The US tech giant is looking at ways it can automate more of its operations.

A union said Amazon had “been treating their workers like robots for years”.

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  • alienanimals@lemmy.worldEnglish
    882·
    1 year ago

    It’s a good thing that shitty jobs are being automated.

    However, we also need UBI (funded by corporations using automation).

      • just_change_it@lemmy.worldEnglish
        231·
        1 year ago

        I disagree. They used what they had and were certainly researching continual improvement all along. They’ve had automation wherever they could implement it all over.

        The challenge is finding the right human teams to design the automation that will be successful. Engineers with a background in practical robotic automation are not exactly common.

        Every major company is in a race to reduce wage cost to 0 and maximize growth and p/e. For amazon their growth and revenue numbers kept growing despite offering above market for unskilled labor, albiet for horrible jobs. They’ll continue to try and eliminate as many FTEs as they can until all they employ are people who manage, deploy, maintain, design and implement automatic systems.

    • Steve@communick.newsEnglish
      81·
      1 year ago

      The job could be fine if they had twice the people. Then they wouldn’t need to be over worked so much.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
    356·
    1 year ago

    “Free them up” from employment. These fuckers seem to be trying SO HARD to make every dystopian corporate world a thing.

    Soft plug for Cyberpunk 2077 and Blade Runner if you want to see how that happens.

    • insomniac_lemon@kbin.social
      71·
      1 year ago

      Soft plug for Cyberpunk 2077 and Blade Runner if you want to see how that happens.

      Except reality would be far more soul-crushing, most people wouldn’t have autonomy or success that make for interesting stories. Most people would just have the choice to live in a company office, die to corporate police, or become cyberhomeless.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Amazon is trialling humanoid robots in its US warehouses, in the latest sign of the tech giant automating more of its operations.

    It said it was testing a new robot called Digit, which has arms and legs and can move, grasp and handle items in a similar fashion to a human.

    We’ve already seen hundreds of jobs disappear to it in fulfilment centres," said Stuart Richards, an organiser at UK trade union GMB.

    As the announcement was made, Amazon said its robotics systems had in fact helped create “hundred of thousands of new jobs” within its operations.

    Amazon Robotics’ chief technologist, Tye Brady, told reporters at a media briefing in Seattle that people were “irreplaceable”, and disputed the suggestion that the company could have fully-automated warehouses in the future.

    Scott Dresser of Amazon Robotics told the BBC this allowed it to “deal with steps and stairs or places in our facility where we need to move up and down”.

    The original article contains 479 words, the summary contains 159 words. Saved 67%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!