Protest against robotization in front of Amazon headquarters on Cyber Monday
The online commerce giant, which has tripled its US workforce since 2018 to nearly 1.2 million people, believes it can avoid hiring more than 600,000 people by 2033 by automating 75% of its operations. The era of “cobots” has arrived.
According to internal Amazon documents obtained by , Jeff Bezos’ company is moving at full speed towards a robotic future.
This plan for the future is already being put into practice at Amazon’s most technologically advanced warehouse in Shreveportin the state of Louisiana, where 1,000 robots managed reduce 25% of employees that you would have needed in 2024 without automation.
By 2026, Amazon hopes to cut that number in half, says The New York Times. The company, which has tripled its US workforce since 2018 to nearly 1.2 million people, believes it can avoid hiring more than 600,000 people by 2033 by automating 75% of its operations.
It is a strategy that, according to documents to which the NYT had access, will allow a savings of $0.3 per order and cut billions of dollars in labor costs.
The Shreveport warehouse is a prototype — a kind of testing ground that Amazon plans to expand to at least at least 40 robotic centers by 2027.
expect Amazon to use “rose-colored speech” when it has to start openly discuss changing careers and people’s livelihoods by machines.
According to documents obtained by the NYT, Amazon prefers nicer euphemisms like “advanced technology” or the dystopian term “cobot”abbreviation of “collaborative robot”, rather than “AI” or “automation”.
According to , the company is probably using this terminology because it has a less negative connotationbut sooner or later, the term “cobot” will end up being as hated as “AI” or “automation” — if it’s not enough to hear it for the first time to awaken negative feelings.
Amazon executives are already planning public relations campaignsincluding collecting toys for charities, to cushion the impact of job losses, says Vice
Speaking to the NYT, Daron Acemogluan MIT economist, warns that this is the beginning of a change in which one of the biggest job creators of America becomes a liquid destroyer of jobs.
Once Amazon has managed to obtain results from its “cobotization”, it will only be a matter of time until other large companies follow suit.
