like 20% of the soccer players account for 80% of the goals. So why wouldn't we expect it to apply to money as well? This is like a law of gravity. You can attempt to fight against it artificially but eventually it will come crashing down
And from there to fund already rich parties to continue to enforce control in a way that washes Bezos' hands clean of any wrongdoing. Outsourcing the task of maintaining inequality, per se. (Billionares funding millionares springs to mind).
Or, stated with less emotional rhetoric: Funding 1$ to the wealthy returns 0.7$ to the economy. So, from 'there' nothing, because Bezos' pocket is keeping it.
> Funding 1$ to the wealthy returns 0.7$ to the economy.
So going solely by that figure, as long as the gain in efficiency from automating a job is > 42% it's a net positive for the economy? And that's even _if_ you assume 100% of the savings goes directly into the company owner's pockets and isn't simply being re-invested somewhere else.
> So going solely by that figure, as long as the gain in efficiency from automating a job is > 42% it's a net positive for the economy?
No, because 1$ to a poor person is actually 1.12$ returned to the economy. It gets even bigger when you go into 1$ to education.
>And that's even _if_ you assume 100% of the savings goes directly into the company owner's pockets and isn't simply being re-invested somewhere else.
Well that's the thing. Even if you give money to wealthy people they're not going to invest more than a poor person will with it. A person in poverty has immediate needs to spend the money on where a wealthy person does not.
> No, because 1$ to a poor person is actually 1.12$ returned to the economy.
Okay, so >60% then, assuming the average worker at an Amazon warehouse meets your definition of "poor". Still a totally achievable figure.
> Even if you give money to wealthy people
We're not talking about _giving_ money to anyone here, we're talking about automation. Automation means efficiency gains for _Amazon_ (the corporation) not Bezos personally, so you can't just make the lazy assumption that 100% of any savings made by Amazon goes directly into Bezos' pockets (as egypturnash did earlier in this thread).
But even if you do make that ridiculous assumption, _and_ we assume your figures are correct, it still only takes a >60% efficiency gain for the economy to break even on the transaction, correct?
A >60% efficiency gain is not small at scale, and part of the reason why automation is succeeding but not exactly in all the spaces we expect. Even the article covers that jobs are being lost, but not many jobs as one would intuitively believe.
Furthermore, someone who is out of work as a result of automation will also be a loss in the broader economy (as they will need services, the government loses income tax where applicable). The math I assume gets very complicated very quickly. But claiming "and from bezos' pocket, where?" is a reductionist statement that can be met with an equally reductionist "nowhere because we know rich people don't invest as much in the economy as they take".
I think the reason automation isn't taking over as quickly as expected isn't because the efficiency gains are small, but because the capital investment required to automate is often large, and because many of the jobs that haven't yet been automated are complicated to solve in the general case. (This machine, for example, only handles boxing; it can't actually pick products off the shelves because that's a very general problem that's more difficult to solve.)
There are also numerous other economic effects to consider, such as the increased activity from capital spending on automation equipment and software, and (as you pointed out) the economic losses from higher short-term unemployment.
My initial question was only made in reply to a reductionist and intellectually lazy statement implying that the company owner is the only one who benefits from automation. I asked that question in an attempt to get the other commenter to think more carefully about their position (the answer isn't "nowhere" by the way, as the very figures you yourself provided indicate that 70% of it goes directly back into the economy). Unfortunately it doesn't look like they ever replied, but nonetheless I think I've made my point.
He will horde most of it. Occasionally he will spend on lobbying efforts, purchase insane luxury items (ie yachts), or vanity projects. Sometimes, he will splurge on a business that employee a few people. When he is feeling particularly generous, he may contribute to some project that makes home look good while putting his name on something (ie new opera house).
I believe something called 'communism' which addresses that.
Snark aside, automating shitty jobs is a Good Thing. Finding new and better jobs for those impacted should be a major political priority. Education is one aspect, but comes too late for those already on the workforce.
Places like Japan keep unemployment low by having many low skill jobs, like mall greeters and whatnot. This may be better than unemployment, but is possibly not the best use of human versatilty..
> Places like Japan keep unemployment low by having many low skill jobs, like mall greeters and whatnot. This may be better than unemployment, but is possibly not the best use of human versatilty..
An interesting aspect is that those jobs are low technical skill, but can require good to very good social skills to be done well.
Without joking, greeting an elderly entering a bank and guiding them to the section they needs to go, explain briefly what they need to do, is can be non trivial.
That’s not what people mean when referring to low skill jobs.
What you’re saying would be similar to saying a warehouse worker might be low in technical skill but high in strength skill, which just misses the point that people refer to low skill jobs as jobs that require little education or specialization.
I am not sure everyone shares that definition. Would sales or manager be a low skill job for instance ?
For a number of these positions you need little to no specific education or specialisation.
In some ways the very low social skilled worker is better at the job than the person with higher technical skills. I know some people with Downs Syndrome, their employers hire them for greeter type tasks because they obviously unsuited for anything: it makes thing move fast when the public realizes they won't get anything out of the greeter so they have to read the signs to figure out what they should know. The public likes to know that otherwise "useless" people have a productive job and so public opinion of them goes up. The greeter like the feeling of doing something useful, plus the money in their pocket. Everybody is better for this. Of course someone has available to handle trouble makers.
These "low skill" customer-facing jobs are also considered important and held in quite high regard in Japan, something we seem to have forgotten in the west.
The United States, is, in a sense, a communist country, given that most people own a good portion of major companies. However, like every other communist society literally ever, your diminutive share of ownership means little and there's still one guy in charge, except our guys differ by industry and vertical.
>most people own a good portion of major companies.
Are you revering to the stock market? I don‘t believe this is true. Just because half of adults own stock doesnt mean they own a good portion of these companies. Remember the richest 1% own 35% of the wealth.
> Just because half of adults own stock doesnt mean they own a good portion of these companies
Most people invest in mutual funds, which do own a significant portion of the largest corporations. This is fine; most communist systems in practice allow for private ownership of smaller businesses.
> Remember the richest 1% own 35% of the wealth.
This is true, but communism refers to the communal ownership of the means of production. In practice, communist societies typically end up with some small group of people having an outsized influence on the means of production. Although nominally, they own an equal share of them, this is in name only. By all metrics of control, they own a larger share. My guess is that the US (and free market systems in general with widespread ownership) is probably more egalitarian in that regard.
That's certainly one way of looking at it but I would worry if your answer to "those workers are being abused!" is always "make them redundant via automation".
Amazon's warehouse workers were abused because Amazon, not because those jobs should have been automated. They could have had more break time. They could have had lower targets. Pay them more. Paternity leave. So many things you can do to improve working conditions.
Then Amazon eliminates yet another cost that other retailers have to burden, further out-competing them.
I have no love for retail —it was my Saturday job growing up— but it does employ a huge pile of people, from warehousing through to the shop floor. As consumers, we bitch and whine about the cost this adds, and the hassle of mooching into a busy town to go and get something... So we sit back and use Amazon instead.
This is killing retail and it could also kill off manual warehousing. Retail employment in the UK us 10% of the workforce.
So what happens when Amazon replaces them too? Fewer and fewer jobs for unskilled workers. Across the board. Much more desperate people. Much more abuse.
If the alternative is no job the math works out differently. I think that a considerable number of people on this site don't really know what it like to not have employers fighting over them. Sometimes you take what you can get to feed yourself and your kids.
You said "fairly attractive" to them which might not be the best way to say that. Eating worms while lost in the woods isn't something that the vast majority would consider attractive but they would do it anyway to survive.
Honestly the best proposal I've seen for slowing down such automation is to add a tax on these machines. That'll make the cost-benefit equation less obvious. These machines won't pay for themselves in a year and then be practically free. They'll continue to cost a lot. This kind of tax would help slow the progress of such automation to a speed where society can better adjust.
And I say this as someone who absolutely loves all this kind of automation.
So how would you tax my cordless drill? It saves a ton of time versus the old bit-and-brace method. Or does the tax only apply to things that replace new jobs, not old ones?
Did the cordless drill result in tons of jobs vanishing overnight? Or did it slowly happen over many years? Is your cordless drill able to walk over and automatically do the job you would've done, firing you overnight? Since it doesn't do any of those things, seems like it wouldn't necessarily be taxed.
The best proposal is a more accessible social safety net that includes things like free higher education (or technical training) and healthcare. I don't think automation should be slowed, but the US is not equipped to handle the ensuing job displacement. Chop up the foreign invasion and domestic spying budget and reallocate toward uplifting the average worker.
Maybe we should have done that 2000 years ago. Then we wouldn't have the scourge of electricity and the candle maker's union would still be going strong: providing high paying quality jobs to the honest workers of the world.
I was going to (very slightly) disagree, but the idea that society is slower than technology is an angle that needs to be stated out loud a lot more. We can't out pace machines and its a fair reason to tax them for the time being.
That said, I don't necessarily believe "society is slow to catch up" should be a long term problem. It should be something the government mandates for x years -- so that it has a timeline to get its act together and build society towards the future.
> It should be something the government mandates for x years -- so that it has a timeline to get its act together and build society towards the future.
Be careful what you wish for. Social Security was supposed to be temporary too, but here we are, 50 years later. As Milton Friedman put it:
> Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
to be honest I am not sure your going to find warehouse work that isn't demanding. they usually all have metrics by which they are judged but we hear very little of other companies simply because Amazon is big and therefor an easy target.
be careful what you wish for, automating manual labor jobs just pushes the value of such labor lower which can further put these people behind. as labor costs rise automation will continue to push people into positions that are not easily automated or the cost doesn't suit them but I doubt the workers will always be better off.
unlike industrialization we are not bring people in to do new jobs but instead displacing people this go around. so the real work that needs to be done is to find jobs that we can train people for that have some longevity fully taking into account that many may not be able to train to do them
We could also reduce the work week and increase taxes to distribute the gains from automation, instead of relying on the goodwill of billionaires. It seems the current political populism environment is best suited for this outcome.
It's going to be an interesting economic situation when the wealth distribution is so skewed towards less than 1% of the population that no one has any money left to make billionaires, billionaires.
No, this is just a subversive form of union busting with more deleterious effects on the workers.
As a society we need to find a balance between the firm and the worker. Automating jobs away isn’t always good or always bad. But unilaterally automating workers out and them not getting something in return is bad for the worker.
I've seen a number of articles on what jobs are least likely to be automated. I'd concentrate on doing whatever is required to get my foot into the door of one of those types of jobs.
History also suggests that having a significant number of unemployed people who suddenly can't afford basic necessities because their jobs / way of life suddenly disappeared, is destabilizing as hell.
Very few people are actually suggesting that automation is bad, per se; the concern many people have is that the rate of change needs to be managed such that significant numbers of people aren't left behind. People can only retrain so fast, and some people will never be able to effectively retrain. Automation that suddenly puts them out of work needs to account for what they're supposed to do, and hopefully it's something better than "sit at home and drink themselves to death / overdose on opiates / engage in crime".
I'd rather intentionally put the brakes on automation, even though it's a hit to efficiency (and depresses the value of labor -- automation makes human labor more valuable over time), if the alternative you get with unlimited automation is a massive disenfranchisement of working people and consequent destabilization of society.
Better to keep some technologically-unnecessary jobs around than to live in a society constantly teetering on the brink of a violent populist uprising. All the efficiency gains of that automation are going to pale in comparison to the damage and loss that will happen during one night of rioting by the now-unemployed proletariat.
> Better to keep some technologically-unnecessary jobs around than to live in a society constantly teetering on the brink of a violent populist uprising.
Is there any evidence that the United States is "teetering on the bring of a violent populist uprising."? Your entire comment is hyperbolic.
But that's the whole point though. We're creating bs jobs to replace the bs jobs we automated. What's our goal as a society ? Shouldn't we think about working less, better spreading wealth, figuring out a plan so people don't have to work multiple jobs to barely survive ?
Right now almost everywhere in the world we're heading for longer work week and increased retirement age. So much for "automation will deliver us from work" we've heard over and over again for the last 60 years.
As long as we keep setting the cost of housing to "everything you've got" and the cost of health care to "everything you're gonna have", it won't matter how much new productivity we create.
> Shouldn't we think about working less, better spreading wealth, figuring out a plan so people don't have to work multiple jobs to barely survive ?
We should but that would put a decent dent in corporate profits. Germany actually followed this for a long time - since the aftermath of WW2 up until the collapse of the UdSSR we had the "Soziale Marktwirtschaft" which is basically what you described. Then after communism fell, neoliberalism took over.
I grew up in a country where communism has won - I know for sure that it's an utopia. I really hate communists, socialists and other imbeciles who believe that people/business should give their money to lazy people just to make everybody "equal". No, people are not equal - somebody is smarter, somebody works more, somebody is a great artist, somebody is just a lazy alcoholic.
So no, we should not think about "spreading" wealth, we should think how to train people for new skills/professions, required by the market.
> I grew up in a country where communism has won - I know for sure that it's an utopia.
I don't think communism is the answer either.
> I really hate communists, socialists and other imbeciles who believe that people/business should give their money to lazy people just to make everybody "equal".
That's a very individualistic point of view, I used to hold a similar one a few years ago but traveling made me change my mind. Look at the US for example, people are dying of diabetes, in 2019, because they can't afford insulin. That's in the #1 country in the world according to "the market".
It might be lazy people, it might also be disabled people, people born in the wrong place / at the wrong time, people who didn't get the opportunity to develop, &c. The question isn't even "why are these people failing?", but "how do we handle them humanely?". It's life, shit happens, your parents die prematurely, you get sick, your company declares bankruptcy and you get fire out of nowhere.
The day you'll have kids or, hopefully not, a car accident, a cancer or other high impact disease, you'll be happy that all these "imbeciles" paid a bit of your hundred thousand dollar bills you'll owe to the hospital / schools.
> just to make everybody "equal". No, people are not equal
Sure they're not, nothing is. It's not about making people equal, it's about not letting people go down too far. You can shift the blame on people all you want ("somebody is just a lazy alcoholic"), but in the end we're products of our environment. Individuals shape society, society shapes individuals. There are people having full time jobs who won't be able to live when they retire without public pensions, what do you tell to these people ? "Too bad you were too lazy, go die somewhere else" ?
When I'm talking about spreading wealth I'm not talking about the average worker giving even more of his money, I'm talking about the top 10%, the people who game the system going through every loophole available to avoid paying tax.
> we should think how to train people for new skills/professions, required by the market.
We're already doing that, and in a perfect world yeah, it might work. But I don't see that happening, we'll always have people less capable than others, people who chose or get pushed on different paths.
Also, idk where you live but (moderate) socialism brought us weekends (yeah before workers started to unionize in europe we were workin 10 hours a day 7/7), vacation days, sick days, health insurance, social security, work insurances, maternity/paternity leave, unemployment benefits, <40hrs work week, &c. so it's not all bad. I care much more about what I and my close community requires than what "the market" requires. By the way, isn't "the market" supposed to serve the people and not the other way around ?
I think we've reached "peak profession". The reality is that there will be fewer and fewer types of jobs going forward, and that you probably can't merely retrain a coal miner to be a software engineer.
This doesn't mean we should stop automation. It does mean that we need to figure out a real solution to give these people a secure future. Companies are already innovating on how to not need employees. As a society, we need to innovate on how to give these people that aren't need to pack Amazon boxes a productive and fulfilling life.
(My answer is basic income, paid for by the government. It seems that other people's answer, though, is that Amazon should have to pay for not needing employees. I don't foresee that working out. You can't put the security of the collective in the hands of a profit-seeking entity.)
And all those middle age workers will, what? Just be retrained? Who's paying for that? What happens when the retraining fails (as it so often does) because you can't magically turn a truck driver into a software engineer?
I don't think any of the comments here are anti-progress. But we do need a social and political plan to handle the automation of a large number of low skill jobs. Failure to plan for this future will result in large numbers of displaced and disaffected people.
I'd argue that the competition start before the child is even born in the modern world. Wealth of one's family, their connections play a major role in the success of the child (admission scandals come to mind)
I wrote about skills competition, not competition between persons. In our cruel world it's absolutely possible to get new skills, and you don't even need huge money to get skills you could sell later.
> Wealth of one's family, their connections play a major role in the success of the child
And it's perfectly fine. Somebody's parents were working hard or smart and created some legacy - it is absolutely, 100% fine that their offsprings have some advantage - it was the goal of their parents' life.
> What do you think those people will do after being fired?
> they will turn to theft and crime in order to feed themselves and their family
If they prefer this rather than learning new skills/professions - nothing can help them. "Give us the money for free or we will take your money by force to feed our families" - times of naive pirates are gone.
> (which you seem to lack)
0 empathy to communists/socialists and other people who just want to feed lazy blackmailers you described.
Young people starting their way in life (first job), old people who can't work anymore - only groups of people I'm ready to give some money to support them. I have enough empathy for them.
Something tells me people will find a way to complain about this. And that those people will be the same people that think Amazon's warehouse policies are oppressive.
Of course, and with good reasons. Before you wrote your comment, did you stop to think why people work inside Amazon's warehouses if the working conditions are so oppressive?
It's because the alternatives are still worse. And now they'll lose those jobs and have to face those alternatives.
Of course those of us who perceive this as an injustice will complain. The complaint is not directed at Amazon only, it's at the injustice of systemic oppression of the working class.
Can I just clarify: you're saying that Amazon, despite offering jobs which are (apparently) less bad than other alternatives, are participating in systemic oppression of the working class?
In your view, what should Amazon do to not systemically oppress the working class?
Some people believe, much like there's a minimum wage and below that you're not allowed to hire someone (even if both employer and employee consent and it's market rate) and minimum safety standards (again, irrespective of mutual consent and market conditions) there should be minimum levels of working conditions.
This what interests me (genuinely - I'm not just trolling here!)
If an employer has need for employees to perform a specific type of manual physical work --be it 'picking' for Amazon, or building houses, or working in agriculture, or whatever-- and they pay market rates, and adhere to health-and-safety laws... what other reasonable working conditions must be met?
For example, it's difficult to build houses without exposure to inclement weather.
Googling 'Amazon working conditions' produces a variety of reports.
Regular ambulance call-outs. Timed toilet breaks. Top floors at very high temperatures in summer. Workers doing heavy lifting complaining of back pain. Mandatory overtime of 60 hours a week. Performance targets calibrated for the young and healthy meaning pregnant women get fired for underperforming. Firing people for taking sick leave, even with a doctor's note. Wasting doctors' time by forcing employees to get doctors' notes for trivial ailments. Firing workers automatically without human intervention.
All of these would be unusual in a white-collar job; the biggest complaint I have at work is when the free bean-to-cup coffee machine breaks down and only instant coffee is on offer.
Aside from wages, it sounds like you agree with the sentiment of 'minimum working conditions', just perhaps disagree on the specifics of what that means.
I don't disagree - I really don't know what standard Amazon (in fact, all employers) are being held to here.
And I see a major challenge (logical and practical) for employers whose business requires employees to perform tasks that others find unacceptable, or "inhumane", but which are legal according to H&S standards.
Yes, I am saying precisely that. The key word here is "systemic". It doesn't mean that "Amazon is systemically oppressing the working class", as you put it in your second question. It means that Amazon participates in a larger system that oppresses the working class. It follows that Amazon cannot, on its own, completely eliminate that oppression. That, however, does not mean that there's nothing Amazon can do to make things better.
Others in this thread have already given a few examples and explanations of what is wrong with those jobs, as they are now. Much has also been written and reported about it. All in all, there's not much I feel the need to add to that.
Instead, I would like to point out that systemic oppression that is tightly entangled with economy is not a new thing that Amazon invented and that humanity is facing all of a sudden. A few examples would be child labor, sex tourism and drug cultivation. We all want to get rid of those, but history has shown that trying to do so in the most direct way possible only makes things worse. Nobody's arguing that we should stop trying, just that the solution is not as straightforward as most people imagine.
Sorry, I had limited time to type out that particular comment, so I didn't have the time to place a footnote there that would offer a more nuanced view.
No, we don't all want to get rid of drug cultivation. We do all want to ensure that substance abuse doesn't affect our lives and our families. Of course, that's a vague sentiment and it's hard to get everyone to agree on the specifics of what it means. That didn't stop certain politicians from exploiting that and manipulating general opinion and passing laws and foreign policies that ended up creating a whole lot of suffering for a whole lot of people in different parts of the world.
As a result, there's a whole lot of systemic oppression involved in drug cultivation these days. Unlike child labor, it's not the drug cultivation itself that we should strive to get rid of, but that doesn't negate my original point, which is that just trying to solve the problem in the most direct way possible is going to make things worse.
If you think about it, the other two examples I gave can also be adapted to become something that isn't pernicious in and of itself. If you legalize prostitution and make it a safe profession that adults can choose, instead of resorting to out of necessity, then sex tourism isn't necessarily something you want to get rid of. Similarly, if my kid wants to mow neighborhood lawns to get some money or sell lemonade or babysit other kids, that's not the kind of child labor we're trying to get rid of.
Going back to the topic of drug cultivation, I would recommend reading "Lacrónica" by Martín Caparrós. In one of the chapters, he describes the situation in Bolivia in 1991. One of the many things that fascinated me in his account was the fact that, at that time, a farmer could get 100-150 bolivianos (local currency) for a hand-carried load of coca leaves or 1 boliviano for a hundred oranges. That meant that, to make the same amount of money for one load of coca, a farmer would have to sell 15,000 oranges and there's no way -- even if there's enough demand -- to carry 15,000 oranges in one trip.
I mention this because I think it's a fascinating insight into the systemic oppression I've been talking about. These farmers were not getting rich off their drug cultivation. On the contrary, they lived in quite precarious conditions and they had to cultivate coca leaves to be able to feed themselves and their families.
So yeah, maybe we don't all want get rid of all drug cultivation, but we definitely want to get rid of it in its present form.
I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that co-ops are supposedly more profitable than autocratic workplaces. Co-ops still compete in the marketplace but they distribute ownership and profit among the workers in a democratic fashion, typically on the basis of their contribution.
The parent comment asked how Amazon could stop systematically oppressing their workers, not how workers could stop being the targets of systematic oppression. Amazon could accomplish this goal by distributing corporate ownership among the workers and giving them a democratic platform to make decisions about their workplace in an egalitarian way.
I guess (economics aside) that a wage increase is a simple concept to grasp.
But I'm interested how Amazon's working conditions are "inhumane"? I've read about 'picking' jobs which require lifting, bend, and walking for many miles per shift, but this doesn't seem more inhumane than many other jobs requiring manual labour? And I've read about complaints about the rate of workplace accidents (this was highlighted in the UK recently) but it's hard to tease out more details here.
> During summer heat waves, Amazon arranged to have paramedics parked in ambulances outside, ready to treat any workers who dehydrated or suffered other forms of heat stress. Those who couldn't quickly cool off and return to work were sent home or taken out in stretchers and wheelchairs and transported to area hospitals. And new applicants were ready to begin work at any time.
> An emergency room doctor in June called federal regulators to report an "unsafe environment" after he treated several Amazon warehouse workers for heat-related problems. The doctor's report was echoed by warehouse workers who also complained to regulators, including a security guard who reported seeing pregnant employees suffering in the heat.
Thanks - that's a great example. As a non-expert, I'm frankly amazed that such working conditions aren't already outlawed by health and safety regulations.
However, to be specific, it does seem somewhat geography- and time-dependent - i.e. it's not so much a standard condition experienced when working for Amazon, and so perhaps not an example of Amazon's warehouse job conditions being consistently "inhumane".
It is, however, an interesting example that would support that Amazon perhaps cares too little for its workers, and/or is insufficiently responsive to changing conditions in safeguarding their well-being.
In many cases and locations they are illegal conditions.
It however is [maybe] [some] company practice to push the boundaries as far as they can be pushed, as a cultural motive. Often pressure from the top down, not with explicit instruction, but implicit general direction that X needs to be done to meet Y requirement. "Shit rolls downhill" as the saying goes. Then it just happens that Joe on the end of the line doesn't get to take a washroom break for 8 hours, every day—and if Joe were to ask about it, Joe would be fired, and Joe [like most] can't afford to be fired.
I've seen it in other industries. It's not unique to Amazon. Amazon's notoriety comes from its size and ubiquity in North American life.
The question is whether that's an achievable thing, or whether people will always complain that whatever Amazon does is a non-living wage and inhumane working conditions.
And there's nothing superficially wrong with automating the picking and packing of boxes.
The problems come later, and it's not Amazon's "fault" but rather a much larger problem that eventually we'll all have to deal with: what happens when "enough" people get involuntarily shoved out of the workforce, with vanishingly remote prospects of securing other paying work?
Amazon has probably wrangled massive tax discounts with the cities and states their warehouses are located in on the promise of providing jobs.
Get the automation working and the jobs vanish. But I bet those tax breaks don’t. And I bet Amazon will fight tooth and nail against places deciding to revoke them.
IMO the best "counterargument" here is that those were jobs which paid folks who then paid into their local economy. That goes away with robots and becomes more revenue.
Lots of folks are in favor of a "automation tax." I'm not sure how I feel.
Note I'm not arguing these points, but merely pointing them out.
The problem is that as we move forward and keep automating this will become a major issue in our society. I'm not sure if I support automation tax but it makes me uneasy.
I work at a manufacturing company. We are slowly chipping away at data entry, manual processes. It only improves efficiency now, but eventually we will need less people.
I am in the same boat with my unease of the situation. Entitlements are already putting the US in crippling debt, however, I am worried that automation will destroy so many jobs that we need a universal basic income.
Which I am personally not advocating. I am unsure of how I feel about it.
Universal basic income seems to be the only viable way forward. So far I have not heard any other good solution to the societal problems automation is causing. The other alternative would be to slow the progress, but that’s even worse. We need to let people learn new skills, and universal basic income makes that possible. There will be obviously freeloaders, which is the main issue with this approach. This is extremely difficult problem to solve, and the current political climate makes it even more difficult to find acceptable solution
Are there any other viable alternatives? How can we help people who don’t have marketable skills get back to work and contribute to the society?
Amazon is the best of what capitalism can offer. They have basically crushed competition by focusing on providing better value, not building a monopoly through lobbying or a legal moat.
Given that, I wish us economic policy was focused on allowing more Amazon’s to exist in more industries, and a social policy that focused on helping the folks that are acutely negatively impacted by competition.
Another negative impact of losing those jobs is that those folks paid income tax. When the operational cost of these tasks are transferred from payroll to capital expense the effective federal tax rate of what was payroll is lost (a ballpark 1.7% - 8.7%[0]) and the added automation cost is used as a deduction on a ballpark -1% - 1%[1] corporate income tax.
Is the outcome such that the reducion in payroll will lead to increase in profits and then pressumably that profit will be taxed at a minimum of long term capital gains rate when returned to shareholders?
No, it's just that you are only now bringing in capital gains, when that's actually pretty important. If all these corporate profits are going to shareholders, who are then taxed on capital gains, don't you think that's a little bit higher than the 1% you were quoting?
So maybe if you actually finished doing the math instead of stopping in the middle, you'd see that automation isn't the tax loss you're making it out to be.
>Lots of folks are in favor of a "automation tax." I'm not sure how I feel.
I think it's really important the operators of the horse drawn coaches, put out of work by the train I get to work in the mornings, are properly compensated. How is that to be funded without an automation tax?
People who operate horse drawn coaches can learn to operate trains.
Once we automate everything the basic muscles of a human body can do without creative thought, that kind of comparable transition won't be possible and there will be 20-100 million Americans unemployed, hungry, and angry. You can have trite and dismissive mis-comparisons about the 1800s, or you can take it seriously and suggest some way society won't collapse in the ensuing riots.
That would include you suggesting what new class of jobs are on the near horizon which can absorb hundreds of millions of low-skill human workers, without needing them to be smarter, but also can't be done by machines.
It has become fashionable to paint everything in black and white. The solution to workplace abuse is removal of jobs? Really? Automation is not bad inherently, but it's socioeconomic impact has to be ascertained.
You're right, automation is not inherently bad. In fact, automation is inherently good.
And yes, the solution to jobs that humans don't want is to eliminate those jobs with automation. Working in a warehouse packing boxes doesn't suck because it's Amazon and they are a big bad employer -- it sucks because it's working in a warehouse packing boxes.
We don't need to "ascertain it's[sic] socioeconomic impact" before we pursue the elimination of such things.
Automation isn't the problem. These jobs being lost are terrible and no one should do them.
The problem, as always, is capitalism. Amazon wouldn't be where it is today without its massive workforce, including its army of factory workers. None of the people losing their jobs will benefit from this increase in productivity, though. Those gains will go only to the people at the top. Meanwhile, there will be more competition for the low-level jobs that still exist, creating downward pressure on wages.
That's oligopoly. True competition needs to have many different options e.g. food. I can go out to a restaurant, order something or opt-out from the market and buy in a shop and cook it myself. But straight from the farmer or I could even grow it myself.
The fact that rising automation is an issue bothers me.
Automation is miraculous! Its has steadily been removing the necessity for humans to engage in drudge work.
The solution is simple and obvious. Most people no longer need to work. This has probably been true for decades and is only becoming moreso. With automation, a small number of people can provide the food / water / electricity / etc. for 1000's.
Everyone should be provided with the food, shelter, etc. they need for free.
Thats it..
The actual problem here is remediating our obsolete society and cultural values so they are once again practical in the light of these automation developments.
I'm not saying it'll be easy, there will be plenty of wrinkles, some people (eg. farmers) will still need to work. Do they get more? Do people take turns? But these are just wrinkles.
Overall its very clear what the actual problem is and what we need to do.
The fact that so many people now are still slaving away engaged in pointless bullshit white collar jobs is a tragedy. Such a waste of potential happiness. Also we are wasting massive amounts of resources carrying out all this pointless work, and furthering the destruction of the environment for no reason.
It would be great if the automation were in the hands of individuals. you need to farm? Invest in an automated tractor, combine, whatever and it will take care of your crops. Now you have free time, food to eat, and can work a second job for anything else. Instead the automation goes in the hands of large corporations and there's no relationship between what the machines produce and what people need to live. An automated boxing machine doesn't build houses or farm food for individuals. There's no more abundance to go around. You could create the relationship by taxing machines or taxing the wealthy that own them and spending that money on food and housing, but maybe people don't want to live off food stamps in government housing. Then you have economics that come into play. Are people going to have more kids since they get more food and bigger houses? Will there be an increase in crime? Will prices increase now that everyone can afford food? I'm optimistic, but it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
>Invest in an automated tractor, combine, whatever and it will take care of your crops.
Now you have a huge loan to pay every month to pay off your farming equipment. You now need a second job and you're no better off than when you went and bought your groceries at the supermarket.
I'm basically a Luddite trapped in a software engineer's body at this point. I'd like nothing better than to buy a hundred acres and become a farmer/rancher, but after taking a serious look at the financial side of things I gave up that dream. The capital costs to start up are so high that there's basically no way I would be able to do it without a loan big enough to mean that one bad year in the first decade would likely sink me financially.
Anything that improves the livelihood of the warehouse workers is a win in my book.