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Amazon trials humanoid robots to 'free up' staff
(www.bbc.co.uk)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
These jobs need to be automated. No human should be packing and sorting boxes at the capacity that Amazon ships them.
Unfortunately amazon didn't figure that out until they realized they were running out or people to exploit.
I disagree. They used what they had and were certainly researching continual improvement all along. They've had automation wherever they could implement it all over.
The challenge is finding the right human teams to design the automation that will be successful. Engineers with a background in practical robotic automation are not exactly common.
Every major company is in a race to reduce wage cost to 0 and maximize growth and p/e. For amazon their growth and revenue numbers kept growing despite offering above market for unskilled labor, albiet for horrible jobs. They'll continue to try and eliminate as many FTEs as they can until all they employ are people who manage, deploy, maintain, design and implement automatic systems.
This guy gets it
The job could be fine if they had twice the people. Then they wouldn't need to be over worked so much.