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Comment by smpetrey | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Since I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not, are you aware of what residency is?

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

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

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.

Are you a physician btw?

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.

https://zdoggmd.com/ama-005/

>Luckily, I'm in med school now so I don't have to worry about being taken advantage of in that way

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.

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.

There is a pipetting robot now: https://opentrons.com/

This is awesome! But...

PIs everywhere: “Why would I buy this robot when I could get an undergrad to do the work for free?”

Although if they hated taking the time to train undergrads maybe they’d give it a shot

Then again, they don’t train the undergrads, postdocs do

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.

Looks like the Theranos Edison. Except it works apparently.

> 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.

Your story seems like it's right out of the game "What Remains of Edith Finch".

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.

Too bad this can't be outsourced.

Automation and mechanization have always been about replacing dehumanizing, backbreaking, mindless toil. Maybe not intentionally, but that was the result.

"And for $13.75 an hour, it definitely isn't worth it."

A billion of people around the world would be happy to work with that hourly rate.

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.

"accept your scraps, peasant, there's folks with no plausible way of ever enjoying them who would"

Not at the US cost of living. Nor would those billions of people be paid a that rate if their cost of living is lower than the US.

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.

Well people here keep ranting about 1 percenters without ever realizing that >$100K earners are among one percenters in the world.

Actually, the threshold to be in top 1% income bracket worldwide is $32,400

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/05061...

This number is both old and in nominal terms. A person making 50k USD in China is likely richer than a person in the US making 100k USD in the US.

http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/771271476908686029/Segal.pdf suggests that the number to be in the global 1% is around $50,000 PPP per person in a given household.

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.

All in countries with a lower cost of living.

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.

That is the first time someone has thought about me as a king. Even metaphorically and for a brief moment :)

Sure, if they could stay where they are. $13.75 buys a lot more in Bangalore than it does in the US.

Would you?

No, but I am not suffering from hunger, lack of clean drinking water, lack of basic medical help or violence.

If that were the case, I would be happy to do anything, including relocating to the US and working as an Amazon's robot.

To add further there will be billion who would do as a daily rate.

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.

An industrial job often pays a lot better than amazon ever would

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.

Yes let’s make everything manual in an entire factory

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.

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