If Amazon is the future of work, then be afraid
pro.gigaom.com
pro.gigaom.com
That kind of zero-skilled, follow-the-instructions work is going fully robotic, much more quickly than people realize. Amazon themselves are investing heavily in robotics.
There's a caveat to that though. When mechanization became intelligent mechanization (what I call having a Computer whether mechanical or digital control the process) the shifts started happening more frequently, and the replacement jobs became harder to obtain.
I think ultimately this is the key point, as a society we LET mechanization happen, and ultimately it has taken us to a point where not everyone is CAPABLE of having a highly skilled job. There's ways to alleviate it, part of the problem is an outdated education system. Another part of the problem is probably cultural, there might be a lack of high skilled jobs too.
None the less, there WILL be a growing population of people who we've taken away their capability to work for a living. So when we offer a basic income, its not us graciously giving them a gift of our hard work. Its giving them the lives they are owed because of the decisions we have collectively made a hundred years ago.
I'm personally strongly in favour of basic income, but the two biggest arguments people give me are "How will we pay for it" and "why should we give money to people too lazy to work". Your final comment is how I defuse those, though I word it slightly differently.
I say something along the following: "Computers and machines have obsoleted old jobs, and we as a society haven't found new ones for all these people yet. So, I don't know how much you know about history, but when you take a bunch of people, take away their money, and let them be bored all day... bad things happen. Don't think of it as a gift. Think of it as a tax that prevents revolution."
I may have a little bit of a penchant for melodrama
I completely agree. What I need to be able to enjoy food more is not better food, but that nearly 1 billion people aren't undernourished [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starvation ]. However, I don't see that sentiment shared a lot. The world in large part seems to operate in slightly different principles.
When the industrial revolution happened, a debate kind of started.
Very extreme exploitation started, and many people had to struggle and even risk their lives to change that from utter callousness to calculated and physically healthier exploitation. Now, corporate profits keep soaring, but they are accumulate in fewer and fewer hands, and today 40% of US workers earn less than 1968 minimum wage [ http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-08-05/40-us-workers-now-e... ].
If capitalism became more humane because people applied pressure, why would it become even more humane when there is nobody left to apply any kind of pressure? Why is basic income a more likely outcome than, say, mass sterilization? Make me believe, I really want to. I could use some optimism but I'm all out.
We're certainly not there now.
The possibility of the transition is predicated, on the technical side, on massive advancements in AI and robotics.
At least we'd be making society a better place while guaranteeing an income of some kind.
1) Benjamin Franklin
2) not advocating - this part violates some of my basic beliefs
Though the number of these jobs is not going to be enough.
Of course that merely shows that there is a problem, it doesn't show what to blame or how to fix it in general.
In all seriousness, the world needs ditch diggers too.
Exactly.
This is what worries me about the attempt to bring unskilled manufacturing jobs back to America. It's a losing battle & the wrong battle. The focus should be on how to equip workers with skills for the 21st century.
If you think about all the kinds of jobs that can be replaced by automation you'll see that this only leads to a grim proposition: mass unemployment.
It's really cool how it works too.
This is not the future of Amazon. This is the current state of Amazon. If the writer is concerned about anything at all with the workers, he should be concerned about the workers losing their job.
Thousands of warehouse workers will be losing their job because their work will soon be automated. I am not saying that it is trivial to replace them. It will be a costly process to streamline and automate current process with robots, but believe me when I say it will be done.
Go into a STEM job? Well, maybe you'll get hired, maybe you won't, you have to hope that you picked an area that was hot 4 years ahead of time and that the people managing recruitment don't have their heads up their asses. Also you need to hope that any company isn't already in the process of globalizing or outsourcing said STEM jobs because they can do those cheaper elsewhere (see IBM story yesterday).
And if you didn't go into STEM, well, fuck you because STEM is the only college that's any good by 95% of all accounts.
And if you didn't go into college, then fuck you because you're going to do back-breaking labor with no guarantee of financial security.
Something's gotta change or things are going to be grim. They're already getting grim.
“The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it”
What is the solution? I don't know. The future is going to belong to people who refuse to let themselves be nothing. It is not going to be about STEM jobs, math or science or art. The future is something you are going to have to find. Or become irrelevant. Scary, but sometimes that fear is useful.
I think the crows are coming home to roost for America in more ways then one. It isn't just the choices we make, but our very ideology that is devouring us (so to speak). We believe in the free market and competition. We're capitalists. We used to be capitalists mostly within our own borders. Now technology has transformed our chains of distribution and communication to the point where we're capitalists with no borders. Globalization is here, intensifying, and our religion of capitalism has won converts the globe over.
It isn't that Indians and Chinese are choosing more lucrative career paths (working with your assumption there, -I'm not sure myself), -they've also got the fastest growing middle class on the globe. That's not because they are doctors and engineers. They've got what were our manufacturing jobs too. This is the logical outcome of what we preach as a country.
As long as you aren't too nationalistic, it looks like a good thing as wages continually shift and flow to the cheapest labor pools on the planet, lifting those people up, but that's really overly simplistic. What concerns me is the gap between the richest and the poor and middle class. In America it's growing, but it's a concern anywhere on Earth if it gets too large.
Life in India and China for the middle class isn't as bad as your comment makes it out to be (perhaps unintentionally). Human beings have an amazing ability to adapt. Health care and other costs in many developing countries aren't totally insane. The big difference is hope for progress - the middle class is growing in many developing countries. Also, people have a support network that would seem surprising to a westerner. E.g. the joint family system.
As opposed to the US, where the safety net is so ample and awesome and...
...oh wait. Nevermind.
Yes, your situation here is awful too. But that is only a taste of the hell hole that exists out there. There is a reason that immigrants still come to these shores. It is because the hell here is paradise compared to the hell out there.
In all of the "first world" and many of the "third world" ER is actually quite okay, and all of them will fix noncritical damage pretty much equally good, in EU probably even better than USA. But only in USA it carries a risk to be billed with something moderately comparable to an annual salary.
I am asking because HN comments by people who have lived in the US and in another country are the best way I have found to learn about countries outside the US.
I suppose my guess is that something will grow organically out of what we have. I don't think it will be ideological.
One example might be localization. If Amazon is subject to the same taxes as a brick and mortar business, it might become less important and local businesses more important.
If not, we're all going to end up in the Army. See you in the cybercorps!
I'm probably right of center, but you don't have to be a leftist to realize that Marx had great insight into the relationship between labor and capital, an insight that will be crucial to understanding how society will evolve as the necessity for labor is automated-away.
People have been worried about the necessity for labor being automated away for centuries. Do you really think that this time it's different?
I'm always pretty skeptical of that kind of argument, though in this case I do have some uncertainty.
Just like the kind of machine that wove cloth isn't the same kind of machine that forms plywood.
Just like the kind of software that checks my taxes won't be the same as the code that reads my MRI looking for cancer.
I'm not sure if the difference you describe fully explains what we might see.
Owning profitable capital buys you security, but that's basically a tautology. Plenty of people invest heavily in means of production and fail. In fact, the risk of investing in capital is almost certainly much greater than the risk of just trading your labor for a paycheck.
Yeah, man, fuck them for giving jobs to poorer people!
From my experience with warehouses/fulfillment centers, all the other options are same or worse than Amazon with regards to worker treatment. Besides, on Amazon plenty of merchants do their own fulfillment, and those that do fulfill with Amazon are going to fulfill with Amazon on eBay or Rakuten or their own website anyway. To do so morally you'll have to look into the fulfillment details of any individual company you do business with.
Honestly, it just sucks to be an unskilled worker in today's society, its not something new to Amazon.
Here are some Glassdoor reviews for Costco Wholesale:
http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Costco-Wholesale-Reviews-E2...
I'm sure this isn't a good comparison. But Costco is doing fine and has a large market cap (52B).
This isn't new to Amazon.com, but Amazon.com is exemplary in treating employees in high-demand (i.e. easily replaceable) positions poorly. We should talk about their warehouses because their policies alone could nudge the industry to being more compassionate.
Bezos repeats that "long-term" "willing to be misunderstood" stuff a lot, but how many companies have tried really treating replaceable workers well? Maybe the current conditions inhibit workers from fulfilling their potential and making larger impacts than carrying boxes.
I do see where some wish to blame the consumer for this trend which is a bit surprising to me. That idea seems paradoxical in that the majority of people do not have good paying would, by necessity, want things to cost less. Yet if you propagate this throughout ecosystem you end up in a viscous cycle where companies, in order to meet lower price points, squeeze their employees which only propagates the cycle.
Most of us on this site are not the type of unskilled laborers who are currently impacted by this. Yet such trends have a way of working their way up the the food chain so to speak. Companies will trumpet "think of the consumer" as a way to depress or wages.
(I'm a Euro dude, sorry, could not resist.)
I don't like the nature of the work, but I look at it like this: if you want robots to take dreary work from people, then that work needs to be quantified and structured. These kinds of things are the last step before total automation.
So in a way, the news is even worse than crappy jobs. These jobs are leaving. This is just the last vestiges of them. What will replace them? Beats me. I think the question itself is wrong, that is, as things change and become more efficient, there are new scarcities having nothing to do with food or shelter that people pay for. If you could predict the future of these scarcities you'd be rich beyond belief. So while it sounds like a good question, "Where do all these people go?", it's not one that's answerable in this case -- nor was it ever answerable.
One thing I know: this issue has nothing to do with Amazon. They're just being used as a prop here.
Now I am glad I don't have to do that kind of job, but people should question what they are really asking for. They should then really support basic income, and also be prepared to pay a lot more for stuff. In fact, I wish instead of complaining people would just cough up more money. I wonder how big the engagement would then still be.
Or, you know, go full communism and have everybody take turns at doing the hard manual labor, no matter what education they have. In Christmass time, there would be a random selection of people who would be sent to Santa's warehouse (I mean Amazon) to work.
Indeed. "They don't have air conditioning!"
Oh...so the Amazon warehouse workers are like every other warehouse worker, factory worker, agricultural worker, miner, oil drilling hand...
But this doesn't have to be a bad thing, if you think about it from a community perspective, how great would it be if all our basic needs were automated and low cost? Theoretically, this should free people up to pursue other interests, like science, art, sports, religion -- kind of like the premise Star Trek TNG.
Unfortunately, this isn't the reality today. If things keep going like they are, then this automation will enable a small oligarchy even greater wealth and power, and leverage over the civilization. I don't mean this to be alarmist, this is a really logical progression, and 'they way things are' has created some pretty amazing achievements for us to-date. I think this will be the next big social evolution and I can't wait to see how it unfolds.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if Amazon suddenly announces a secret R&D project involving a floor of robots pretty soon. In fact, the type of monotonous line-following, retrieval and packing fits well within the line of past factory workers who've been all but replaced with robots.
I'd even cheer them on if they did that instead of dehumanizing those workers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KRjuuEVEZs&feature=youtu.be&... http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/amazon-com-buys-kiva-...
And I'm sure those workers would be grateful for your cheering when they're standing in the unemployment line.
At one of them, I still felt like a human being. Guess which.
I love the idea actually, but I think most people would find it unsettling. But why not have perfectly optimized work routines and get the same amount of stuff done in half the time? Unfortunately I doubt the benefits would go to the workers and they'd still have to work the same amount of time, but that's true for all increases in efficiency.
Just like a slave camp. You know, besides the fact that you get paid, can own property, have the full rights of citizens, can quit at any time, and go home at the end of the day.
> There is much to admire in Amazon’s rise, but in some dark corners of that sprawling empire the top line numbers and razor-thin earnings are being boosted by a dystopian model of neofeudalism that is jarringly out of step with the company’s shiny, ‘leaning into the future’ brand.
A "dystopian model of neofeudalism"? For reals, guys?
I have complained about jobs that were doubtless better in every way than warehouse jobs at Amazon, and I'm sure that there are legitimate complaints, but it's hard to take this article seriously. The axe to grind is so prominently on display that it's difficult to know what part of the story can be read as an objective description of the facts.
Each successive future we strive for should have standards higher than the previous. We can do better than putting literal slave labor behind us. We should achieve a standard where the metaphor doesn't even apply.
Well, the Borg Collective has perfected that technique, actually. But yeah.
This created an enormous class of extremely poor that could be let go at any moment for any reason. While farms and employment agencies raked in profits.
Just because a company is acting within the law doesn't mean they are ethical or moral.
Maybe robots are better than human subjugation, maybe this is the beginning of new type of economy.
Consumers are constantly pushing down the prices on everything, expecting more and more for less and less. Faced with this reality, companies have to streamline and become more effective in order to succeed and profit. This is what Amazon are doing.
We moan about having to pay for baggage, choosing seats, food and even using the bathroom on flights now - but this is solely because of our want to push down the headline price of flights. The price has been reduced...but the cost is still there.
AFAIK, Amazon aren't doing any illegal, they're just working very efficiently.
If Amazon wants to be efficient, it can be on the back of its margins, not at the expense of humans.
EDIT: Ran into this on reddit, thought it was very timely:
"Sorry, It's Not A 'Law Of Capitalism' That You Pay Your Employees As Little As Possible"
http://www.businessinsider.com/companies-need-to-pay-people-...
Edit: found it.
> Amazon uses temporary employees in its Breinigsville warehouse, works them to the point of heat exhaustion--no, really, it parks ambulances outside--and then lets them go after they've failed to perform.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2011/09/what-it-ta...
And it seems there's an update - http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/06/amazons-wa...
No, it isn't glorious work. Yes, I felt like I was managing a literal sweatshop in the summer. But, working in a warehouse/distribution environment is tough everywhere. I really wasn't a fan of how Amazon treated any of the fulfillment workers (managers or associates) and that ultimately led to me leaving. Don't miss it at all.