For the increased shopping season Amazon has rolled out more than 15,000 robots across their warehouses in order to improve efficiency and cut costs. The robots are being deployed across Amazon’s warehouses in time for Cyber Monday which is one of the busiest shopping days of the year. According the article, the robots are expected to decrease operating costs by one fifth and help get packages out the door. This is particularly important around this time of the year because more people are buying online for their Christmas list and Amazon needs to keep up with the increased items being purchased. Last year the surge in Christmas shopping overwhelmed UPS shipping which resulted in late packages across the globe. Hopefully the robots being introduced this year will help prevent any mishaps during this season. This is continuing the trend of increased automation in blue collar jobs, which poses a problem for many people who don’t have technical skills and can’t get them.
While overall, I feel that the trend towards increased automation in manual labor type jobs is a good thing, I definitely feel that there are a lot of problems associated with it. A large part of the population does not have a college degree, or any sort of specialized skill, and rely on the availability of jobs to get by. When these jobs are replaced by robots then we, as a society, will have to find a way to solve this problem. I personally think that the best solution to this would approach the problem from two angles. Firstly, as automation increases the average work week would be decreased, but pay would stay the same. For instance, if these robots help decrease the number of hours to move goods by 20% then the employees will also see a reduction in how much they have to work, but Amazon would pay them close to the same wage. This would allow for workers to have more free time, and Amazon to increase efficiency and productivity at the same time. The main issue with this is that Amazon wants to maximize profit so they would not want to do this, but if they could be convinced to it would work out in favor of everyone. The next step would be to offer specialized training to people who have no specialized skills. While this would end up costing money the benefits would far outweigh the costs because these workers would then help advance the country and the economy, and would ultimately give back more in terms of tax money and benefit to society. While I feel this would be one of the best ways to solve the issue of increased automation in jobs I do not think it is likely to occur for a long time.
http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/amazon-rolls-out-kiva-robots-holiday-onslaught-n258976
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