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> It's as plain as day that Amazon isn't keeping manual labor around out of the goodness of their hearts. There is no bottom line calculation other than the cost of manual labor vs the cost of automation, and no amount of deflection about the working conditions of warehouse work (whether better than Home Depot or not) is going to keep your job once the scale tips in the other direction.

Be that as it may, agitating for rules that make it more expensive to employ people can make the scale tip the other way sooner. It's not unreasonable to prefer a $15 job to a "$25 job" that promptly gets automated away because the automation threshold is currently e.g. $22 (and will be $19 in five years).

That's a valid concern and I think there's no really great path forward, aside from broad structural changes that will blunt the negative consequences of automation: how do you balance good working conditions with the specter of automation? If human labor forever has to undercut the cost of automation, then we can't discount the human cost of doing so.

The problem isn't actually automation. If a job gets automated, now the thing being produced costs less. At scale it means you can have the same standard of living with a lower salary -- a boon for the poor.

The real problem is when some of the things have artificial scarcity. If we have zoning laws that prevent new housing from being built, the poor can't afford housing. If we have restrictions on the number of new doctors and regulations that create high compliance costs and barriers to competition in medical services, the poor can't afford medicine.

You can't make a robot to build housing for people in a place where there is effectively a law against building new housing. So that's where we get into trouble -- people building moats around stuff that make it more expensive, to prevent its cost from staying in line (i.e. declining) along with everything else, until those things are unaffordable.

The real problem is the high cost of housing and medicine and education.

> If a job gets automated, now the thing being produced costs less. At scale it means you can have the same standard of living with a lower salary -- a boon for the poor.

This is making the massively optimistic assumption that cost savings will be passed onto the consumer rather than hoarded for executives & shareholders.

Automation is a fake problem which has yet to reduce the number of jobs in the world.

People think it's a huge issue because they misread a study about computer manufacturers producing exponentially faster computers since 1970 as saying the manufacturers fired all their workers.

I think I disagree.

If job roles are arranged like a pyramid (wide base of lower paid jobs, with lower number of higher paid jobs above) - the largest benefit is always going to be automating away the high number of low paid jobs.

Amazon might roll out some pick-and-pack droids - but are unlikely to replace Jeff with an AI farm of CEO-leadership.

If you say look at say what Uber or AirBNB have done, it's replacing the very bottom interface layer connecting what you want with who provides it. People are still driving people and cleaning rooms for their arrival.

I don't see how this contradicts the argument above.

I don't think I was specifically seeking to contradict anything you said.

If it's cost-effective to replace you with a machine, then it's probably going to happen. You can present your shareholders with the nitty-gritty numbers and the result is given.

I was just pondering the idea that as you rise up the pyramid we still retain the idea that these people are irreplaceable.

If you read any corporate history, there's always somebody portrayed as the bad-guy who clung onto some random notion that then caused the failure - and conversely the good guy that saved the company.

You can boil this down a bit to statements like "Why don't we all own an Atari console today?" (usual answer is that people at the top made made decisions, and bottom of the pyramid didn't matter).

A more modern example of "AI-CEO-wins" would be say... "Butterfly keyboards on Macs"

Data-mining reports that nobody likes them, and correct decision would be to revert to the previous standard.

This is seemingly about to happen after many years, many revisions, much expense and ridicule - and my postulated idea as to why this long saga happened, was because the decision was left to exceptionally well paid people, with vested personal interest.

> If job roles are arranged like a pyramid (wide base of lower paid jobs, with lower number of higher paid jobs above) - the largest benefit is always going to be automating away the high number of low paid jobs.

Not quite. If you can automate a CEO you might cut a million dollars out of the budget -- maybe even ten or a hundred million in some companies. But if you can automate 500K people making $15/hour, that's over fifteen billion dollars a year. Plus benefits and employment overhead. So yes, there's more incentive to automate the larger number of people.

But if the same number of people made $25/hour, then it would be over 25 billion a year. So it's both.

This has actually played out in practice with both automation and outsourcing. The auto workers were some of the first to go, specifically because there were both a lot of them and they had high wages, resulting in a very large incentive to reduce those costs once they had real competition from Japan.

It's not unreasonable for people to be willing to accept less money as one of the ways to stay competitive. The problem is when that amount of money isn't enough to make a living -- but it's not automation that makes stuff cost more. Automation makes stuff cost less. The problem is the high cost of the things that haven't been automated, and the barriers to entry preventing all of these people from doing those jobs, which should in turn bring down those costs -- unless we're dealing with artificial scarcity like zoning regulations. In which case we've identified the real source of the problem.

> if you can automate 500K people making $15/hour

They have 500K total employees, not 500K warehouse workers. That's closer to 90K. Divide your automated-away figure by 5.

Suggest a correction, more than 250K making atleast $15/hour - https://www.aboutamazon.com/amazon-fulfillment/our-fulfillme...

A large part of the reason a lot of companies keep jobs only partially automated, is so that they can flex capacity up and down with demand.

With automation you have to buy all that capacity upfront and pay for it if you're using it or not. With labor, you can send people home early or cut hours if you don't need them.

Yep. These lines made me squirm.

Amazon probably isn't a bad employer even by warehouse standards. But these kinds of statements are paternalistic propaganda on behalf of capital.

> If I had to guess, I’d say that Amazon continues to employ lots of human beings because, by putting money into the pockets of working-class people, the company creates more customers

I've never accused a piece of content like this of being a shill, but it's taking some mental gymnastics to convince myself that a person could really believe this.

why, its not far from the philosophy of Henry Ford, thus completely plausible.

The author is a libertarian think-tank shill, not actually worried about his job.