A sizzling potato: Amazon has lengthy insisted that the superior robots being launched to its warehouses aren’t meant to interchange people. However believing that declare is not simple when the variety of machines deployed in its services has greater than doubled over the previous few years.
Amazon’s use of robots in its success facilities and warehouses goes again greater than a decade, however it actually began ramping up the numbers in current instances, from 350,000 robots in 2021 to greater than 750,000 by June 2023.
It is not simply the variety of robots Amazon is introducing that is worrying employees; it is their human-like design. In October final yr, the tech big introduced Digit, a 5-foot 9-inch 143-pound robotic from Agility Robotics, was being deployed to warehouses. The 2-legged machine can stroll ahead, backward, and sideways; squat and bend; and transfer, grasp, and deal with gadgets utilizing its arm/hand-like clasps. Principally, it may possibly imitate virtually the whole lot {that a} human can do, and with no need to pee in a bottle or take day without work for stress.
There have been loads of common, non-human-like robots added to Amazon warehouses, too, together with the Roomba-esque Sequoia, the totally autonomous Proteus, a robotic arm known as Sparrow, and extra, every extra superior than the final by way of design and the software program behind them.
Amazon likes to guarantee staff that their jobs are protected following the introduction of a brand new robotic mannequin. They’re supposedly in place to do the monotonous, repetitive, and harmful jobs as an alternative of people and are designed to work alongside folks, not exchange them. Stefano La Rovere, Amazon’s director of worldwide robotics, mechatronics, and sustainable packaging, mentioned that superior fashionable tech will merely improve employees’ roles and create new job classes. He claimed that 700 new classes of jobs have already been created by the usage of this expertise.
Damion Shelton, CEO of Agility Robotics, did not appear as involved about assuaging job-loss fears. In December, he mentioned that the well being of companies utilizing these robots was much more dire than any perceived fears about job alternative. Amazon, by the way, has an almost $2 trillion market cap and its annual gross revenue for 2023 was greater than $270 billion.
Like nearly each different tech agency, Amazon has been slicing jobs this yr. CEO Andy Jassy mentioned final month that the corporate is not accomplished with reducing prices because it embraces not solely robots but additionally that different “it will assist and never exchange folks, trustworthy” expertise: generative AI. Jassy believes the tech might be as massive because the cloud and as necessary as the appearance of the web.
