Amazon’s First Fully Automated Factory Is Anything But

Why does the NY Times allow people to submit articles proposing that 15 years from now a large company would be committing OSHA violations? Looking at other comments it's clear that people take this as truth or an accurate prediction? What compulsion, other than the desire to generate views and clicks does a (news)paper have to generate trivia that doesn't actually keep a reader informed of actual current events?

I am going to stop using Amazon.

Bryant Merchant’s opinion article about automation in Amazon's working facility is enlightening and exposes the company for the treatment of its workers. Immediately this article is hard to take in because many of the audience, like myself, have been Amazon supporters: Buying things from Amazon left and right because of the great deals and infinite products. As human beings are we going to let Merchant’s article fall on deaf ears? As his audience, are we going to go about living our daily lives knowing that not everyone gets fair treatment in their workforce? And even furthermore, continue to support a company with our money that “renders its employees invisible” and by default puts their lives at risk? Absolutely not. Merchant’s goal for his audience may not be clear, but the impact is. As readers we cannot be bystanders. Informing those not aware of the inner workings of this company and the treatment of the workers has to be known. With enough awareness amazon can change its rules and regulations to provide a safe and valuable work environment to its labor.

I am an Amazon shareholder and I would be absolutely delighted to see Amazon workers: 1) properly compensated 2) having good health insurance 3) not worked until they drop in their athletic shoes Amazon pickers, walking 15 miles a day looks like a GREAT place for those annoying electric scooters.

Apparently amazon is having trouble filling the jobs at his work farms, they are now running employment ads on national TV. Of course, like the McDonald’s ads they paint a rosy future of their minimum wage employees.

I would definitely hate it if all the buildings became fully autonomous. I made some good friends working here, and nothing would replace that. However, I don't know how this would be dangerous for the humans. Why would they get rid of the amnesty vests that already protect our amnesty workers from getting hit by a robot? It wouldn't matter if it became dark because the robots can sense that vest when it's nearby.

The future is now.

Translated: So tell me how this future Amazon venture is different from what we have now? A completely "lights out" facility is probably not going to be possible until the robots are as intelligent and facile as we humans. My work is leading the way toward the real lights out facility but the goal is still at least a few weeks away.

What a load of poppycock. One needs to assume bad engineering and horrible software development coupled with incredible arrogance, a stupid business model, and that there would never be chocolate in the facility. It’s not even plausible as sci-fi.

This is what Andrew Yang is talking about, and it not that far down the road. Most non-manual jobs will also disappear. Everyone should read his book The War on Normal People. I personally love Amazon. I am currently working on an electronic design project in retirement. I needed an electronic part yesterday and found a package of 15 on Amazon for next to nothing with free Prime shipping. They will be here tomorrow. Left to themselves, humans will always find things to do for one another that they are willing to pay for, and Yang's Basic Income approach is the only suggestion out there that will allow us to create an abundant future world that takes full advantage of technology without screwing up our society through hyper-regulation. The new nuclear licensing reforms, finally brought about by Trump after years of opposition by uninformed progressives, will dramatically reduce energy costs as the new generation of melt-down proof emission free reactors are deployed. Humankind will be in a world of material abundance undreamed of a few decades ago. We can stop burning fossil fuel, and stop killing millions of birds and littering the world with impossible to recycle wind farms. What we will do with it is yet to be determined, but we are about to find out.

It's frustrating to see culturally progressive men acting like Russian oligarchs, Saudi princes or narcos, when it comes to their business. Sometimes I wonder which one is worst. AI owned by Chinese Communist Party or AI serving a few men?

Amazon shoppers expect cheapest, fastest for all the useless garbage we think we need. We will continue to face growing labor shortages, forcing labor loaded functions to automation.

Bezos is a dangerous man who hit on an idea that plays upon our worst instincts and has turned most everyone into his willing slave. You have to wonder what he'd be doing for a living if this wretched world wasn't built on mindless consumerism. An article in The Atlantic depicts just how deranged he really is. Notoriously stingy with his fortune - just ask New York City - he sees his role as the populating of the solar system with trillions of humans, floating in giant canisters. I'd venture that he wouldn't mind it if they were all clones of his magnificent self, bald pate and all. So, if his workers drop dead from heart attacks or heat exhaustion, while being paid a subsistence wage, cheer up, its all for the greater good of humanity! That goes also for paying no taxes.

Freedom Dividend(Tech Check) $1000 per month for every US citizen age 18 and older for life.....This is how we mange tech(Amazon,Google, Facebook) and AI in the 21st century....Moving forward with Andrew Yang in 2020.

Amazon insists on ordering from suppliers base ONLY on their criteria. So they order 1, 2, 3 books at a time, and I have to rush to meet their deadline, pay shipping and transportation fees multiple times, instead of ordering a reasonable supply once and consolidating my expenses. This also means that their warehouse workers are receiving shipments multiple times, and running their legs off unpacking and storing inventory, when it could be done once. These people don't even receive living wages. Amazon is a poor example of treating customers, suppliers, and workers with respect and fairness.

Several years ago I quit doing business with Amazon when they would not let me make a comment about the fact that two weeks passed from the time I ordered an item until it was finally shipped even though they had charged my credit card when I first placed the order. They said comments about Amazon shipping are not allowed. Everything I've read since then only confirms my decision that Amazon only wants to make tons of money and anything negative is to be swept under the carpet.

But when this future "end of work" transformation has fully occurred, who will be buying all of the millions of items delivered in the same hour? Certainly you don't expect Jeff Bezos to pay taxes to support a Universal Basic Income? What will all the displaced people do for basic necessities, let alone Amazon trinkets? Perhaps the robots, with their overtime earnings, will....

Back in reality, taxpayers in Virginia are shelling out some $2.5 billion in bribe....er tax incentives to Amazon.com, Inc. to locate their east coast facility in Arlington. That's a government handout to a company that reported nearly $12 billion in net income in 2018. All that for Amazon.com, Inc. to engage in illegal co-employment, no doubt sentencing many of those who will fill all those jobs to depend on government assistance for housing and health care, which Bezos and his oligarch friends will no doubt decry as government waste we cannot afford.

The premise of a free market is that people can withhold their labor if they find the conditions under which they work intolerable.” – Charles Krauthammer (1950-2018) writing in Time magazine on Jan. 31, 2003.

Why is this set in the future? Isn't this the way it is today?

This speculative fiction op-ed about the Amazon fulfillment center gets it wrong. By 2034 to 2054 the AI based software and AI designed hardware will work flawlessly. The System will be self designing and self repairing. New and replacement parts will come form other companies with AI based software and AI designed hardware. This will be true for many other companied as well. Everything will work perfectly except that there will be not enough people with incomes to buy the products produced and sold by these companies. There also will not be enough customers due to natural disasters, disease, and war precipitated by climate change. This speculative fiction op-ed paints is too optimistic.

The human mind has infinite adaptability to unknown environments. AI has limits, always will. It would take me too long to explain in detail but the limits are imposed by mathematical constraints and the limits of probability and game theories. The best card player frequently runs into the unexpected results of reality not conforming with the 'right' decision. Think Capt. Kirk in every Star Trek movie you ever saw. The best decision is not always the one favored in the array of probabilities. Reward is always uncertain.

Looking back there were great concerns at the time of both the Industrial Revolution and 150 years later at the dawn of the computer age that eventually machines would do all the work resulting in mass unemployment. In both cases that isn’t what happened. Instead new and, in many cases, better job opportunities were spawned by the new technologies. However, I somehow think the advent of robotics coupled with the rapid development of AI portend a different outcome. Obviously, there will be highly skilled jobs created to design, develop, and maintain both the hardware and software required. But it is very difficult for me to see how we will be able to maintain full employment in the not so distant future. The impact will, I believe, be felt first in the entry level job market for less educated/skilled workers. Everyone, regardless of education, needs a first job to begin the climb up the economic ladder. These entry-level jobs are, for the most part, the ones that will most rapidly be impacted. We cannot assume that free market forces alone will somehow solve this problem, and I write as a conservative.

With even a modicum of effort and effect on the bottom line, Amazon can make their employees, ALL of them, well-paid, well-cared for, safe with decent benefits including healthcare. Don't subcontract out and leave these things to some other company. Don't do that to your FELLOW AMERICANS. Patriotism means giving back to the communities and the people who live there and work for you, who have made your those Billions and Billions. and I want all large corporations to do this. They can and all it takes is corporate responsibility and stewardship. I will happily give my hard-earned dollars to companies that treat its employees right. If I walk into a Home Depot and its clear that they aren't treating their employees well? I'll walk right out. The same goes for shopping at Amazon. There needs to be give and take. Pay no real taxes on your Billions earned? ....Well, ok. But only if you take care of your workers. Both would be nice, but I'll settle for one....

I think there's a need to separate out "unique to Amazon" vs "typical of automated factories" in this discussion. I do not claim to know where the line is, but some of what's being called out here does not strike me as unique to Amazon's automated fullfillment center.

I have been a big user of Amazon since day one. However, this story give me the creeps. "we are under continuous video surveillance, so we receive guidance from off-site supervisors through a text system" Sounds like a quote from 1984.

What I question about this projection is the fact that all of the employees are contracted. The current model seems to be that programmers and other high level technicians are company employees while shelf pickers and janitorial people are contracted. Will it really change. High demand occupations will probably be able to command benefits and employment security even in the dystopian future.

What a brilliant article. The last paragraph gave me chills - you could replace a few words therein and it would be a carbon copy for Amazon's (or any number of companies') PR today. Especially the reference to same-hour delivery. It's so easy to imagine millions of Americans (including myself) shrugging their collective shoulders given the convenience...

This feels alarmingly familiar, given the stories of those who work at Amazon's current fulfillment centers. It also echos the content moderators and machine-learning traders behind Google, Facebook, and Apple. Let's all work together to make sure this never becomes reality. We need to ensure the power of labor isn't gutted by companies using contracting as a legal loophole to dodge worker protections and rights.

Seems like Aug 6, 2034 hasn't happened yet.

Amazon has already racked up numerous injuries in its warehouses and a few deaths. There is no sense of the value of human life at all. There is also no sense of the value of the property of individuals. My husband and I witnessed an Amazon Prime delivery van careen around a corner, put a dent in a car legally parked a bit in from the corner, and merrily continue on its way without stopping. This occurred Sunday (Oct 20) around 10:30 am at the corner of 231 St. and Tibbett Avenue in Kingsbridge, Bronx. When I got home, I tried to contact Amazon online to inform them of the incident. There is no way to contact them. You can only order stuff, track your orders, arrange to return stuff you've ordered, and rate stuff. All communication with that corporation is one-way, from them to you, except for ordering. I am thankful that NYC did not become the host of the second headquarters of this amoral, acquisitive monster. It would have been a parasite on our city, as it is a parasite on its workforce, as this article describes.

Government regulations will have to adapt to advances ind AI and automation to prevent wealthy corporations from owning the future.

This is the future, but what about the present? We must remember that Amazon doesn't make the products, many of these products are being made by people in China, India, etc, who are getting less than a dollar an hour, have no health benefits, no vacations, unsafe work conditions. The people buying these products could care less about any of that, and they sure wont care about robots or the self driving trucks that will deliver them. We live in a totally nihilistic age, and it wont be any better 15 years from now. In fact this entire post was written by a robot, the lazy human was too busy playing video games. Beep.

Excellent. Future based on present reality. Workers are already being injured by lack of air-conditioning, and the robots, at Amazon centers. I'd like to see that bald-headed monster (Bezos) work a 12-hour shift at one of his "fulfillment centers", in July, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, with no air-conditioning. Like he expects his workers to do.

Good article. It speaks to the skepticism we should have with automation, robotics and AI in general. I've been programming for almost three decades and have seen many redundant tasks give way to automated processes. The problem is, and likely always will be, that automated systems are bad at self-correcting - a batch process is fine if it's outputting good data but can wreak havoc if it's bad (e.g., sending out thousands of incorrect bills). This idea can be extended to robots and self-driving cars. They might be ok within narrowly defined use-cases but can turn deadly when their operating environment changes or they receive false/ambiguous signals.

Given the low unemployment rates across the country, why don’t you get another job? It sounds as though you do not like the working environment and the most reasonable thing to do would be to go somewhere else. I do not mean to minimize the potential problems caused by automation, but I have held jobs that just didn’t make it for me and I sought other employment.