https://thenationalpulse.com/2...ed-documents-reveal/

Amazon is reportedly looking to automate a significant portion of its operations, which could allow the company to avoid hiring over 600,000 U.S. workers by 2033. The leaked internal documents reveal that Amazon aims to automate 75 percent of its operations, potentially saving $12.6 billion between 2025 and 2027.The company’s robotics team is reportedly working to replace 160,000 U.S. roles by 2027, saving approximately 30 cents on every item warehoused and delivered. The documents also indicate that Amazon expects to double its product sales over the same period.

In anticipation of backlash, Amazon has reportedly explored ways to soften its public image, including participation in community projects and avoiding the use of terms like “automation” or “AI.” Instead, the company has considered using phrases such as “advanced technology” and “cobot” to describe its robots working alongside humans.

Amazon responded publicly to the leak, claiming the documents were incomplete and do not fully represent its hiring strategy. The company also denied instructing executives to avoid certain terminology when discussing robotics.

Notably, the documents detailing the automation plan appear to be based on projections that Amazon will continue to see significant growth in its consumer base. However, The National Pulse reported in April that UPS announced plans to reduce its workforce by 20,000 jobs this year as part of a cost-reduction strategy related to decreased deliveries from Amazon.

I keep telling people that the biggest controllable expense for a company is usually payroll and if they want to keep a job, they better show up every day and perform. No one listens.

Yes, they aren't the only ones. As it is their fulfillment centers already have to robots running all over the place.

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I keep telling people that the biggest controllable expense for a company is usually payroll and if they want to keep a job, they better show up every day and perform. No one listens.

Sometimes even that doesn't matter.

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Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire
Unions might not be the tech giant’s biggest labor threat.

...Amazon is facing a looming crisis: It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024, according to leaked Amazon internal research from mid-2021 that Recode reviewed...

Raising wages and increasing warehouse automation are two of the six “levers” Amazon could pull to delay this labor crisis by a few years , but only a series of sweeping changes to how the company does business and manages its employees will significantly alter the timeline, Amazon staff predicted.

“If we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024,” the research, which hasn’t previously been reported, says.

The report warned that Amazon’s labor crisis was especially imminent in a few locales, with internal models showing that the company was expected to exhaust its entire available labor pool in the Phoenix, Arizona, metro area by the end of 2021, and in the Inland Empire region of California, roughly 60 miles east of Los Angeles, by the end of 2022. Amazon’s internal report calculated the available pool of workers based on characteristics like income levels and a household’s proximity to current or planned Amazon facilities; the pool does not include the entire US adult population.

...The leaked internal findings also serve as a cautionary tale for other employers who seek to emulate the Amazon Way of management, which emphasizes worker productivity over just about everything else and churns through the equivalent of its entire front-line workforce year after year...

...In the past, that churn wasn’t a problem for Amazon — it was even desirable at some points. Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse workforce as necessary but replaceable, and feared that workers who remained at the company too long would turn complacent or, worse, disgruntled, according to reporting by the New York Times. But now, as the internal report Recode reviewed shows, some inside Amazon are realizing that strategy won’t work much longer , especially if leaders truly want to transform it into “Earth’s best employer,” as Bezos proclaimed in 2021...

From an article last year. Amazon has been looking to eliminate their workforce for years. "necessary, but replaceable". Now, no longer necessary.

Now if we could only apply that to Congressmen.

My financial guy mentioned that AI replacing workers is one thing driving the economy upwards.

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Originally posted by Pipe Smoker:
My financial guy mentioned that AI replacing workers is one thing driving the economy upwards.

Yeah... what do we need all these people for?

That's fine, if we don't keep importing uneducated people and put them on welfare.
At least Trump has that figured out. Europe, not so much.

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Originally posted by Leemur:
I keep telling people that the biggest controllable expense for a company is usually payroll and if they want to keep a job, they better show up every day and perform. No one listens.

Payroll is the only cost management can directly control, it has the biggest impact on the bottom line, from wages to benefits.

Gabby Newscum raised wages to $20 and hour and helped fuel the AI/Robotics drive to replace workers. It already existed but now there is an economic impact to having a robot perform tasks that minimum wage employees did.

As a consumer I'm not upset about it, robots don't show up late, they don't get sick, they don't spit in food or do nefarious things to products because they are having a shitty day.

As Trump pushes out the illegals and disincentivizes hiring low wage imported H-1B visas with the $100K penalty, robotics will have to take up some of the slack.

There is a segment of society that will never work, robots don't have that issue..

I'm just musing out loud before coffee. I'm not versed in this stuff.

It seems to me there are 3 high level categories:
1. jobs that benefit from both AI and Robotics
2. jobs that benefit from AI but not necessarily robotics.
3. jobs that benefit from robotics but not necessarily AI.
4. of course, there is the dual negative as well.

Where do these jobs exist (country or region) once you apply other factors like prevailing wage rates, average education levels, cost of living, etc? Does it make more sense to start in a first world or third world region? Replacing labor or intellect? Both? How fast do you roll this out - how many people per year get replaced? What influences these decisions and why should gov have any role in that (ie - min wage increases encouraging the transition)?

Some applications can be applied to the home. Like a grill AI robot for making hamburgers and steaks - when can I have one for my kitchen?

As a business owner - the faster/sooner, the better.

Having to hire people to do rote work is annoying to manage/difficult to keep people happy at, etc.

(EG, I’d much rather hire people just for customer relations, etc in an ice cream shop, than worrying about the ability to scoop ice cream fast enough to make milkshakes etc.

It’s a boring part of the job, which would have more consistent/better results if automated.)

I think Amazon is a good case study of why you shouldn't build the behemoth which will ultimately destroy those who built it.

Their involvement with UPS, their use of DSPs, and now the AI/robots are three solid examples.

Stop feeding the beast if you don't want to be eaten.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: a1abdj,

As the guy who keeps the robots in line, automation is not usually understood by most people. They are not something out a Boston Dynamic's CGI video that shows up on site and you tell it what to do. They are purpose built for specific tasks and that task has to be programed. You can make a robotic system that will pump out cheeseburgers, but it is not going to be capable of washing the dishes.

For the last 20 years I've worked on an automated system (production line) that made contact lenses. A 125 ft by 40 ft footprint that you feed raw materials into it and it kicks out cases of 50 boxes of 30 lenses, inspected, labeled, and ready to be shipped to the customer at between 100K to 150K lenses per 12 hour shift, all accompanied with no human intervention. Process that for a moment before I add in that we have over 50 lines at our Jax plant alone.

Take the little plastic package that each lense comes in, sealed with foil. The packages are made on a 130 ton injection molding machine at 16 parts per cycle with a 4.1 second cycle time. Once the mold opens, a robotic arm swings in and picks the 16 parts from the mold face and swings out of the gap so thw mold can close and start the next cycle. The robotic arm transfers the 16 parts to a 6 axis robotic arm that takes the first 16 parts, repositions, and takes another 16 parts. Then the robotic arm moves the 32 parts from a vertical plane to the horizontal plane, shifts the spacing between the parts, and places them onto 2 16 cavity pallets that are waiting on a conveyor. This repeats every 4.1 seconds, 24 hours a day, 12 weeks between scheduled maintenance shutdowns or, until something goes wrong and I have to figure out what and why, and get it running again.
This is one very small part of our process and it is loaded with sensors, valves, air, vacuum, water, pneumatics, etc, and things fail regularly.

Now think of your cheeseburger making machine. The robotic part that puts the burger on the grill can’t flip the burger. The robotic part that flips the burger can’t add the cheese. The robotic part that adds the cheese can’t add the ketchup. The robotic part that adds the ketchup can’t add the pickles. The robotic part that adds the pickle can’t wrap the burger. You see where I'm going here. Sensors, motors, conveyors, pneumatics…. It gets complicated fast. Maintenance and repair costs on top of the initial cost make it more cost effective to pay a person to do the whole process.

Until it's not. Keep raising wages and you change the economics of the equation. The fast food places like McDonalds that have replaced the counters with a kiosk to order yourself is an example of this even though this is the low hanging fruit of automation.
When our production lines were first built it was not fully automated and it took around 60 operstors to run it. Over time we upgraded the various parts of the processes as our engineering department designed new technology to automate them. Now it is fully automated and normal staffing is 4 techs per line. The new lines we are installing have a smaller footprint and are staffed with 2 techs.

Amazon's current approach to automation has been to make each worker more efficient. Stacks of shelves are moved around as something on that rack needs to be picked so the human doesn’t have to go as far to pick it. Fixed racks have picker robots that run up and down the racks picking items as needed and having the item ready for the human to get. Some items are picked by a robot and an automated cart takes it to the human to process. But anyone who thinks Amazon's strategic planning hasn’t been to fully automate everything is a fool.
As mentioned above, payroll is usually the biggest expense that management has any controll over.

As a manufacturing engineer, I can say yours sounds like a plant I'd love to see in operation!


I'll echo part of what you just said, too: my team and I are moving racks this afternoon, putting them closer to the operator's point of use. Walking to get materials is not value-added!

going automated isn't always robotics.

I's a long term process, with a company as big as Amazon they can certainly afford to put in the automation needed, look at the automation in the auto industry that's eliminated the massive number of employees that were required to build a car.

Shame though as AgLifer as clearly pointed out, managing employees can be a PIA, and expensive once you add in all the HR rules you have to navigate to stay in compliance. Automation doesn't have HR laws and no attorneys to worry about suing you for money or the Feds over something you miss .

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Originally posted by vthoky:
As a manufacturing engineer, I can say yours sounds like a plant I'd love to see in operation!


I'll echo part of what you just said, too: my team and I are moving racks this afternoon, putting them closer to the operator's point of use. Walking to get materials is not value-added!

Years back I came off the floor into a support role for about 3 years. One of the odd things our group had was to give the approved tours. It was cool to take groups from all over the business and see thier reactions. It reminded me that what we did there was really cool. You lose that when you do it daily.

Maybe some of those 600,000 people should begin to learn how to repair automated machinery.

DSP - delivery service partner, in Amazon’s case, not digital signal processor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex3_brOUdpA

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Originally posted by SpinZone:
The packages are made on a 130 ton injection molding machine at 16 parts per cycle with a 4.1 second cycle time. Once the mold opens, a robotic arm swings in and picks the 16 parts from the mold face and swings out of the gap so thw mold can close and start the next cycle. The robotic arm transfers the 16 parts to a 6 axis robotic arm that takes the first 16 parts, repositions, and takes another 16 parts. Then the robotic arm moves the 32 parts from a vertical plane to the horizontal plane, shifts the spacing between the parts, and places them onto 2 16 cavity pallets that are waiting on a conveyor. This repeats every 4.1 seconds

That's the kind of process that makes "How It's Made" and similar programs some of my favorite TV!