Amazon hid its safety crisis
revealnews.org
revealnews.org
The gist of the message above. It seems that robots made the process so efficient that workers were suffering from repetitive motion injuries.
It also would seemed to be a matter of time that the packing/picking will be fully replaced by robots. At which time Amazon will no longer have a safety issue, but an entire separate political issue.
Here's an old Kiva Robotics video that shows how picking works.[1] It's an utterly mindless job. An automated laser pointer points to the bin from which to take an object. A lighted button shows which box to put it in. A new bin then moves into position, and this goes on. Training time required is about 30 seconds. Amazon liked the system and bought Kiva. The company, not just the system.
So anyone with basic eye-hand coordination can do picking, computers check that it's done right, there's no future in the job, and Amazon is trying to automate the picking process anyway. Classic assembly-line job.
I worked as a picker/packer one summer. This is an understatement, even before the robots did the walking for you.
It's interesting that the only thing left is to make a robot that can handle the objects to be placed, currently they cost more than minimum wage human labor unless the thing being picked is designed to be handled by a machine.
Ultimately that's what I think will happen, the packaging will be designed for picking by machine and the job can be fully automated.
Walmart has been flirting in the same space to automate inventory management.
So either Amazon will own it, or we all own it and distribution centers can become like public utilities.
Turns out that it's a really difficult problem.
I think the problem we have is that destroying a human body with mindless repetitive tasks is often still "cheaper" than engineering an automated solutions. It is simply cheaper to feed off desperation than to value human lives, and there is the engrained notion that humanity cannot be productive without putting humans into positions of desperation. This is a mindset issue that needs to eventually change.
When the inherent costs are externalized, of course. The public pays the bills of these people who can't afford medical care or end-of-life expenses. My last job was a late-night warehouse position, where the hazard pay of 50¢/hr in no way covered the health consequences of a disturbed and atypical sleep schedule (driving heavy machinery, in my colleagues' case).
Just privatize it! The human meat grinder will be perfected.
I don't think it's cheaper, it's just that a solution has yet to exist. Once it start working, it will go out at breakneck pace.
I don't think this is a single problem. There are several dimensions to it, and you can trivialize some at the expense of others. Stop storing things compactly in bins and you can make it a lot easier to grab those things with a robotic arm. Give everything very robust packaging and you no longer have to worry about appropriate grip strength.
If you occupy the entire volume of a warehouse, then the volume occupied per object becomes less of an issue than when you have huge air columns between the roof and robots, workers, or shelves.
You could move most of the manual handling to the ingest side; having truck workers load product into what amounts to a fancy Pez dispenser customized to each high volume product. The humans spend more time dealing with oddball items and trying to arrange the order to fit within the box, instead of grabbing things out of bins.
Now available in Germany.[1] Except the manual handling on the input side is done by robots.
General bin-picking is still hard. But bin-picking of roughly rectangular objects in a moderate size range works pretty well.
edit: Looking at how things are packaged and presented in the lower end like Lidl/Aldi, they are often standing on a pallet, either in full carton boxes, or just with carton around the top and bottom and the sides, stacked to maybe a meter, or 1.20m high. And the boxes are perforated in such ways that you can pull on some marked corner to open them easily.
Also the burger-flipping robot and self-driving car have been just around the corner for the last two decades. Although the end solution to those issues may very well be that we need to stop eating so many burgers and stop designing cities around cars, rather than robots coming in to allow even more consumption.
Even your frozen burger likely had significant manual labor investment in it at the factory it was produced. Also by "fully prepared", try adding fresh ingredients like lettuce, tomato, onion, freezing it and then microwaving it. I am sure it will be enjoyable to the palate. Even without the fresh ingredients, most will find the microwave burger inferior to even the cheapest McDonald's burger.
Also Sri Racha helps with almost anything! ;> Have you ever tried to 'tune' a quarterpounder, double-cheese, or simple cheesburger with mild (green cap/Huy Fong alike) Sri Racha? Just a few small splotches.
When we talk of burger-flipping robots replacing the McDonald's worker, the answer isn't "McDonald's is already highly automated", as they still have a huge number of employees doing manual labor at every store. There is no burger-flipping robot, and their factories featuring automation(as most factories have for decades) hasn't really changed the number of employees they need in each store.
Yes, Yes! I do understand efficiencies of scale. I asked you because you said there are no ready made burgers, which are deep frozen, able to being warmed up again at the time of use by whatever means.
I questioned if that matters because there already refrigerated(although not deep frozen) burgers available in the supermarkets, so not a really long shelf life(I think about a week, have to recheck that next time in store), but who cares if the supply chain delivers?
I further question that this isn't fully automatable because almost fully robotic deep frozen pizza production does exist at scale in factories already in operation for a long time, to be pipelined into the fridges of supermarkets. Or the documentaries showing them in operation from the inside are fake news, but what do I know?
I don't see why that shouldn't be possible with burgers.
Btw. there is no need to flip anything in McD for the classics as I recall, with the exception of that McRib thing and something fishy. At least that was the case when I've been crew-trainer for about a year somewhere around 1988/1989. At that time we got the clamshell grills/BBQs which made flipping obsolete. Similar for the buns, 12 small or 6 large on a plate, to be put into some horizontal slot, toast, done.
Why McD doesn't produce deepfrozen stuff for supermarkets is their decision, not necessarily a technical one. Maybe they fear law-suits from their franchisees? Maybe it makes more economic sense for them to offer the "experience" and full menu all the time? Maybe they don't want to compete pricewise with alternative choices right next to them in the fridge? A (non-smart) fridge in the supermarket doesn't ask "Do you want fries with that?" (for now)
So that was that. Almost. Last mile...
Yes? As in deep frozen pizza from the supermarket/grocer. Be it by shopping in person, online, via phone, app, who cares?
You said NO!
I said BOO! :)
Are we clear now?
But this is the majority of jobs that humans have right now globally. There's a reason why it's called "backbreaking labor", it literally breaks down your back.
Everything from agriculture to mining to construction to manufacturing to logistics. The world is full of intrinsically unergonomic jobs that slowly grind human bodies down.
It's just that we've decided that one set of these jobs we arbitrarily care about and the rest, we give a collective shrug to.
Like, if you look at the image at the top of this article: https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-12-29/what-it-s-be-rice-far... this is the reality for hundreds of millions of rice farmers across the globe right now and our collective response ranges somewhere between cringey romanticism of the task to a shrug of "whaddayagonnado?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E
Humans would just get in the way and get mangled.
Btw: This Autostore system is becoming the standard automated warehouse system for Swedish e-retailers, as they prepare for Amazon entering the Swedish market in a month or two.
I think there are at least like 10 very large Autostore installations in Sweden for various niche online e-retailers. And like 20 "large" installations.
The Kiva system just needs is a flat floor. The robots are mechanically simple and totally interchangeable. On-site maintenance is limited to replacing batteries and wheels; for anything else it goes back to a repair center.
- Kiva robots are designed to work along with cheap labor
- Swisslog Autostore is designed to minimise labor, because labor is expensive in Europe (it does more of the work).
Here's a four year old video of an Autostore at komplett.no/komplett.se:
[1] http://www.cargocap.com/ or
[2] https://www.smartcityloop.de/ or
maybe even extended right into your condo via elevator!
edit: Surprise, Surprise! [4] https://www.four-parx.com/en/four-parx-smart-city-loop-for-u...
in my hometown! Yay!
There are millions of people who simply cannot be retrained.
Yes, pick-and-pack is mind-numbingly boring for many people. But for others, it's good. Or even challenging.
I've worked on an assembly line three times in my life. I found it tedious and pointless, and to keep my mind busy, I mostly just focused on what I was going to do after work. But there were people there for whom the work was a perfect fit.
Not everyone has the intellectual capacity of a SV keyboard jockey. Not everyone has average motor skills. These people still need jobs. Still need to earn money. Still have the right to participate in society.
The solution is not to just throw UBI money at them and warehouse them in apartments like cattle. The solution is to automate an appropriate amount of factory jobs, but also keep an appropriate amount of low-skill jobs so that these people can be part of society.
Yeah but, isn't the fact that those are going away the whole problem? If there already was an "appropriate amount of low-skill jobs" we wouldn't be talking about this. Do you want the government to mandate certain companies have to keep X number of certain jobs around for low-skilled workers? And what do you do about jobs that simply aren't needed anymore (not automated away, just gone due to something new)?
I'm not saying it's a terrible idea, but it seems odd to me that you're complaining about UBI but your solution to the problem is likely just UBI with extra steps - is it more 'demeaning' to just give people money for nothing, or to force them to do a literally unnecessary job to get it?
It's also not like there isn't anything for people to do if they're receiving UBI in place of their (now gone) job, Ex. they could volunteer at a non-profit, work on hobbies, work for a local business (that maybe couldn't afford to hire them at a full salary), etc. And all those things are arguably more useful usages of their time than making them do an unnecessary job.
Still, fundamentally I agree with most of your criticisms, there's definitely a subset of the population that really can't be retrained from what they currently do, but recognizing the problem and solving the problem are two different things. And numbers here matter as well - the number of people losing their jobs to automation is a different number from those that can't reasonably be expected to be retrained somewhere else. If that second group is small enough, just giving them UBI/SS/etc. and telling them to retire is honestly not that bad of an option.
I agree with the "elitist" part but not the "SV" part. "Well, they'll just get retraining" has been the orthodox economist's standard dismissal of any and all concerns related to automation and/or globalization for decades, long before Silicon Valley became economically or culturally influential. In fact, SV is more likely to support UBI, which is still a handwavy way-too-hopeful solution, but it's a step in the right direction.
What would be wrong with targeted career replacement income? Instead of throwing a little money at everybody, completely fund the remainder of careers at the functionally obsolete/long-term disabled/otherwise unhirable. Then create incentives to hire these individuals that outpace offshoring/outsourcing/automation.
Either they get a good job that replaces what they lost, or enjoy getting what their career promised - including sizable wage increases.
I think this is a statement worth teasing apart a bit.
Nobody "needs" a job, for most definitions of "job."
Everyone needs
food
water
shelter.
Maslow's hierarchy makes this clear.
In most places in the world, you justify your right to access food, water, and shelter by providing labor to earn capital (or you just have capital because your parents had capital) to give to someone else for the food, water, and shelter they control. Sometimes this is the person that gave you the capital in the first place! (What if you work for Safeway? ...or whole foods? )
So you're not technically incorrect to say "these people need jobs." Of course they need jobs, if they don't, they'll starve to death or die of exposure! But it doesn't sit right with me. Why is the solution automatically "let's find a way for them to justify their existence in a world quickly filling up with robots," and not simply "let's sit back and enjoy the fruits of robotic labor?"
I think this is how the bottom portion of Maslow's hierarchy is often dismissed.
What I think the parent is talking about is higher up in the hierarchy--esteem needs. In our current society, most people get fulfillment through their job or raising kids. You often hear about issues with empty nest or retirement because people have trouble losing that purpose in their life.
I've heard a lot of people bring up this dilemma, but not a lot of discussion about solutions. Often, they seem to imply work is the only way for fullfilment and don't even mention raising kids.
I think history has a bunch of examples. None are going to be a good fit for everyone and I can imagine many people just being warehoused, consuming media with no other purpose. Historically, you saw well-to-do women run charities outside of raising children. A lot of scientists were very well to do people following their whims. For retirees, they can find purpose in maintaining a garden, playing music, or something else that offers personal fulfillment.
> think history has a bunch of examples.
Which part of history has automation and post scarcity? This would be news to me!
> consuming media with no other purpose.
Far be it for me to judge what people do with their time. I hate running but there's these maniacs that run marathons.
I wasn't trying to make an argument or refute anything you said. I liked that you brought up Maslow and was hoping to steer the conversation back to what the parent was saying.
The UBI quote came directly from the parent post. UBI comes up a lot with liberals in the US as a response--often it's dismissed because (assuming it works) it only solves the base of the pyramid. (I honestly have never heard post-scarcity or automating away jobs brought up by conservatives in the US)
> Which part of history has automation and post scarcity?
Apologies, I felt like I was pretty clear when I was referring to portions of society and not society as a whole. Women only recently became part of the traditional workforce. Women would often marry and bare children rather young and affluent would send kids to boarding school. This gave them a lot of time outside of child rearing. A lot of history's scientists were independently wealthy.
> Far be it for me to judge what people do with their time.
I'm not intending to put words in the parent poster's mouth, but the implication of warehousing and forgetting low-skilled people I politely put as "consuming media with no other purpose." The fear is more like high suicide rates, high levels of depression, and addiction. You're certainly allowed to not judge--I'm not sure "judge" would be the word I'd use for how I would feel about those people, but the common discussion when this gets brought up is if and what could be done to address it, because UBI (assuming it was a workable solution) wouldn't.
We need to businesses around reuse and recycling. We need a ton of people who can find new ways to disassemble and dismal complicated parts, quickly, so they can be turned into new resources; so we're not shipping all our e-waste to kids in Africa who get heavy metal poisoning for a little bit of copper or lead.
There are lots of things that still need innovation. You throw UBI and people, and you won't get that.
UBI would work if we didn't have resource scarcity. We do not have Star Trek style replicators. We are far from being scarcity free.
Star Trek is a great fantasy, but we are a long ways away from that. (Culturally, politically, legally, technologically and economically)
What a nonsensical thing to say. There are so many counterexamples, where to even begin?
Don't confuse your current administration or administrative culture for 'government' worldwide, throughout history.
While that's true, it's only true from a short to medium-term perspective.
In the US at least (perhaps some folks from elsewhere can chime in on this), nearly 70% of GDP is consumer spending.
As you automate away jobs, that leaves fewer people with money to spend. The very wealthy, while certainly able to consume vastly more than others, can't make up for this.
Mostly because there's a limit on how many pairs of pants, skirts, socks, sofas, T-bone steaks, homes, cars, half-caf soy lattes, etc., etc., etc. that one person or household can reasonably use.
If current trends continue, eventually there won't be enough demand to satisfy the levels of production over the long-term -- which will cause the economy to crash and burn.
As such, creating incentives to raise wages, employ more people and encouraging real investment by the wealthiest, rather than incentivizing the hoarding of financial resources, could ensure a vibrant economy for the long-term -- with benefits to everyone, including the very wealthy.
Yes, it will mean that someone whose net worth could be hundreds of millions may only be tens of millions, but from the standpoint of living a good life, how would that make a material difference?
Please note that I am emphatically not advocating for "forced wealth redistribution" or "nationalization of private industry."
Rather, I'm suggesting that changing the incentives WRT wages, taxes and jobs in a capitalist system could have a profound positive effect in the near, medium and long-term on those with the least, and a profound positive effect on those with the most in the long-term.
In fact, creating incentives to inject more consumer spending (through higher wages, incentives to innovate and engage in entrepreneurial activities, disincentives to using arbitrage and financial chicanery to increase wealth, etc.) is a market-based way to bolster the strength of the economy for the long-term, increase the consumer power of those with the least and ensure the long-term growth and stability of our economy and society.
Let's do capitalism right and create a better world for all of us.
In all of these discussions about automation, Capitalism, economic dynamics and so on a lot of people seem to try to argue that the process can be divided into the automation part, call it capitalism with a small c, and the education/political/human part, when in reality, technological process changes both in the exact same way.
I mean even the term you went with "oversupply of humans", from which vantage point does such a label come? Sounds more like a rogue AI than a humanistic consideration. That would be Capitalism with a capital C speaking, I guess.
And, recently, we die less in childbirth and infant-hood. So - even with falling childbirth rates, we still tend to multiply a bit.
But given that absolute and relative global poverty rates and starvation rates and disease mortality rates have plummeted and population grows dramatically - it becomes a resource allocation problem.
Germany (for example) needs more laborers because of plummeting domestic birth rates. The retired community's social net requires young tax-payers to pick up the burden. Demographics are screwing with this math. Somalia or Syria (for example) have a lot of folks that need to escape. Problem: Once Turks or Arabs or Persians or Somalians or Syrians or Northern Africans get to Germany - they may or may not want to learn the language - but as refugees, they get full public benefit. And are not willing to learn or work to support retired Germans (this is an isolated example).
Maybe we have an exploding population in all the wrong places? (I am not recommending genocide - just: It is a wicked problem)
That and potential driverless trucks are going to create a potential jobless future of the less fortunate/educated, that is an enormous political issue - though the burden will not be completely on Amazon, it will be a huge part of that.
And yet Amazon has no real interest in solving its counterfeit problem, the same way it has no real interest in solving its safety problem.
I feel like it's all PR and bullshit at this point. And I'd say the overwhelming evidence of them lying about safety reports is a pretty strong indicator of how their actions don't match their words.
This obsession with growth is metaphorically cancer. It has to grow no matter what, until the once-healthy host has long since died and all that's left is an enormous tumor.
> I work at Amazon, we are hiring all the top ML people to work on this problem. Legions of ML PhDs.
It doesn't take legions of PhDs in machine learning to fix a basic counterfeit problem on a glorified online shopping store.
You'd think that a company that claims it is throwing vast amounts of resources at stopping counterfeiting on their platform would at least try to collect data on the counterfeits their customers receive.
Amazon has a vested massive interest in not provably knowing numbers about counterfeit rates!
I don't get this Amazon hate. Weren't they the ones who originally came up with the idea for putting purchaser reviews with the product, and the 5-star rating system? It seems like their solution was to 'crowdsource' the problem. Now people have learned to game the system, but I buy plenty of electronics from amazon and from ebay, and I'm careful enough that I've never ended up with a counterfeit.
Edit: I've noticed that ebay gives seller ratings, and amazon does product ratings. I guess that belies the different focus they each have. It would be cool (and probably a big improvement) if amazon put both product and seller ratings in equally prominent positions.
No. Companies have been doing this for as long as there has been advertising and mail-order catalogs. Did Amazon do it on the web first? Unlikely, but cannot be proven.
and the 5-star rating system
Also unlikely. The five-star system has been around for at least a century. In digital form, I had it on one of the first web sites I built, around the same time that Amazon.com launched, and even that was cribbed from online review systems that existed before the web.
As I linked elsewhere, Bloomberg seems to think they were the "first successful online retailer to embrace consumer views".
Were they? I doubt it...
It doesn't say if they were the first, but it looks like they were at least one of the first.
Edit: yep, Bloomberg says they were the first to do it.
What you said makes more sense if you replace both the words with the word 'humans'.
Well, as told by Bezos, “Leaders start with the customer and work backwards,” doesn't mean "Leaders start with the customer and his needs in mind".
It just means "leaders start with how to get the customers' money doing what's minimally required, and/or profitably duping them without consequences".
These principles are severely lacking. The word "ethic" does not appear. Even the bullet point devoted to employees is framed entirely around employee output ("Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion.").
> Leaders have relentlessly high standards — many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and drive their teams to deliver high quality products, services, and processes. Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed.
Read this in the context of their current behavior around factory workers to understand how sick the mindset truly is.
Leaders should have relentlessly high standards for themselves. They should not expect humans to perform manual labor at super-human levels. That's called abuse.
> The overall rate of 7.7 serious injuries per 100 employees was 33% higher than in 2016 and nearly double the most recent industry standard.
> those requiring days off or job restrictions.
Meanwhile OSHA defined serious injury here: https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/standardinterpretations/1993-...
Exerpt:
> 1 Impairment of the body in which part of the body is made functionally useless or is substantially reduced in efficiency on or off the job. Such impairment may be permanent or temporary, chronic or acute. Injuries involving such impairment would usually require treatment by a medical doctor. Examples of injuries which constitute such harm include:
a Amputation (loss of all or part of a bodily appendage which includes the loss of bone).
b Concussion.
c Crushing (internal, even through skin surface may be intact).
d Fracture (simple or compound).
e Burns or scald, including electric and chemical burns.
f Cut, laceration, or puncture involving significant bleeding and/or requiring suturing.
The differences in standards (which the article does mention in passing, but in no details) is a potential differentiator.
Given what we know about the working conditions there (threatened to be fired for any sick day, wearing adult diapers to avoid bathroom breaks, etc.) getting a medical day off in an Amazon wharehouse scenario means something like your leg was cut off or you're bleeding green blood...
/s
> Certain (not all) Amazon warehouses seem to have per-employee injury rates that are significantly higher than the industry average, as in twice as high or more. Apparent reason: It’s not they’re actually dangerous places to work, it’s just that they’ve maximized efficiency and reduced waste to the point where people are picking and packing and shipping every minute they’re working, never stopping. And a certain proportion of human bodies simply can’t manage that. They break down under pressure.
> According to the Advanced website, Julie Parsons, then its occupational medicine medical director, believed in “treating injuries such that they are not OSHA recordable, if possible.”
> A nurse practitioner who worked at the clinic said she dreaded seeing Amazon patients because she didn’t think she would be able to treat them appropriately. She said she remembers an Amazon worker who came to the clinic in a lot of pain from a wrist injury, crying and asking, “Can’t you do something?”
> “I’m really sorry,” the nurse practitioner recalled telling her. “There’s really not a whole lot I can offer you right now.”
Is there a RICO-equivalent to medical malpractice? This is conspiracy and fraud, aside from what should be a blistering class action lawsuit.
Part of the reason I don't think we should tamp down too hard on a lawfirm's share of monetary damages is because there should be large (well-funded) firms who would salivate to take on such a case against Amazon, even if it could take 10 years to go through, even if it might fail in the end.
According to the article, productivity expectations per worker doubled with robotics, and Amazon has about double the injury rate per worker, so my super rough back of the envelope calculation says they should fare similarly on that metric.
If the industry alternative takes twice as many workers to do the same job, ultimately leading to approximately the same number of injured workers, has Amazon really created a safety crisis?
Theoretically, a system could be designed where all safety standards were ignored and productivity was n times more per employee, with lower injuries per item picked, but would result in astronomical injury rates. If you were an Amazon employee, would you want to go to work where there was a 1/10 chance per day you’d be injured? A 10x more efficient warehouse employee isn’t making 10x more money, so they are seeing increased risk for no personal gain.
Double the industry standard begs a real response and action plan.