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Businesses Robotics Technology

Amazon Dismisses Idea Automation Will Eliminate All Its Warehouse Jobs Soon (reuters.com) 145

Amazon dismissed the idea of running a fully automated warehouse in the near future, citing the superior cognitive ability of humans and limitations of current technology. From a report: Scott Anderson, director of Amazon Robotics Fulfillment, said technology is at least 10 years away from fully automating the processing of a single order picked by a worker inside a warehouse. There is a misperception that Amazon will run fully automated warehouses soon, Anderson said during a tour of Amazon's Baltimore warehouse for reporters on Tuesday. The technology for a robot to pick a single product from a bin without damaging other products or picking multiple products at the same time in a way that could benefit the e-commerce retailer is years away.
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Amazon Dismisses Idea Automation Will Eliminate All Its Warehouse Jobs Soon

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  • I hope they do. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If it cuts costs, then as a customer I will be happy if they go fully automated.

    • Re:I hope they do. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sdinfoserv ( 1793266 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2019 @11:52PM (#58525408)
      That's an ignorant perspective, I hope you remember it when your job gets automated... It doesn't need to be your job specifically, just enough of those that in order to be competitive in cost, your company ships all jobs to a low cost country with no environmental, intellectual, wage an hour or labor laws. you know, all those pesky job killing regulations. Eventually there's only going to be 2 jobs left here - the guy who owns everything, and the guy who cleans THAT guys toilet.... because even robots have standards.
      odds are, you're not not THAT guy. good luck sparky..
      • by Hognoxious ( 631665 ) on Thursday May 02, 2019 @12:10AM (#58525462) Homepage Journal

        Come on, look on the bright side. The guy who owns everything will have more than one toilet. There'll probably be at least one per yacht, for example.

        • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

          So want chaos, here is the answer. Amazon stop your suppliers packing in boxes, get them to pack in tubes. Different storage layout more depth, to allow tubes with one item stored behind the other, with a bit of packing between. So the tubes are stored in racks with a gate in front of each tube, each tube set at slight angle and you can pull off the front to unload and of course the back to push a pneumatic tube, that you inflate to push out the items one by one. When tube empty, pull out pneumatic tube and

        • by Anonymous Coward

          Come on, look on the bright side. The guy who owns everything will have more than one toilet. There'll probably be at least one per yacht, for example.

          Yup, and the toilets will all be solid gold, there will be plenty of work for mercenaries guarding the golden toilets with their lives, and people repairing the robots that cremate their bullet riddled bodies, salvage the lead from he ashes, and then process the ashes into solvent green fertiliser.

        • The guy who owns everything will have more than one toilet. There'll probably be at least one per yacht, for example

          I'm a poor billionaire -- I have to move my toilet between yachts.

      • Re:I hope they do. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by religionofpeas ( 4511805 ) on Thursday May 02, 2019 @01:26AM (#58525594)

        It doesn't really matter what your perspective is or what you're hoping for. As soon as it makes financial sense, Amazon (or any other company) will replace humans by machines.

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Oh noes! We will all be automated out of our jobs! Sky fall! All dead!

          Automation reality 101: Why you can't automate the world.

          Automating real-world processes is a Zeno's paradox of diminishing returns. You start with the low-hanging fruit or automation (moving items from one place to another) and then move on to the more difficult tasks (storing and sorting real items in a three-dimensional universe, recalling the items on demand, tracing location, etc) You soon find that automation has hard limits. For in

          • by Anonymous Coward

            You are making a fatal error in reasoning. You are saying that if you can't do it, then no-one can. People in Deep Mind have very high skills. They can do things that you can't.

            You are also forgetting that people who are experts in AI said that AlphaZero would be a decade away. AI is advancing much faster that experts think.

        • Here's there piece in the financial flow you miss... every single job eliminated translates into one less person "buying" or "consuming" things... Robots don't buy hamburgers or pencils. Eventually, enough people won't have jobs, so enough people stop buying things, the companies that automated the shit out of everything, automated out of jobs the very people they're tying to sell to... profits fall, robots go away..
          Just like the wave of "off shoring" changed. Eventually bean counters realized when you
      • by Anonymous Coward

        Thanks for the fatalistic viewpoint / FUD.

        If there are literally only 2 jobs left as you describe, then that means either (a) everyone is getting paid to sit on their asses and buy the owner's wares all day, or (b) everyone else is dead, or (c) there are 200 million hungry people with pitchforks converging on the owner's property = soon that guy will be swinging from a rope, and then people will start bartering with his possessions.

      • That's an ignorant perspective, I hope you remember it when your job gets automated... It doesn't need to be your job specifically,

        Actually, let's look at which jobs are automate. Here we aren't speaking about AI making some highly paid consultant job's redundant. (Not going to happen soon, mostly due to the high pay in question)

        Here it's about replacing par of the manual labor in warehouses. You know, specifically these jobs about which you hear scandals every now or then how horrdenously bad condition their worker have to work under, abysmal pay, insane work hours, almost no break at all, need-to-pee-in-a-bottle, Amazon basically jus

        • by iserlohn ( 49556 )

          Well look up "japanese toilets". Robots actually gladly take care of the toilets

          The Japanese electronic toilets are not replacing human workers though, unless you employ somebody to squirt water on your behind and blow dry it after you've finished with business.

        • by Merk42 ( 1906718 )

          You know, specifically these jobs about which you hear scandals every now or then how horrdenously bad condition their worker have to work under...

          Working for Epic Games [windowscentral.com]?

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Sorry, but everyone without a job is the goal, it's just a matter of changing society to fit the changes.

      • That's an ignorant perspective, I hope you remember it when your job gets automated...

        It's not ignorant at all. It's just a fact. YOU have exactly the same perspective every time you buy something in the grocery store. Farming has been hugely automated and you as a consumer have benefited greatly from the reduced food prices. Less than 150 years ago over half the population made their living farming. Now the percentage is in the low single digits. Even if you shop at the most organic granola hugging place you can find you still are benefiting hugely from automation and I don't see you

      • by mad7777 ( 946676 )
        Is my job getting automated? Please say yes, as I would much prefer to go to the beach. Obviously, I'll be the owner of that robot doing my former job.

        I guess some people really do love picking plastic crap out of bins all day for Amazon. Personally, I'd rather do other things with my time, but that's just me.

        You don't need a job. You need income. Now stop being so confused.
      • That's an ignorant perspective, I hope you remember it when your job gets automated...

        The ignorant perspective is the one from which we imagine that it makes sense for humans to continue to do grunt labor forever and ever amen. This notion that we should all be working is a puritan fallacy. Given the state of our biosphere, we need to do less work until we can get our energy sources ironed out, because the secondary effects from our energy expenditures are threatening our very existence.

      • by Zmobie ( 2478450 )

        (Not the AC, but I disagree with your ridiculous assertion) You do realize the economy and society as we know it would collapse long before that right? Who the fuck is going to buy all of the shit THAT guy is selling if no one has any real wages with which to buy? Automation is just being used as the current boogey man. Its a new buzzword for what we have been doing for thousands of years: Making work easier.

        First off, it is in the interest of the people that are selling shit for there to still be a mark

      • I’ve worked in a warehouse. College, 3rd shift, refrigerated. Bunch of 30 minute smoke break taking truck driving trump voting assholes. Fuck them.
    • Particularly since they treat their workers like shit, to the extent that their workers are even scared to take bathroom breaks. This is worse than working conditions in slave labor countries like the Arabian Gulf countries or China
    • Ready to pay 80% in taxes?
      Automate 80% of America out of work, YOU will pay for their survival costs one way or another
      The tRump way, also called "schoolyard to Prison Yard" or the "Sit on your ass and collect the uncorporate part of welfare" way.
  • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2019 @11:10PM (#58525276)

    It's not just the cognitive ability, as the summary mentioned a real limitation is being able to pick up products without damage and from an assortment of items.

    All of the gripping technologies even under development, still come off as extremely primitive compared to a real hand.

    It's probably the trickiest robotics problem left...

    • by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Thursday May 02, 2019 @03:40AM (#58525850)

      All of the gripping technologies even under development, still come off as extremely primitive compared to a real hand.

      So . . . has anyone developed a Robotic Masturbation Hand yet . . . ?

      That would be an interesting extended Turing Test: Can you tell if that hand job come from a human . . . ? Or from a robot . . . ? Or from yourself . . . ?

      Um, like, I'm just asking for a friend.

      • So . . . has anyone developed a Robotic Masturbation Hand yet . . . ?

        Probably, but AFAICT the peak of masturbation technology is the Japanese sperm sample collection machines, and they don't use a hand. They don't use a plastic vagina, either; they use a bumpy silicone tube. If you were building a product-picking robot you might or might not even think about building hands. Maybe you'd use a combination of different picking devices. You could have a hook, and a snake, and a suction device, and a three-fingered grabber, and a magnet... Hands are expensive, you could probably

    • It may well be a tricky problem, but that just means that you have to stop storing stuff in bins and other human oriented containers. In point of fact it is quite easy for machines to handle (most) objects presented to them if the stuff is presented in a fashion optimized for machinery. Fully automated and partially automated production lines would be impossible were that not the case.

      Whether everything in an Amazon warehouse justifies the expense of automation is an entirely different question than wheth

      • It may well be a tricky problem, but that just means that you have to stop storing stuff in bins and other human oriented containers.

        That is optimal and probably something that could be done in most cases.

        But for Amazon I'm not sure the huge range and fluctuation of products allows for this. They basically act like a giant merchandise cache for things at warehouses, that could be just about anything depending on season, hot items, or even buying waves.

        The product mix changes all the time so I don't know if

      • Their automation problem, as Kendall alludes to, is the variety in their inventory. Warehouses that have fully automated contain only a single company's products and that those products have been fairly uniform in specifications. What Amazon needs to automate is the process of assembling profiles of the inventory so that grip arms can pick any item presented to them and to a lesser extent know how to pack multiple items into a single container for shipment. Amazon just needs to figure out how to make it cos

    • I find it hard to believe though. Things like vacuum grips are extremely effective and arguably more reliable than fingers for picking things like closely packed boxes. Training of the systems is required for different packaging types, as well as anticipation of weight and accommodation of damaged packaging, but these things have been solved already.

      • I find it hard to believe though. Things like vacuum grips are extremely effective

        Sure, those are great on hard sided items.

        What about plush toys? Are they great on books, gripping the cover while the rest of the book swings wildly open? Lots of clothing is packaged in very light plastic, that when vacuum gripped would be destroyed.

        If you are talking an arbitrary mix of products not one technology that exists or is being worked on does a great job of replacing the hand.

        • You are approaching it the wrong way. Your automated picking line has tools appropriate for different items at different stations, with a final “fall-through” station with a human. The only things that end up being a problem are things that aren’t individually wrapped, or boxes that have been damaged. Fabric packaging is the only thing that doesn’t work with one size or another vacuum picker. I will admit I don’t know how hard cover books are handled though, unless the case i

    • by Quirkz ( 1206400 )

      Yep. You need good hand and arm control to properly flog the flunkies, plus a sadistic mentality. They may eventually replace all of the flunkies on the floor with robots, but we'll always need a human to flog the flunkies.

  • by mentil ( 1748130 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2019 @11:17PM (#58525298)

    They will test full automation in a secret trial location with only a couple people there to assess it. Once they get it working, they will swiftly (6-12 months) roll it out to all of their warehouses. This way they get to (mostly) avoid the inevitable strikes/walkouts.

    There's no way in hell they'll announce "oh yeah this is definitely going to happen in 1-2 years" and watch their business grind to a halt as tens of thousands of workers walk off the job. In the unlikely event of a shareholder lawsuit, they could easily make the claim that being coy about the tech readiness raised their profitability; furthermore, underselling themselves isn't securities fraud, only overselling themselves.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      They will test full automation in a secret trial location with only a couple people there to assess it. Once they get it working, they will swiftly (6-12 months) roll it out to all of their warehouses. This way they get to (mostly) avoid the inevitable strikes/walkouts.

      There's no way in hell they'll announce "oh yeah this is definitely going to happen in 1-2 years" and watch their business grind to a halt as tens of thousands of workers walk off the job. In the unlikely event of a shareholder lawsuit, they could easily make the claim that being coy about the tech readiness raised their profitability; furthermore, underselling themselves isn't securities fraud, only overselling themselves.

      I've said it before, I'll say it again, and get modded to oblivion for it: If you don't educate your kids they will be unemployable in a heavily automated economy. Anybody who today terminates his/her education at 15 and goes to work as an unskilled worker is asking for a life of poverty. Now cue a long line of angry respondents telling us how degrees are useless, we should abolish vocational schools and universities and just rely on home schooling and self education because those people are way better at m

      • > I've said it before, I'll say it again, and get modded to oblivion for it: If you don't educate your kids they will be unemployable in a heavily automated economy.

        Actually just the opposite. A lot of the "mind work" jobs and the soft skill jobs are now being automated, and more of that will accelerate. The LAST jobs to be automated will be skilled labor trades, so if you want your kids to have a future tell them to become plumbers, HVAC tech, electricians, or builders. Or to a lesser extent, mechani

    • I would imagine that automation in warehousing will creep in product by product. Commonly ordered stuff packaged in uniform, easy to handle containers (e.g. boxes) will be automated first. Lumpy, awkward, hard to handle or rarely ordered stuff may not be automated for many years. If ever.

      And my guess is that initially there will be LOTS of nifty jobs fixing the automation equipment. Those jobs will presumably fade away as the problems are ironed out.

      (Yes, I've been in real warehouses. But not often.)

    • If the business grinds to a halt due to work stoppages the incentive to automate becomes much higher. Amazon is hinting that automation is off in the future unless they really need to have it sooner.
  • lose their jobs. Check. This guy does know that most folks reading this will be alive in 10 years, right? That 10 years isn't a whole hell of a lot of time...
    • 32 million Americans change jobs every year.

      650k over ten years adds 0.2% to that.

      I think we'll manage.

      • There's a difference between "change jobs" and pulling jobs out of the work force completely. If you change a job, someone else takes the job you left... someone who pays taxes, goes out to eat, owns a car, pays maintenance, uses office supplies that someone sells, etc..Once a job is gone, nobody is earning, paying taxes or being part of society - its just gone. Leaving 650K people needing public assistance just to eat and have a roof over their head. The circle of life (financial life) stops circulating
        • You are repeating the lump of labor fallacy [wikipedia.org].

          There are not a fixed number of jobs in the economy. Economies scale to the resources available, including labor.

          The money not spent on these jobs will be spent on other things, creating jobs elsewhere in the economy. The difference is that the new jobs will actually add value, raising living standards. This effect is why automation has led to a 20-fold improvement in living standards since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

          • It's a nice idea, but as automation gets more advanced, the machines can start taking over those jobs as well. I would expect the pool of new job opportunities to dry up at some point in time, as there's a limit to our needs and our abilities.

            And even in the optimistic case, there may be a serious gap between losing a job and creating a new one that the same person can do with their current level of experience and education.

            • as automation gets more advanced, the machines can start taking over those jobs as well.

              People have been predicting that for 300 years.

              Until we get GP-AI, which is no where on the horizon, it won't happen.

              When it does happen, the change to our existence will be so profound that "jobs to keep people busy" will be the least of our concerns.

              as there's a limit to our needs and our abilities.

              When needs are met, spending shifts to desires. I don't need my own starship, but I certainly desire one. But with a billion people still living in extreme poverty, I don't think we will run out of "needs" anytime soon.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 01, 2019 @11:34PM (#58525344)

      lose their jobs. Check. This guy does know that most folks reading this will be alive in 10 years, right? That 10 years isn't a whole hell of a lot of time...

      Automation isn't really a big problem. Absolute worst case we have to do some *shudders* wealth redistribution to make sure no one starves or goes hungry. Given that you will produce at least as much productivity after automation, well, the money should be there. The more likely case is they find something else to do, for the most part. The other possibility is for some industries to reduce hours, so rather than working 40 or 50 hours a week, you work 30 or 40 tops.

      At any rate my list of fears goes something like this.

      1. Anti-intellectualism and its effect on choosing competent democratic leadership. "My gut tells me."
      2. Tribalism combined with (1). "It's all okay if your a member of the tribe or if it advances your cause here." A tribe member will often tell you straight out was, well the other choice was much worse, when by any empirical measure it wasn't even close.
      3. The oft repeated meme that "The other is why you don't have all you deserve." It is of course combined with (2) and (1).

      Note that all 3 feed on each other to grow. Either way, while more automation is going to cause problems in the short term, we will get through those. Killing off our planet, because of stupid choices, is somewhat more permanent.

      • Given that you will produce at least as much productivity after automation, well, the money should be there

        If Amazon pays $15/hour to a human worker, and replaces them with a robot that has operating costs of $5/hour, this means that there's only $10 left on the table. Even if you redistribute that all to the fired worker (which won't happen), their income would still drop from $15 to $10.

        • by urusan ( 1755332 )

          Yes, but now they don't have to drive to a warehouse every morning. Perhaps they can reassess where they live and move some place cheaper and lower density, and even if they prefer city life (as long as this is a far-reaching automation trend rather than just their job being automated) there will be plenty of other people doing so at the same time, driving their living costs down. They also don't have to save for retirement if this $10 is going to be given to them indefinitely.

          They'll also have plenty more

      • > Absolute worst case we have to do some *shudders* wealth redistribution to make sure no one starves or goes hungry.

        Because America is doing such a bloody fantastic job with that currently, right?

        https://longmontobserver.org/lifestyle/changes-to-snap-benefits-for-seniors/

        https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/03/14/trumps-proposed-snap-cuts-could-damage-economy-heres-how/

  • by im_thatoneguy ( 819432 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2019 @11:25PM (#58525316)

    Of course he's ignoring the fact that you can still have massive losses between here and there.

    They already organize racks in some facilities to put picked items closer together. Of course inevitably this will be taken to the extreme where individual bins roll in front of a worker with a product photo "Grab this" with zero walking. If they could just boost efficiency by 50% by moving individual bins within reach of a picker with zero walking that's still hundreds of thousands of impacted workers. And that doesn't sound like a problem would be terribly difficult.

    They could even boost it further with machine vision. Attach a high powered spotlight to a camera. Identify object to be grabbed. Focus spotlight on item in bin.

    At some point the machine is just using humans for their dexterous fingers.

    • by Lanthanide ( 4982283 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2019 @11:29PM (#58525326)

      Of course inevitably this will be taken to the extreme where individual bins roll in front of a worker with a product photo "Grab this" with zero walking. If they could just boost efficiency by 50% by moving individual bins within reach of a picker with zero walking that's still hundreds of thousands of impacted workers.

      They already do this - they already bring the bins to the worker on robots called Kivas, that were made by Kiva Systems. They bought the company. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      • They already organize racks in some facilities to put picked items closer together.

        That's what I meant by this quote. But you still have to walk to the rack of grouped bins. I'm talking about conveyor belt bin showing up in your "lap".

        • Incremental improvement is indeed the issue. It will take a long time (ten years?) to remove the last packer from the warehouse, But bit by bit, there will be fewer each year.

          They can do thing like organize their bins so that it is easier for robots to bin pick. And bin automated picking has come a long way in the last ten years.

          And as you say, for now, the human is just the robot's fingers. The computer already takes the order from the customer, determines how to meet it, fetches the bin, tells the hum

    • Of course inevitably this will be taken to the extreme where individual bins roll in front of a worker

      They are already doing this [youtube.com].

      Moving the shelf to the picker, rather than the picker walking to the shelf, has been common in Amazon warehouses for several years.

  • Sure, for arbitrary products the risk of damage / mis-picking is quite high.

    But there are some products that are very uniform, so a solution to pick these without damage or mis-picking is much easier. Books and DVDs/BluRays are obvious candidates for their standardised size and non-fragile nature.

    • Books and DVDs/BluRays are obvious candidates for their standardised size and non-fragile nature.

      You say that, but I have had a LOT of books shipped to me with slight damage from Amazon (and other places). I generally don't care because I enjoy reading a book more than how it looks - but I still find it annoying.

      Corners can get dented, edges of pages slightly town, covers marred. Lots of ways a book can get to be less than pristine, especially if you are packing it with anything else (which seems like is

  • by wolfheart111 ( 2496796 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2019 @11:49PM (#58525400)
    Working in a warehouse sucks... so does all the other jobs robots can do. Modern day slavery.
    • Plus, the only people who lose are the working class - the deplorables. They had their chance to vote the right way and they blew it. I don't think anyone feels sorry for them any more. Let them learn to code or perish.
  • Amazon Dismisses Idea Automation Will Eliminate All Its Warehouse Jobs Soon

    Amazon fired some guy named "Idea Automation" and is going to get rid of all their "Warehouse Jobs" next.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Well they won't eliminate all workers (wink). Need a few to program and maintain the bots.

  • Of course there will always be managers

  • It is actually pretty soon if they can do it by then. And, if this works, it will inspire others and a lot of jobs will be lost with no replacements. Time to prepare for that.

  • Sorry, but if you think working in a warehouse should be protected from automation then you need to rethink your values.
  • The industrial revolution started in the early 18th century and almost all the work that people would have done in 1700 has been automated to some degree.

    There will still be jobs, however the divide between the reward for unskilled/low skill work and the reward for higher skilled work will continue to increase.

  • Kerblam! will be reality someday.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • You can't threaten, demoralize or fire robots.

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