Will Robots Cause Job Insecurity at Amazon? what the tech boss says

Westborough:

At Amazon’s robotics lab on the outskirts of Boston, Massachusetts, the company’s latest automaton “Sparrow” picks up goods to be shipped to customers while displaying dexterity similar to a human hand.

It’s the e-commerce giant’s most advanced robot yet and could soon do the job of the thousands of Amazon employees who sort and ship five billion packages annually.

The development of “Sparrow,” and other robots like “Robin” and “Cardinal” is raising fears that Amazon’s warehouses will one day be run by machines, which could lead to massive layoffs.

Amazon’s robotics chief Ty Brady downplays such concerns, which have been expressed by labor unions.

“It’s not machines replacing people,” he tells reporters during a tour of the lab, which opened in Westboro last October.

“It’s really machines and people working together to collaborate to do one thing.”

Equipped with cameras and cylindrical tubes, Sparrow can successfully detect and select any single object from millions of products of various shapes and sizes.

It gently sucks incoming items onto a conveyor belt and delivers them to the appropriate basket using its robotic arm.

While Robin and Cardinal can only redirect entire packages, Sparrow is Amazon’s first robot capable of handling individual products.

“Given the diversity of materials we have in our warehouses, Sparrow is a significant achievement,” says Brady.

Working alongside the robot trio is a small army of machines, including a “Proteus” that can move hundreds of kilograms of goods around warehouses.

Brady insists that creations will free employees from repetitive tasks to focus on “more rewarding and interesting” activities.

Amazon’s focus is making sure that as little time as possible elapses between when a customer orders an item and when it arrives at its doorstep.

– Drone –

That goal has led some workers to accuse the company of treating them like “slaves” and denying them meals and toilet breaks.

In statements, Amazon has insisted it provides “a safe and positive workplace” for employees and has opposed unionisation, in addition to a warehouse in New York.

Amazon’s desire to deliver items faster is driving its investment in automation.

By the end of this year it will start delivering packages of up to two kilograms in less than an hour from warehouses in Lockford, California and College Station, Texas.

The company aims to deliver 500 million packages by drone by the end of the decade, including in major US cities such as Boston, Atlanta and Seattle.

According to Joe Quinlivan, vice president of Amazon Robotics, about 75 percent of Amazon’s five billion annual orders are handled by robots at some point.

Conventional wisdom for decades was that increased automation destroys the workforce.

Studies now suggest that the move to robots in e-commerce will not result in massive job losses in the short to medium term due to the huge increase in demand.

Although a 2019 study by the University of California’s Labor Center at Berkeley warns that while some technologies may ease tedious warehouse tasks, they may also contribute to increased “workload and work speed.”

The researchers said technological advances could also contribute to “new ways of monitoring workers” and cited Amazon’s Mission Racer video game “which pits workers against each other to rapidly collect customer orders.” Is.”

Amazon says its innovation has generated more than one million jobs and 700 new job categories, primarily in highly specialized engineering, but also as technicians and operators.

“I really think that what we’re going to do in the next five years will dwarf what we’ve done in the last ten years,” Quinlivan says.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV Staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)