11/25/13 16:30
The BBC ran a provocative piece today on the
stressful conditions in an Amazon warehouse:
“...secret filming of night shifts involving up to 11 miles of walking - where an undercover worker was expected to collect orders every 33 seconds.”
On one hand, it's heartbreaking (who would want to do a job like that, given a choice?), but on the other isn't this what a
menial job means?
Already, there's a
retort from Amazon, and even Consumer Affairs
reports that:
“…the revelation that “Amazon warehouses offer bad working conditions” is nothing new in America.”
Yes, repetitive, structured jobs are terrible. 10 points to Griffindor.
But here's the real story: These jobs are no longer designed for humans.
In 2012, Amazon
purchased Kiva Systems for a whopping $775M. Kiva makes cute little orange robots that perform the work of a “picker" - collecting the necessary items from shelves on demand (the very job the BBC article was complaining about).
While the exact performance of these robots may be an industrial secret, it's safe to guess that the metrics used to evaluate human workers are similar. This means that they are already exceeding what people can (and should) do, and the robots are only going to get faster.
But robots offer additional cost benefits over humans:
“For example, Amazon spent $2.4 million installing air conditioners in four of its fulfillment centers after record temperatures caused over a dozen workers to collapse from the heat. In a Kiva warehouse, the pick areas could be placed separately from the stock area, meaning that only a tiny fraction of space would need to be kept habitable for human workers. Reporter Alexis Madrigal reports that Kiva warehouses can be kept dark, as the robots have no need for overhead lighting — another cost-cutting measure.” -- Geekosystem
You can see where this is going.
No doubt the Kiva team, now at Amazon, is getting extra budget to step up efforts to roll out automated systems.
It's intriguing that the original article, nor any of the follow-ups so far have mentioned Kiva systems.
The robots
are coming to the rescue, but to
Amazon's rescue, not the workers.
It seems that we are stuck between a rock and a hard place with manual labor: Either people strive to meet increasingly impossible physical standards, or cede these jobs to machines. Are we just heading for a human vs. robot showdown with a predictable outcome?
There might be a better third option. In his
TED Talk, Shyam Sankar discussed how symbiotic human+machine systems outperformed
both pure machine and pure human competitors. He was talking about intellectual challenges such as chess or data analytics, but the same concept could apply for more physical tasks.
What if instead of having to
walk 11 miles a night, factory workers had motorized assistance? What if a trained operator could control and orchestrate a fleet of autonomous robots instead of doing the physical work himself?
Perhaps there can be a world where we do what we're good at, and let machines do what they are good at. Such hybrid systems would in theory be more flexible and adaptable, while being far more productive than either human-only or pre-programmed machine-only.
So instead of a human vs. robot future, we need to strive towards a cyborg future.
Related: Business, Society.