Comment by deanCommie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deanCommie | Hacker News Reader

When Amazon first launched they only had a few FC's in the US, and as a result claimed they did not need to collect local taxes because they didn't have a "presence" in all the states of their shoppers.

Lawmakers complained this created an unfair advantage over local retailers and insisted on regulation that forced Amazon to collect local taxes.

Except that meant that there was no longer any reason why Amazon wouldn't open local fulfillment centers in basically every state, improve delivery speed, lower costs through economies of scale, and make it even harder for the local brick and mortar retailers to compete.

The Cobra Effect[1] is a bitch.

The relevance here is unions are good, and worker rights are good. But Amazon is already working hard on replacing all those workers with robots and automation (who isn't?)

If these workers succeed in unionizing, it will only just accelerate Amazon's quest to replace MOST of these workers with robots.

And then it will be the government's problem to figure out what to do with millions of low skilled workers leaving the labour force at the same time as millions of truck drivers becoming redundant with self-driving cars.

I do not have good faith in the US figuring this out without substantial social upheaval (The rest of the West will handle it much better because of the existing safety net and early experimentation with Universal Basic Income).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

>If these workers succeed in unionizing, it will only just accelerate Amazon's quest to replace MOST of these workers with robots.

It won't, though. Amazon is already investing as much time, money and effort as possible into automation. Nothing workers do, or don't do, is going to affect that timetable, only the feasibility of deploying automation technology at scale versus the cost effectiveness of existing human labor.

Actually, workers increasing the cost of labor will certainly accelerate deploying automation.

There’s currently a cost of robots and a cost of humans. When the cost of humans goes above the cost of robots, automation kicks in.

Technology innovation is dropping the cost of robots. A fulfillment center unionizing will increase human costs, unlikely that it will go up so much as to make robot deployment feasible.

But workers definitely can do, or not do, things to affect the timetable.

I would expect that human cost would also increase with lowered productivity and that’s directly in worker control.

>When the cost of humans goes above the cost of robots, automation kicks in.

Assuming that's true for the sake of argument, I don't think the wage of the average Amazon warehouse worker is anywhere near that tipping point. 50 to 100 Kivas cost between $2 to $4 million and I guarantee they are not hassle or maintenance free, and all they do is move shelves around. Automating the rest of the warehouse process adds orders of magnitude more cost.

I disagree that this is an example of the "cobra effect". That term properly refers to situations where efforts to improve a problem have misaligned incentives that wind up exacerbating the same problem.

Ideally, we'd have fulfilling, well-paid jobs for everyone. If we can't have that, at least robots don't suffer when you make them do mindless, repetitive tasks at high speed for no money.

The status quo is humans suffering in miserable jobs. A unionization push that results in better-paid, more humane jobs in the short term, and robots taking over the awful jobs in the long run seems like a net gain for humanity to me.

One way or another, we're going to have to figure out what humans do in an automated world, because the robots are coming for everyone's job, not just warehouse workers. (Unless climate change stress collapses society before then, which might happen)

>>A unionization push that results in better-paid, more humane jobs in the short term, and robots taking over the awful jobs in the long run seems like a net gain for humanity to me.

By prohibiting monotonous work, you're preventing those low-skilled workers from contributing to the total production, which reduces the rate at which the economy automates. Automation is a product of investment capital (surplus productivity). Anything that reduces total production results in less productivity being invested into upgrading the economy.

> If these workers succeed in unionizing, it will only just accelerate Amazon's quest to replace MOST of these workers with robots.

I'm sure they've thought this through more than some random poster on Hacker News.

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