Thanks to better AI and smarter robots, a new wave of automation is about to sweep through Amazon’s fulfillment centers.
The workers I get to meet at BDL4 are unfailingly cheerful and helpful. There is Allison Kim, a senior operations manager, who gives a tour with the aid of a golden toy microphone that boosts her voice above the constant whir of machinery. And Alex Sabia, an Energizer bunny of a man who keeps mentioning his meat-rich diet. His job is to prevent workers from injuring themselves by encouraging them to take regular breaks, ensuring good ergonomics, and giving them physical therapy exercises to do.
The ground floor of the building is dominated by conveyor belts ferrying packages in one direction or another. On the second floor up through the fifth, humans are busy picking items from shelves that Hercules robots ferry over from an enormous, fenced-off storage area where only robots roam. It has few lights because the machines do not need to see to navigate. The scale is dizzying.
Among the pickers, I notice one worker wearing a utility belt and shoulder strap mounted with a flashlight, carrying a tablet and what looks like a short hockey stick. He unlocks a door that leads to the robot area, walks in, and closes it behind him. This worker’s job is to assist when a Hercules has dropped something, which often means retrieving an item from between several robots with the hockey stick.
On a floor lower down, where packages filled with items are routed to trucks below, the ratio between humans and robots is tilted firmly towards machines. The center of the room is a hive of motion, as some 12,000 Pegasus robots, similar in size to the lawn-mower-scale Hercules models I had seen earlier, zip around, dropping packages down holes in the floor that lead to the loading docks. Each time a robot sheds its load, it returns to a parking spot somewhere on the floor.
As this floor demonstrates, automation can take over certain tasks previously only achievable by human workers. In some cases, certain jobs can even disappear. For an individual, replacement by machine might be devastating, but the picture across the job market is more complicated.
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