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by zero_deg_kevin 1828 days ago
They're not running out of people to employ, their product (working in an Amazon warehouse) sucks, the market knows it, and Amazon is stuck with the excess inventory. If they want to solve the problem, they can improve product/market fit.
1 comments
napolux 1828 days ago
Or just go "full robots"
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mikepurvis 1828 days ago
It seems pretty clear that they're trying to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Robotics#Acquisition_by...

But I guess thus far they've found that just burning through human labour is more cost effective. Perhaps upgrades to labour conditions/wages via unionization, regulation, etc would change that calculus.

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mabbo 1828 days ago
You say that like it's a choice to be made and not a project that remains permanently 5 years away.
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throwaway0a5e 1828 days ago
Many warehouses or portions of warehouses (for retailers that deal in a much narrower range of products than amazon) are already fully automated. These are usually in slightly higher "marginal cost of sending the wrong stuff" industries.

For some manufacturing facilities the robots pick all the parts and then the humans take the "shipment" of parts to the actual line and distribute it to the relevant stations.

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mabbo 1827 days ago
And that works well if you have a small number of SKUs with a set weight and dimensions. Amazon has billions of SKUs.

The robotics and ML needed to be able to open a storage bin, see what items are inside, choose the one you are looking for- and only it- and then carefully pull it out without disturbing the other items, that is the problem Amazon faces with full automation.

You could reduce the number of SKUs per bin, but then you have a storage problem- there's way more SKUs than bins in a building. You could go slower, but then you have a throughput problem.

It's really, really hard. And while humans have a high opex, they're really good at that particular problem. Hands and eyes are incredible tools. Robotics is catching up though, and it's awesome, but it's not there yet.

Source: I spent many years working in Amazon Fulfillment Tech (and these opinions are my own and do not represent me speaking for the company).

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zero_deg_kevin 1828 days ago
Maybe Jeff can succeed where Elon failed. I have doubts.
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