Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs

Lol.

It's not that the motivation isn't there to get robots to do the bitchwork in science, it's that the money isn't there in an academic setting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_resident_work_hours

You may enjoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_God

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.)

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.

"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."

Isn't that drop shipping?

Why would Amazon comoditize its greatest competitive advantage? (Yet, it seems that they are, so the question is not rhetorical.)

Shady subcontractors are Amazon's problem.

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.

The point I was talking about has to do with the internal labor publicity at Amazon which rarely affects the consumer.

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.

Yes there is. Lower prices means that consumers will buy more.

Unless you are going to argue that the elasticity of demand is perfectly inelastic. Such cases are rare.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Office jobs are disappearing by the millions, just like physical ones. Lucikly, at least until now, new ones were created in their place.

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.

If the company doesn’t create the job, the tax break is reduced by a certain percentage per job.

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.

[1] https://azizonomics.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/farmjobs.jpg

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.

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.

Robots will make the same mistake, only faster. :/

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.

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?

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.

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.

This seems to me to be a fundamental difference.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

I first heard this proposal from Bill Gates. Suffice to say he's got a unique view and has probably studied this extensively.

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.

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'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)

Which I am personally not advocating. I am unsure of how I feel about it.

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.

Only if there is enough competition.

Or maybe have robots and then pay working class people to do nothing?

Convert itself into a co-op:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative#Definition_...

This is not rocket science...

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.