The tech industry seems to have two thoughts when it comes to where human workers fit into the AI-powered world they are creating: Either they think that all the jobs, except perhaps their own, will be done by bots. (VC Marc Andreessen seems to think that his work as an investor could never be automated).
Or they think that bots will do the icky, boring work, acting as human companions in jobs while humans do brand-new jobs that the bot revolution creates. The latter is the one most supported by historical evidence. The World Economic Forum predicts that 92 million roles will be displaced by current technological trends, but that 170 million new jobs will be created.
For those who don’t have the economic power, or the intellectual interest, to get a master’s degree in AI and machine learning — especially the people who now occupy unskilled labor roles like warehouse workers — what does the bot-filled future look like for them?
Amazon offered a hint of one sort of path on Wednesday when it announced major progress toward replacing warehouse workers with robots with its new Vulcan robot that can “feel.”
“Vulcan is helping make work safer by handling ergonomically challenging tasks, while creating opportunities for our teammates to grow their skills in robotics maintenance,” CEO Andy Jassy posted on X.
In one breath, Amazon’s blog post about Vulcan described how the robot will work alongside humans, gathering items from the warehouse’s highest and lowest shelves, so humans won’t have to climb ladders or bend down all day long. Humans will then gather items stored only in the middle and/or items that the new “feeling” robot still somehow can’t manage to pick up.
In the next breath, Amazon talks about how it is training a small number of warehouse workers to become robot technicians, as it uses the bot for more of the warehouse picking role.
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“These robots — which play a role in completing 75% of customer orders — have created hundreds of new categories of jobs at Amazon, from robotic floor monitors to onsite reliability maintenance engineers,” the blog post said, adding that it offers a job retraining program for some workers to gain these robotic maintenance skills.
Although Amazon didn’t say so, this would obviously not be a 1:1 conversion. It wouldn’t require an army of humans to oversee the robots in the same way it needs them to fulfill warehouse orders directly. Nor would everyone have the aptitude or desire to become robot mechanics.
But the fact that Amazon included info on its retraining program alongside its Vulcan announcement is meaningful.
That’s because there’s been very little evidence so far of what the post robots-doing-all-the-jobs looks like for working-class humans. (One AI startup founder even suggested to TechCrunch that in an AI-does-all-jobs world, the humans would somehow just live on government-issued welfare.)
But perhaps, instead of grocery clerks, there would be “automation monitors,” much like we have one clerk overseeing every row of self-check today. Instead of fast-food cooks, workers would oversee the cook bots, and so on. Running robots becomes like operating a PC: Pretty much everyone needs to know how to do it to be employable.
Then again, this fully bot future may never really materialize. Bots could remain the purview of only the biggest and most deep-pocketed companies — like with Amazon or how they’re used in things like automotive manufacturing — while the vast majority of retail, restaurants, and driving jobs continue to be done by humans. At least for decades more.
Remember, Amazon is a company that was trying to sell its just-walk-out automation Amazon Go technology to a wider retail/grocery industry. The retail industry is none too fond of its biggest competitor, Amazon, and wasn’t terribly interested. The tech was later found to be using humans in India to watch and label videos, and even Amazon later scaled back on its use. Such tech (by Amazon or others) is hardly visible in the wild today.