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Old June 16th, 2016 #1
NewsFeed
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Post Amazon's Successful Automation Boosts Employment - For Now

Amazon’s automated warehouses continue to show how rapidly smart machines are taking over tasks that were performed by humans. A few years ago, workers pushed carts for miles around the warehouse picking out items for customer orders. Huffpo reported in 2011, “Some workers at Amazon.com’s Allentown, Pennsylvania warehouse are reportedly willing to contend with working at a brutal pace in dizzying heat so long as it means having a job.”

Was that only five years ago? It shows how quickly an industry can change when modern automation is applied.

Now the Amazon warehouse is immersed in tech, and other companies are turning to automation as the capability of the machines improves. For example, Walmart announced early this month that it was six to nine months from using drones within its warehouses to do inventory, cutting the time of that chore from one month to one day.

San Jose California is a part of Silicon Valley, and naturally awareness of tech issues is high there. The home town Mercury News had a front-page spread on Sunday that focused on the employment threat presented by robots, as represented by the automation powerhouse that Amazon has become. The paper tried to draw a fine line, cheering the advances of robots and the jobs added to the nearby Amazon warehouse in Tracy while also observing the long-term inevitable job loss.

Despite the Mercury’s happy talk, the clear trend is for hugely fewer jobs in the future because of automation. Warehouse worker is one of millions of ordinary occupations that have disappeared since the great recession began, the result being that the choices for job seekers have shrunk enormously. Oxford University researchers predicted in 2013 that nearly half of American jobs could be automated within 20 years. The Gartner technology consultants predict that one-third of US jobs will be done by a computer or robot by 2025. That’s a grim future that no political leaders even mention.

Certainly within such a dire employment prospects, it makes no sense for Washington to continue importing millions of unnecessary immigrant workers. In fact…

Automation makes immigration obsolete.

Amazon’s success has led to employment growth for the time being, but improving technology means fewer jobs later on. How do these brilliant captains of industry like Jeff Bezos expect the economy to run when half or more of the jobs (and paychecks!) have disappeared?

Amazon’s robot army fuels expansion, San Jose Mercury News, June 10, 2016

TRACY — In Amazon’s million-square-foot order-filling warehouse, two low-slung orange robots carrying stacks of consumer products are zipping across the floor, headed right at each other. One stops — not on a dime, it turns out, but rather over a QR code stuck to the floor — and allows the other to proceed, carrying inventory to a human worker who will pluck out an item, scan it and send it off for packing and shipping.

In this building the size of 28 football fields, containing four miles of conv

----- snip -----


read full article at source: http://www.vdare.com/posts/amazons-s...oyment-for-now
 
Old August 16th, 2016 #2
Cesare Vento
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Join Date: Aug 2016
Posts: 7
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NewsFeed View Post
Amazon’s automated warehouses continue to show how rapidly smart machines are taking over tasks that were performed by humans. A few years ago, workers pushed carts for miles around the warehouse picking out items for customer orders. Huffpo reported in 2011, “Some workers at Amazon.com’s Allentown, Pennsylvania warehouse are reportedly willing to contend with working at a brutal pace in dizzying heat so long as it means having a job.”

Was that only five years ago? It shows how quickly an industry can change when modern automation is applied.

Now the Amazon warehouse is immersed in tech, and other companies are turning to automation as the capability of the machines improves. For example, Walmart announced early this month that it was six to nine months from using drones within its warehouses to do inventory, cutting the time of that chore from one month to one day.

San Jose California is a part of Silicon Valley, and naturally awareness of tech issues is high there. The home town Mercury News had a front-page spread on Sunday that focused on the employment threat presented by robots, as represented by the automation powerhouse that Amazon has become. The paper tried to draw a fine line, cheering the advances of robots and the jobs added to the nearby Amazon warehouse in Tracy while also observing the long-term inevitable job loss.

Despite the Mercury’s happy talk, the clear trend is for hugely fewer jobs in the future because of automation. Warehouse worker is one of millions of ordinary occupations that have disappeared since the great recession began, the result being that the choices for job seekers have shrunk enormously. Oxford University researchers predicted in 2013 that nearly half of American jobs could be automated within 20 years. The Gartner technology consultants predict that one-third of US jobs will be done by a computer or robot by 2025. That’s a grim future that no political leaders even mention.

Certainly within such a dire employment prospects, it makes no sense for Washington to continue importing millions of unnecessary immigrant workers. In fact…

Automation makes immigration obsolete.

Amazon’s success has led to employment growth for the time being, but improving technology means fewer jobs later on. How do these brilliant captains of industry like Jeff Bezos expect the economy to run when half or more of the jobs (and paychecks!) have disappeared?

Amazon’s robot army fuels expansion, San Jose Mercury News, June 10, 2016

TRACY — In Amazon’s million-square-foot order-filling warehouse, two low-slung orange robots carrying stacks of consumer products are zipping across the floor, headed right at each other. One stops — not on a dime, it turns out, but rather over a QR code stuck to the floor — and allows the other to proceed, carrying inventory to a human worker who will pluck out an item, scan it and send it off for packing and shipping.

In this building the size of 28 football fields, containing four miles of conv

----- snip -----


read full article at source: http://www.vdare.com/posts/amazons-s...oyment-for-now


I have heard that over at Seattle, where 15 an hour is the minimum now, fast food joints have installed ordering machines, and only have a few folks in the kitchen making the food, whilst everyone else is fired. Automation will destroy the economy, we simply do not have the governmental strength (centralized) in order to ensure the technology is used for all, nor the market large enough to find new jobs for several dozen million Unemployed folks.
 
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