Amazon has spent years automating its warehouses with robots. Its mechanical workforce is more than one million strong, rivaling the size of its human workforce of some 1.56 million people. Robots, in fact, are on track to outnumber Amazon employees.
The Jeff Bezos-chaired company claims that the infusion of automation will drive up productivity and efficiency, while creating more high paying jobs. Some workers have praised the robot helpers for alleviating them of repetitive, backbreaking work.
But experts, seeing the writing on the wall, have long warned that Amazon had an ulterior motive with the robots — and now there’s evidence to prove it.
Interviews and leaked documents reveal that the company is planning to replace more than 600,000 jobs with robots, The New York Times reports. By the end, Amazon’s robotics team aims to automate 75 percent of the company’s entire operations. Seemingly, the calculus putting this into action is that it would save 30 cents on each item that it processes and delivers.
Amazon’s reported plans are an alarming wake-up call, as the rise of AI technology has already led to a slew of firings and raised the specter of widespread job destruction, especially among knowledge workers. As the second largest private employer in the US, Amazon has the resources to set a sea-changing precedent that could see manual labor jobs threatened, too.
“Nobody else has the same incentive as Amazon to find the way to automate,” Daron Acemoglu, an MIT professor and automation expert who won last year’s Nobel Prize in economic science, told the NYT. “Once they work out how to do this profitably, it will spread to others, too.”
One of the main ways Amazon plans to achieve this is by slowing hiring to a crawl, even as the company expects to sell twice as many products by 2033, according to the reporting. At some locations like its warehouse in Stone Mountain, it also plans to whittle down its 4,000 employee work force through attrition. By the end, Amazon hopes that some of its fulfillment centers will barely need humans at all.
Amazon’s testing ground for its heavily automated vision is its warehouse in Shreveport, Louisiana, which is swarming with a thousand robots. “Once an item there is in a package,” according to the NYT, a “human barely touches it again.” The warehouse employed roughly 25 percent fewer humans last year than it would have without the robots, documents viewed by the NYT showed.
“With this major milestone now in sight, we are confident in our ability to flatten Amazon’s hiring curve over the next 10 years,” the robotics team wrote in its strategy plan for 2025.
Shreveport’s model will be used at 40 Amazon facilities by the end of 2027, with the Stone Mountain warehouse projected to have its workforce reduced by up to 1,200 employees.
Amazon clearly knows how bad this looks. The leaked documents suggest avoiding terms like “automation” and “AI” when discussing robotics. Its proposed alternative included “advanced technology,” and “cobot,” a portmanteau that’s supposed to suggest collaboration between robots and humans.
It already has plans for damage control in areas where human jobs are on the chopping block, with documents revealing how it weighed up creating an image as a “good corporate citizen” by participating in community events like parades and Toys for Tots.
An Amazon spokesperson told the NYT that the documents didn’t reflect the company’s overall hiring strategy and insisted it was the viewpoint of only one group. The spokesperson also highlighted the company’s plan to hire 250,000 people for the holiday season, but refused to say how many of those jobs would be permanent. In any case, the company expanded its human workforce at an unprecedented rate during the pandemic, which is now triple in size from where it was in 2018, so a hiring spree can’t be taken as a guarantee against downsizing in the future.
Acemoglu, the Nobel prize winning automation expert, warned that if Amazon’s plans go through, “one of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator.”
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