Amazon trials humanoid robots to ‘free up’ staff
Amazon is trialling humanoid robots in its US warehouses, in the latest sign of the tech giant automating more of its operations
Amazon said the move was about “freeing employees up to better deliver for our customers”.
It said it was testing a new robot called Digit, which has arms and legs and can move, grasp and handle items in a similar fashion to a human.
A union said Amazon had “been treating their workers like robots for years”.
“Amazon’s automation is [a] head-first race to job losses. We’ve already seen hundreds of jobs disappear to it in fulfilment centres,” said Stuart Richards, an organiser at UK trade union GMB.
As the announcement was made, Amazon said its robotics systems had in fact helped create “hundred of thousands of new jobs” within its operations.
“This includes 700 categories of new job types, in skilled roles, which didn’t exist within the company beforehand,” the firm said.
According to the tech giant, it now has more than 750,000 robots working “collaboratively” with its human staff, often being used to take on “highly repetitive tasks”.
Amazon Robotics’ chief technologist, Tye Brady, told reporters at a media briefing in Seattle that people were “irreplaceable”, and disputed the suggestion that the company could have fully-automated warehouses in the future.
“There’s not any part of me that thinks that would ever be a reality,” he said.
“People are so central to the fulfilment process; the ability to think at a higher level, the ability to diagnose problems.”
Legs not wheels
Rather than using wheels to move, Digit walks on two legs. It also has arms that can pick up and move packages, containers, customer orders and objects.
Scott Dresser of Amazon Robotics told the BBC this allowed it to “deal with steps and stairs or places in our facility where we need to move up and down”.
But he said the robot was a prototype and the trial was about seeing whether it could work safely with human employees.
“It’s an experiment that we’re running to learn a little bit more about how we can use mobile robots and manipulators in our environment here at Amazon,” he said.
Mr Dresser suggested that the fears over human jobs being replaced didn’t match what had happened at Amazon.
“Our experience has been these new technologies actually create jobs, they allow us to grow and expand. And we’ve seen multiple examples of this through the robots that we have today.
“They don’t always run unfortunately and we need people to repair them,” he said.
Amazon has ramped up its use of robots in recent years, as pressure has grown to cut costs.
Last year it announced it was trialling a giant robotic arm that can pick up items. It already uses wheeled robots to move goods around its warehouses, and it has started using drones for delivery in two US states.
See more here bbc.co.uk
Header image: BBC
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Howdy
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Humanoid? Well as it’s the bbc and they couldn’t tell a human form from a rubbish bin, I guess that’s an excuse.
““They don’t always run unfortunately and we need people to repair them,” he said.”
What, the AI can’t do a simple job like repair itself? Not impressed. Still, it is just a box of bits.
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Wisenox
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What tasks are the employees “freed up” to do?
Oh wait, we’re supposed to be all-impressed with the robot and forget the fact that the thousands of workers and their contributions to our economy are gone.
But, that’s the point, right? People love attacking their companies when they go “woke”, and they love spouting “go woke, get broke”, but they don’t get it. The insider led boycotts and media frenzy are all done to help kill the company, which responds by eliminating more jobs and goods. This helps kill the country, and that is the goal, so “going woke” is a strategy, and not intended to drive sales. The big companies get their lost profits back through fake-war-money-laundering schemes like “Ukraine”. Domestic businesses simply collapse from obeying the overlords.
Amazon will not be freeing up any employees, they will be firing them.
Pointless to bring it up though. Idiot sheep enjoy feeling big as they ridicule the latest woke spokesmodel.
Still, Amazon pales in comparison to what’s coming for medical personnel. Unless your job is hands on, or research, kiss it goodbye. Doctors, nurses and lab job markets will fall off a cliff, as will many many other hospital jobs.
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Penguinite
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Free up staff my ass! They mean reduce staff!
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