FedEx Embraces More Robots Without Firing Humans (nytimes.com) 96
An anonymous reader shares a report: As soon as the first robot arrived at a FedEx shipping hub in the heart of North Carolina tobacco country early last year, talk of pink slips was in the air. Workers had been driving the "tuggers" that navigated large and irregular items across the vast concrete floor of the 630,000-square-foot freight depot since it opened in 2011. Their initial robotic colleague drew a three-dimensional digital map of the place as it tugged freight around. A few months later, three other robots -- nicknamed Lucky, Dusty and Ned in a nod to the movie "iThree Amigos!" -- arrived, using the digital map to get around on their own. By March, they were joined by two others, Jefe and El Guapo. Horns honking and warning lights flashing, the autonomous vehicles snaked through the hub, next to about 20 tuggers that still needed humans behind the wheel. [...] But what has happened at the FedEx hub may be a surprise to people who fear that they are about to be replaced by a smart machine: a robot might take your role, but not necessarily your job. Yes, the robots replaced a few jobs right away. And in time, they will replace about 25 jobs in a facility that employs about 1,300 people. But the hub creates about 100 new jobs every year -- and a robot work force still seems like the distant future.
Temporary (Score:1)
The firing will come next month when the humans are done training their replacements.
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Who wants a job that can be done by a robot? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not I.
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Well as more and more jobs [technologyreview.com] are taken by AI-driven automation [hbr.org], the bigger question is how many jobs will be left for humans [nytimes.com]?
The idea that technology will magically create vast numbers of new jobs to compensate for the ones lost - the so-called luddite fallacy [washingtonpost.com] - doesn't work in a world where employers are deploying automation specifically to reduce their expensive human head count.
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Well as more and more jobs [technologyreview.com] are taken by
AI-driven automation [hbr.org], the bigger question is how many jobs
will be left for humans [nytimes.com]?
Currently people work well in the 60's and even 70's and work 40 hours a week with a mere 2 weeks of vacation. OK so people retire in the 40's and 50's or change the work week to 32 hours, etc. Why not embrace the increase in productivity instead of fearing it or worse impede its inevitability?
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Well as more and more jobs [technologyreview.com] are taken by AI-driven automation [hbr.org], the bigger question is how many jobs will be left for humans [nytimes.com]?
Currently people work well in the 60's and even 70's and work 40 hours a week with a mere 2 weeks of vacation. OK so people retire in the 40's and 50's or change the work week to 32 hours, etc. Why not embrace the increase in productivity instead of fearing it or worse impede its inevitability?
This misses the point; companies are embracing automation (and "increased productivity") as a way of getting people off the payroll and the pension scheme. Who is going to pay people to retire in their 40s and 50s? Who is going to pay people an income they can live on for working part-time? Even today in the UK there are millions of people on "zero hours" contracts which do not guarantee them any work (and therefore any pay) in any given week/month. These people are technically not unemployed, but they have
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Well said. Place a productivity levy on AI robots (Score:2)
Bill Gates has suggested an income tax for robots. Such a levy could alter the calculus of profitability (slowing adoption), while at the same time creating a fund for retraining or even for a universal basic income. Some have argued that human labor will move off the line and back to an artisan model. Throw in UBI or Universal Basic Resources (Food Shelter Clothing Communications etc) and we could see improvements in quality of life. I say could. Hard to imagine our corrupt lawmakers milking the corporate
It does not take you job... (Score:2, Insightful)
As long as there is another job to be done.
It is just PR. Here is how it will work. A company would get bad PR if it fired someone after putting in a robot, so they shift the job somewhere else and spend more on keeping an employee they don't need until someone quits, then that person does not get replaced.
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Indeed. Or the use the increased capacity to kill a competitor. Or the jobs are lost in retail, due to more online shopping. As this is extremely obvious to anybody with half a clue that almost all jobs lost to automation are not coming back, everybody tries very hard to give the impression to not be involved in this, even when they clearly are. As people are generally stupid and have short memories (see elections), obfuscating the issue this way will most likely work, at least until the effects become extr
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Forget the rate of job creation should increase with population creation, naturally.
Their customer base should be growing day by day, so if their workforce is not growing accordingly, automation is taking jobs and this is all PR.
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Another factor, yes. And there will be others. Fact is that robots and other automation create a tiny number of highly qualified jobs, but nothing else. They do remove a lot of jobs formerly done by humans though. It really is very, very obvious what is going on.
AI (Score:3)
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mod up :) (Score:1)
For now. (Score:1)
Once the robots are reliable, goodbye humans.
Dodgy math (Score:5, Insightful)
The math could be misleading. Without the bots, Fedex may be hiring more humans. With the bots, they keep the number of humans the same but expand with bots instead. If/when there's a slump, they then dump humans such that they employee less humans than they would otherwise.
As far as the argument that "automation has always made new jobs", that could be true, but the displaced people may not be qualified for them. It appears that on the larger scale, automation and global trade are creating increasing inequality as it becomes a winner-take-all economy. Warren Buffett admitted his investment company can take on bigger risks, giving total average higher rewards, because it's big enough to spread the risk around, something smaller competitors don't have by definition. The "network effect" is taking over every industry.
Therefore, the issue may not be so much "fear the bots" as it is "fear inequality".
Purpose of the economy is Not to create jobs. (Score:1)
While it can happen that GDP goes up and the majority of ppl have less that usually does NOT happen, what happens is that everyone goes up and of course the rich go higher up. Is this a problem ?
Would you rather be poorer and the rich be way poorer aswell ?
And also, what do you think the rich do with their money ? Stash it under the mattress or jump it in like Scrooge McDuck ? No, they invest it into something that cre
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Who made this rule? Society's well-being may depend on both. (I gave some examples in a nearby reply.)
It can during slumps. Plus, the hugely wealthy are now buying politicians via campaign donations. Our democracy is being replaced by a plutocracy. The plutocrat-stuffed Supreme Court essentially ruled that political bribery is "free
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No, humans mostly control the economy, or at least control how they allocate resources and tradeoffs in a general economic sense.
You can give them incentives to invest in ways a group prefers. We don't have to go to extremes, just balance out incentives. We can tilt their behaviors certain directions without draining out too many incentives.
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A good approximation of what will happen with increased AI/Automation is what you see currently in oil rich nations (like.. Nigeria for example)
GDP does go up, and there is a token increase in standard of living, but by and large, all it does is fuel income inequality.
It's the same damn thing with automation. Only as an added bonus you have an even higher proportion of the workforce out of work, poorer, and angrier at the 'haves'.
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I forget how fucking pedantic people can be. If they aren't hit over the head with precise, literal phrasing it's almost like they intentionally miss the point.
Oil economies are typified by extreme wealth inequality. The firms/families/oligarchs/whatever get the lion's share of the profit. Compare this to something like manufacturing.. how many different companies produce parts That go into a Chevy for example?
So, Nigera is/was an extremely poor country. They started producing Oil in the 70's (joining O
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Without the bots, Fedex may be hiring more humans. With the bots, they keep the number of humans the same but expand with bots instead. If/when there's a slump, they then dump humans such that they employee less humans than they would otherwise.
Yes, that's the point. Basically, at some point, 90% of our workforce was farming. Could you imagine if 90% of people were busy farming? What would we manufacture? How would we have technology? We would be producing only the output of our farm sector, and nothing else.
We're diverting that labor elsewhere.
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Which is where? At least those farmers, and later factory workers, had jobs that could raise a family. It's hard to raise a family flipping burgers or greeting at Walmart. As mentioned in my original message, the benefits of automation/trade are often lopsided.
Anger over factory job loss is a large part of why we have an unusual President right now: the swing states happen to be those screwed by automation and lopsided trade.
If you benefit 60% by throwing 40% under the b
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At least those farmers, and later factory workers, had jobs that could raise a family.
I'm describing labor as a mass-noun. Note that, since 1940, we've spiked up the productivity by more than a dozen times, stopped making a bunch of stuff and instead imported it, and increased our labor force participation rate from 59% to 66%. We keep bottoming out at around 5% unemployment between recessions.
If you benefit 60% by throwing 40% under the bus, the political backlash can be Yuuuuge.
No kidding. The rate of change has to remain slow enough to not nudge unemployment up by about a percentage point at any given time or you get a pretty bad recession. Typically, the rate of chan
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That can be interpreted 2 ways: more who want to work can, or that more have to work to make ends meet instead of take care of family, etc. That's a bigger sprawling topic.
But our recessions have arguably been getting longer and deeper.
That's one approach to spreading the wealth, but another is to tax the rich and use it
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That can be interpreted 2 ways: more who want to work can, or that more have to work to make ends meet instead of take care of family, etc.
I keep pointing out the second because people try to frame the labor force participation rate as the real unemployment rate. In this context, however, it shows that there are jobs for humans--not just that some percentage of those looking for work are able to work. So all of this tech hasn't been making jobs simply evaporate forever.
our recessions have arguably been getting longer and deeper.
If you graph LNS14000000 [bls.gov] back to 1948, that statement is more-questionable.
That's one approach to spreading the wealth, but another is to tax the rich and use it to expand vocational education.
Vocational training is one part of it; but first, the jobs have to be available. You don't nece
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To me, the recoveries look quicker the further back one goes. The right-facing slopes are shallower toward recent years.
In general, the available and/or well-paying jobs require ever-more education and skill. Mindless grunt-work is being replaced by machines and 3rd-world foreign labor.
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To me, the recoveries look quicker the further back one goes.
Fair enough. The rises are smaller, too; although sometimes the trough between is at a higher unemployment rate than others, and those 80s recessions came in the middle of other recessions. It's always been chaos.
Mindless grunt-work is being replaced by machines and 3rd-world foreign labor.
We're kind of doing both. Most people ignore this, creating a huge argument between the "nobody will have jobs because not everyone is smart enough to be an engineer" camp and the "we'll have jobs, but it will all be minimum-wage machine babysitting that requires an IQ of 4" camp.
Security is just one. Ego is also a very powerful motivator, especially for males. Many males will even sacrifice security to serve their ego.
Egotism is a
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I'll have to disagree with your psychology models.
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Productivity and workforce participation are both much higher since the 1940's, yet real wages are considerably lower.
Gee. why on earth would that be?
Automation is absolutely guaranteed to reverse that, right?
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yet real wages are considerably lower
So, the real median household buys less stuff and lives at a lower standard-of-living than everyone else, with e.g. a car bought for the same percentage of the annual income by the same income-percentile family (notably median) containing fewer features than the one sold back in the 1940s?
Internet has gotten slower since dial-up, phones are more-expensive, and cell phone service has only grown to consume a greater portion of the median wage--of course, nobody has cell phones, because they were way too exp
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What you're saying has been historically true. Jobs have moved from farming to manufacturing. Then from manufacturing to services. The problem is that for now we have nothing after services. Sure, there's R&D, but unless something radical happens, it's not a sector where you can reasonably expect a huge number of service workers to move to. So unless we find a "new sector" real soon, we're heading into uncharted territory (not necessarily bad, but we don't know).
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Jobs have moved from farming to manufacturing. Then from manufacturing to services. The problem is that for now we have nothing after services.
Jobs haven't moved from sector to sector as a rule. Jobs are created by consumer purchasing power; historically, technological advances (technical progress) have reduced the amount of labor, thus the TIME x WAGE cost, to produce things. When those things are things consumers are buying, more competitors can enter the market (lower barrier to entry), and price competition drives prices toward costs. With wages remaining the same and labor time invested in a good falling, the purchasing power of a consume
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Warren Buffett admitted his investment company can take on bigger risks, giving total average higher rewards, because it's big enough to spread the risk around, something smaller competitors don't have by definition. The "network effect" is taking over every industry.
This is something people with lots of money have tried to claim many times yet the average age of a S&P company is under 20 years [cnbc.com] down from 60 years in 1958. It's not so simple that mega-corporations throw their weight around and win industry after industry just by being big. There's plenty room for new companies even though many of them get bought out eventually.
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Yes, bought out by the big conglomerates. Your statistic may reflect that companies don't last as long as they once did, even the big ones. But during their reign, the big co's often yield great control. The length of the reign is secondary.
Average CEO pay is clearly larger than in the past, compared to average salaries, and the top CEO pay is very much larger.
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"May be"? It is so bloody obviously bogus it is staggering. The issue also is not that automation does not create new jobs (what an utterly demented level to argue on), the issue is that automation kills a lot of jobs and creates a tiny number of replacements.
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If other things are like self checkout-outs in grocery stores, then they do create new jobs. A friend that worked with Safeway said they cost more and require more people. The labor costs of just the travel time between stores for repairs is staggering. I know from going to my local Safeway every week that their four self check-outs are not that much faster than a single good cashier plus those four self check-outs require.an employee to oversee them so it's not a great gain even if you ignore all of the
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Self-checkouts are not automating a job. They are merely shifting the job from the cashier (a professional) to the customer (an amateur). It is not surprising they take longer. No, the thing is self-checkout is for is data gathering on customer behavior and that makes it worthwhile.
So, no. Almost all applications of automation to remove jobs are not like this at all.
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Indeed there are a lot of different permutations of "hire humans", "fire humans", "keep humans" along with "more/fewer robots".
Whilst this might lead to no humans fired, and even still additional humans hired, with the robots being leveraged only to increase efficiency of that workforce and thus create greater revenue (and presumably profit), it's also possible that, despite hiring more humans still, it would have been even more humans without the robots.
Still, I wouldn't knock them for being at least
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Oh, gee, how did I know????
Because you are a mindless partisan hack.
The robot elephant behind the wheel. (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a cute story, but everyone seems to be ignoring the elephant in the room. Or more to the point, the human no longer behind the wheel.
Sure, a robot may not completely take a job in this case, but how much can you expect to make an hour when your job title is changed from "Heavy Equipment Operator" to "Robot Babysitter"?
Let's stop ignoring or dismissing the impact already. If robots did not make work cheaper and more efficient, no company would be buying the damn things. And if there's an opportunity to lower costs (read: salaries), you better believe a company will do it.
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If robots did not make work cheaper and more efficient, no company would be buying the damn things. And if there's an opportunity to lower costs (read: salaries), you better believe a company will do it.
Actually, if you expand with +100 jobs to do a thing, but now you can add +100 jobs by hiring 4 people and buying some robots that cost about what 4 more do, you've added +8 jobs across the entire economy to accomplish your specific +100 job task. Consider that paying all of this costs 8 cents on the dollar without lowering anyone's wage.
FedEx ships things. With a lower cost per unit goods shipped, FedEx can take business from UPS--or vice versa. Amazon is trying to do this to both of them. That's cal
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Robot baby sitters get paid MORE than heavy equiptment manager. It requires higher skill.
The basic mistake you are making is the "Lump of Labor Fallacy". There is no set amount of work to do, there is UNLIMITED work to do. Work is not created, it is released. We don't work to fulfill needs, we work to fulfill wants. 5000 years ago most of our workers were in agriculture. The tech that made these farmers redundant freed them up to do other jobs that were not as important as feeding ourselves. Those
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Robot baby sitters get paid MORE than heavy equiptment manager. It requires higher skill.
It also requires far fewer people. One operator can drive one machine, one babysitter can watch many robots.
There is no set amount of work to do, there is UNLIMITED work to do.
But not necessarily work to be done by humans.
The people warning about AI and robotics aren't concerned about a few tugs in a warehouse. That will fit comfortably under transitions that happened before. What's going to be new is general purpose AI and advanced robotics, because then the machines will be as good as humans. Why hire a plumber to run a snake down your drain line when a robot that is
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Sure, a robot may not completely take a job in this case, but how much can you expect to make an hour when your job title is changed from "Heavy Equipment Operator" to "Robot Babysitter"?
How do you think it went when it changed from "Ditch Digger" to "Heavy Equipment Babysitter"? I don't see any reason to worry about how advanced the work would be or how well it will be paid for the person lucky enough to get the job. But usually automation means doing more with less people, how that will affect the job market depends on the elasticity of the market. If you're making say toothbrushes you have a rather fixed market, I need one plus a spare for travel and changing the price won't really affec
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> "Ditch Digger" to "Heavy Equipment Babysitter"
That's a good point. I worked with my cousin many years ago when he first started as a ditch digger mostly burying telco cables. IIRC, we made $3.10 an hour. He now runs a directional borer and makes into six figures. The crew size is still the same, five people. Maybe they're more productive, but I doubt that since there's now more planning and time to setup equipment and maintain them. They have two huge DitchWitch boring machines that require some
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Actually the robot attendant (technician) probably makes better money than whatever their old job was. The issue becomes when companies use robots to reduce total head count. Some companies reduce the work force, others train their works to do things that can't readily be done with robots and expand their business.
It's a lesson I learned year ago when I first saw what automation could do in the computer field. It was a blunt lesson that I would either be automated out of a job or I could be the one doing th
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People are stupid and like to put their heads into the sand. Also, this means increased capacity there, which in turn means either a competitor will sack people or the job destruction is in retail because sales move online.
This isn't a good analogy (Score:2)
Simply because shipping, as a whole, is increasing. So even if you add robots, the overall workload is increasing. Primarily because people are buying everything online.
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Indeed. End you find the people that have lost their jobs simply in retail. Of course, that is too complex a situation to understand for many people, so the demented claims that "robots do not kill jobs, new ones are created!" will continue.
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Yeah, the displaced workers here are not just the equipment operators. There's also some number of people losing retail jobs.
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Bullshit conclusion (Score:2)
Of course, they either do this to fire people (not here) or to increase capacity which will mean people fired somewhere else, possibly in a different company.
Its a start (Score:1)
Same old same old (Score:1)