Amazon plans to use automation to replace more than 600,000 workers who would otherwise be hired in the United States by 2033, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times. By that time, the company is expected to sell about twice as many goods as it does today.
Amazon’s robotics team is reportedly working toward the goal of automating 75% of its entire business. By 2027, it is expected to eliminate around 160,000 jobs in the US, saving the company an estimated $12.6 billion — equivalent to around 30 cents per item delivered.
… and they will have automated drone delivery by 2015!!
Picker bots are easy compared to drone delivery.
The systems already designed to be automated. That’s been the plan all along, remove the workers and make even more profit.
I’m going to order brooms and 24’ 2x4 L shapes for mail boxes. Then after 1 day I’ll return them.
In theory this is awesome. Humans aren’t built for menial tasks. All repetitive monotonous tasks should be automated. However, this doesn’t fit our current economic system. Obviously all automation needs to be taxed, so that we don’t have to live this paradox where each technological advancement is a risk to our livelihood.
The problem with that is that either it’s privately owned or all taxes pass through a government that can make an authoritarian transition. Then people are left out.
Humans are the general purpose machine of trivial tasks, it’s literally what they’ve evolved for. Referring to trivial tasks as menial is purely a matter of perception, it can be menial when it’s work and entertainment when it’s for leisure. It’s ironic that AI came for the creative jobs that were supposedly going to be left for humans to achieve first, trampling over the IP rights that could have protected them. It’s a sign of things to come, and those things are not awesome.
Yeah how exactly do they expect to sell twice as much product to a population that doesn’t have jobs/money to buy it.
Consumer societies need consumer - producer chains. They are where the “proletariat” can rise against the “bourgeois”. Automation makes it all obsolete and begins to taunt with the possibility of making direct chains between actual resources to the ultrarich. Societies are then an artificial construct that can be left to die off like horses and donkeys when they are no longer a participant but an encroachment to the environment they contributed to.
I think the big danger is that we have an 80% that are living hand to mouth and the main way to make money off of them is through their numbers, and jacking prices on life essentials to the absolute limit they can bear.
Then we have a 20% who are wealthier than the bottom 80% and these folks actually program the robots and run our economic system, and are paid well enough to buy the fancy products, etc. This 20% buy double what the 80% do or more and constitute a whole economy unto themselves.
The big game is convincing the 80% they can move into this 20% somehow. This keeps them from revolt, along with the fact that the 20% control the media and so on and work against wide messaging of even the existence of the problem let alone a revolutionary solution. Of course the absolute top fraction of that 20% have more wealth than everyone else combined and exert the most influence, largely through the 20% professional class that they allow to live in relative luxury.
Right now that top fractional 1% are asking themselves “hm, could AI shrink the 20% to 15%? That would improve our profit margins and shrink the only class of people with enough power to really disturb us.” Because the “we are the 99%!” crowd are really 20%ers most of the time. 80%ers are consumed by their immediate challenges of survival and the ill side effects of poverty AND above all the hustle to move into the 20%.
It’s an interesting comparison with pre-revolution. France where the 1% lived on the backs of an agrarian 99%. With the introduction of that magic 20%, the 1% are vastly more wealthy than if they lived off of pure agrarian peasantry. And they’ve created a buffer between them and the bottom tier that largely manages the masses for them, pacifying it with the promise of mobility. I don’t think anyone consciously plans this shit but if they did they’d be high fiving themselves for their absolute genius.
Depressing bit of the day: I don’t have the source with me right now but there was a claim on youtube that the top 1% make up for like half of the consumer market in the USA.
Half of everything sold in dollars is done by the ultra rich. Everyone else is basically irrelevant and driven to extinction under capitalism, if that is accurate.
A quick google says 15-20%, which makes sense. Maybe the top 10% could comprise 50% of consumer spending, perhaps.
Very possible yes, it’s been a awhile since I saw it.
Interesting, I’ve recently heard the automotive market is starting to cater to the $70k+ crowd and so this tracks somewhat. That said, the 1% accounting for 50% of consumption still sounds incredible.
1% is not just the ultra-rich. It likely includes a lot of people on lemmy right now
The top 1% of earners in the US made over $1 million last year. I doubt any lemmy users are in that category.
Yeah, I’ve seen it from a few different videos, including one citing a 2005 Citibank report pointing out that this would become a major trend.
Wealth inequality is bad enough that I’ve even seen some marketing professionals mention it as a possible problem for some companies.
and I’ve replaced amazon with normal shopping
I’ve replaced Amazon with various other shopping, but 3 of my purchases (shoes from Zappos and 2 eBay purchases) have come from Amazon anyway. It’s worse than I thought.
Let’s replace their customers with not-customers.
Shame everything you do on the internet supports them through AWS though. Maybe they need more outages to drive those customers away.
Into the arms of the one or two competitors they have? We are living in a time of virtual monopoly, everything they warned us about with communism has come to pass- we are going to see bread lines before long. Government and industry is perfectly intermingled, there is nowhere else to go, the free market was always a complete and blatant lie, no matter where you turn, you will only be propping up the system stomping your face.
Probably into the arms of running colocated servers of their own. A lot of the promised cost savings of cloud infrastructure has not born out in practice.
It’s insane to me that you also get charged for pulling your data out. And it’s not cheap.
I quit using Amazon because the third party delivery company locally is owned by a neighbor that hates me. They sided-lined 10 or 11 packages in a row or just wouldn’t delivery them from their distribution center. I’d call support and they said the company just refused to delivery. They would send a ticket to the center. And they would ignore it.
And amazon would sit on the return for months because the delivery company would re-route my packages to have a delivery date months out. So amazon would sit on the refund for months waiting for the delivery date.
One driver apologized that he had to ask my neighbors first before delivering anything to this address.
And Amazon didn’t care shit in my opinion. No privacy as my packages were opened. No nothing but some folks in another country on the phone telling me call back in a week.
And that jackass delivery owner is a rich, blackmailing, federal agent piece of shit in my opinion.
Amazon is just another criminal sycophant-making machine in my opinion.
Bring on the robots.
I mean, we are about to hit a tipping point where there will be enough poor, unfed masses to rise up and tear down this disgusting charade of a society. We have been running on fumes for so long, I can’t even believe modern civilization is still standing.
You are way more positive about the future than I.
The only reason why we haven’t toppled (at least in the US) is because not enough people are missing their 3 meals. The second that happens for a large enough portion of the population the country will disintegrate. Food shortages are a massive destabilizing force and will force massive changes to compensate.
A great example of only caring about something when it effects you.
I dunno, this is way more personal than what the idiom usually presents, it isn’t really representative of most experiences. Now, I quit Amazon when they started pushing the 51st state merch, cause I can get most of what I used Amazon for straight from China and cut out the fascists playing scrape the value in the middle
Call your state ag and report them.
If it were me I’d be out there with a camera every fucking day reporting a single blade of grass out of place if i could.
Contact the irs and tell them you think they are cheating taxes ffs.
I would not fuck around.
The robots are there to replace the apologetic delivery driver, not the rich asshole. They’d never let that happen.
Bots can just as easily be programmed with an address blacklist. At least a delivery driver with a spine could choose to ignore that list, if his livelihood wasn’t on the line…
Flash sale: 30% off Teddy Bears
This is great news for the army recruitment of desperate people who will fight this unjust system of modern slavery and tear down the oligarchy!
We are all about to starve and fight.
Should be pretty easy for those 600k people to find other living wage jobs that will allow them to keep buying stuff off Amazon.
/s
Isn’t this what all those artists were insisting they wanted? AI replacing rote labor instead of their “creative” jobs like producing advertising and concept art?
You forgot the part where companies suddenly and magically become benevolent and use their newly gained wealth to finance artist’s lifestyles. Presumably the ones that haven’t been replaced by AI.
The “just give us money” part of the artist’s wish is usually left unspoken.
Personally, I’m a supporter of UBI. It’s not reasonable to expect the companies to do something like this, this is the role and responsibility of government.
