LOOK MA, NO HANDS — Amazon has made a huge stride in replacing the human hand in the workplace — and that’s likely to replace two-thirds of its hundreds of thousands of warehouse stock pickers. (With 1.5 million workers, Amazon is the country’s second-largest employer, after Walmart). Billionaire Jeff Bezos’ company unveiled its “Sparrow” robot last week.
It’s an off-the-shelf robot body equipped with Amazon-designed eyes, hands, and software, and it can distinguish between millions of items, pick them up, and pack them — four times faster than humans. Working all three shifts, every Sparrow can thus replace a dozen workers. The only thing that limits the robot — for now — is the weight of the items to be moved.
DOOMSDAY, 2029 — Bezos revolutionized stock picking in 2012, buying the Kiva robot, half a million of which now skitter across its warehouse floors moving sections of shelving to stationary pickers, tripling efficiency. Quickening the move away from brick-and-mortar shopping, caused the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in malls and store-fronts.
At the same time, Amazon held annual contests for techies to automate the rest of its warehouse jobs, as well as buying up firms that made major contributions to that end. Bezos’ recent “Robin” and “Cardinal” robots have automated getting packages to loading platforms. He said in 2019 that he wanted to fully automate Amazon by 2029.
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