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Comment by jason0597 | Hacker News Reader

Considering how badly Amazon treats their employees, I'm surprised they haven't allocated vast amount of resources already to automating everything in their warehouses. The number of times they've appeared in the news in the past regarding their treatment of employees, you'd think they despise humans and want to replace everyone with robots and that they would have done it already.

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Well, if they could they would. They're keeping the workers they absolutely need and automating everything else possible. The endgame is a dark warehouse (no lights, the robots just sort of know what to do) but the workers still need some money so they keep working even though their numbers keep dropping.

This box robot saves material (little wastage of cardboard) and labor costs, and doesn't ever call in sick. Why wouldn't they want robots for everything?

> This box robot (…) doesn't ever call in sick.

Any machine eventually calls in sick when it undergoes maintenance and failure. Of course the failure modes are different than with human labor, but the point is machines also fail.

>Any machine eventually calls in sick when it undergoes maintenance and failure. Of course the failure modes are different than with human labor, but the point is machines also fail.

I think that robots are more fungible and predictable in failure than humans. You can plan around that, like plugging in spare hard drives and machines when they fail so throughput is not affected.

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