Fears of employee displacement as Amazon brings robots into warehouses

There once was a job called "elevator operator", the wikipedia page is fascinating [1], I had no idea they were in existence until the 1970s, I thought it ended in the 30s!

One day we will look at warehouses where robots pack boxes and think "how strange that people used to do that job, how mind-numbing and boring it must have been".

I am not going to pretend to know what employment current warehouse workers will transition to in the future, but I'm hopeful because

1) we have a shrinking world population, so there will be less people to fill certain jobs

2) we've always had improved quality of life for most people as a result of technological change - this could probably be debated, but we have longer lives, excess food, etc etc. We live in a world of excess - that doesn't mean we can't/shouldn't improve our world, but we don't need to create "more", we need to live better.

When did I become a ranting lunatic?

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

I like my speedy Amazon deliveries and don't like the grueling conditions, often reported on by the Guardian, that Amazon warehouse workers have to deal with to support that pace. I look forward to the day when automation puts an end to that.

(edited for typo)

This is not materially different from the robots that Amazon already has in the warehouses. But instead of storing things in pods that have to be moved by Kiva-derived robots to humans who then do the picking and put things into totes, now it's the totes themselves that are being stored on shelves. You're still going to have the picking process, and everything downstream of that.

Seems to me like this is much lower density of storage than using the pods, and that will mean fulfillment centers will have to be much larger in order to store enough totes to equal what they could have stored with pods.

I don't think Digit actually has hands/fingers. So it may not be an immediate threat.

But Amazon does have prototypes for the main packing job, doesn't it? Or at least research robots that can do part of it.

I feel like it only be another year or two and then all the Amazon warehouse jobs will be automated.

One interesting thing is if you look at Amazon's recent press release about automation, they keep stressing how much all of it is just helping the workers, etc. They won't be able to keep saying that for too much longer.

"employee displacement" what a term.

Jobs which can be taken by automation, should be.