Robots spark anxieties, hopes
NISSA Scott started working at the cavernous Amazon warehouse in New Jersey late last year, stacking plastic bins the size of small ottomans. It was not, she says, the most stimulating activity.
Now Scott watches her replacement – a yellow mechanical arm – do the stacking.
Her new job at Amazon is to babysit several robots at a time, troubleshooting them when necessary. On a recent afternoon, a claw at end of the arm grabbed a bin off a conveyor belt and stacked it on another bin, forming neat columns. It was the first time Amazon had shown the arm, the latest generation of robots in use at its warehouses, to a reporter.
“For me, it’s the most mentally challenging thing we have here,” Scott, 21, said of her new job. “It’s not repetitive.”
Perhaps no company embodies the anxieties and hopes around automation better than Amazon. Many people, including US President Donald Trump, blame the company for destroying traditional retail jobs by enticing people to shop online. At the same time, the company’s eye-popping growth has turned it into a hiring machine.
Amazon’s global workforce is three times larger than Microsoft’s and 18 times larger than Facebook’s, and last week, Ama- zon said it would open a second headquarters in North America with up to 50,000 new jobs.
Complicating the equation, Amazon is also on the forefront of automation. In 2014, the company began rolling out robots to its warehouses using machines originally developed by Kiva Systems, a company Amazon bought for $775 million two years earlier. Amazon now has more than 100,000 robots in action around the world.
The robots make warehouse work less tedious and physically taxing, while also en- abling the kinds of efficiency gains that let a customer order dental floss after breakfast and receive it before dinner.
The dynamics between people and machines play out on a daily basis on the floor of Amazon warehouses. In Kent, Washington, the robots resemble giant beetles and scurry around with shelves loaded with merchandise weighing up to 1,400 kilograms on their backs. Hundreds of them move autonomously inside a caged area. Dave Clark, the top executive in charge of operations at Amazon, said the company wanted the machines to perform the most monotonous tasks, leaving people to do jobs that engage them mentally.
The robots also cut down on the walking required, making Amazon pickers more efficient and less tired. The robots also allow Amazon to pack shelves together like cars in rush-hour traffic, because they no longer need aisle space for humans. The greater density of shelf space means more inventory under one roof, which means better selection for customers.
When Amazon installed the robots, some people who had stacked bins before, like Scott, took courses at the company to become robot operators. Many others moved to receiving stations, where they manually sort big boxes of merchandise into bins. No people were laid off when the robots were installed.
The question going forward is: What happens when the future generations of robots arrive?
For now, there are warehouse tasks – for example, picking individual items off shelves, with all their various shapes and sizes – where people outperform robots. Amazon has added 80,000 warehouse employees in the US since adding the Kiva robots, for a total of more than 125,000 warehouse employees. And it says the hiring spree will continue.
But startups and researchers are scrambling to overcome the many remaining technical obstacles. Amazon even sponsors an annual contest to encourage more innovation in the category. Amazon’s Clark said history showed that automation increases productivity and, in some cases, demand from consumers, which ultimately creates more jobs. He said warehouse workers would continue to work in technologically rich environments.
“It’s a myth that automation destroys net job growth,” he said.