The high-tech industry appears to have two ideas about where it fits into the AI-driven world created by human workers. (VC Marc Andreessen seems to believe that his work as an investor can never be automated).
Or they believe that while bots do troublesome and boring jobs and act as human companions at work, humans will do brand new jobs created by the bot revolution. The latter is most supported by historical evidence. The World Economic Forum predicts that 92 million roles will be evacuated by current technological trends, but it expects 170 million new jobs to be created.
What is a bot-filled future for them, for masters in AI and machine learning, especially those who currently have no economic or intellectual interests of people who have an immature labor role like warehouse workers?
Amazon on Wednesday offered one kind of path hint and announced major advances towards replacing warehouse workers with robots, becoming the new Vulcan robot that can “feel”.
“Bulkan helps work to make it safer by handling ergonomically challenging tasks and creates opportunities for teammates to improve their robotics maintenance skills,” CEO Andy Jussy wrote to X.
In one breath, an Amazon blog post on the Vulcan explains how robots work with humans, collecting items from the tallest shelves in the warehouse, so humans don’t have to climb or crouch down the ladder all day long. Humans then collect items that are stored only in the center and/or items that the new “emotion” robot is still unable to pick up in any way.
In its next breath, Amazon talks about how it can train a small number of warehouse workers to become robotics engineers.
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“These robots, which play a role in completing 75% of customer orders, have created hundreds of new categories of jobs on Amazon, from robot floor monitors to on-site reliability maintenance engineers,” the blog post said, adding that they will offer job retraining programs to help some workers acquire these robot maintenance skills.
Amazon didn’t say that, but this is clearly not a 1:1 conversion. We don’t require human armies to oversee the robots in the same way that is necessary to directly fulfill warehouse orders. Also, no one has the aptitude or desire to be a robot mechanic.
However, the fact that Amazon included information about the retraining program along with the announcement of Vulcan makes sense.
This is because so far there has been little evidence of what robotic postdoo jobs look like to working-class people. (One of the founders of AI startups proposed to TechCrunch that in the world of AI-Does-All-Jobs, humans live in some way in government-issued welfare.)
But perhaps there is an “automation monitor” instead of a grocery store clerk. This is the same as having one store clerk overseeing all the lines of self-checking today. Instead of fast food cooks, workers oversee cooking bots and more. A running robot is like operating a PC. Most people need to know how to do it to make it employable.
Again, this perfect bot future may never come true. Bots could only be within the largest and deepest companies, like Amazon and car manufacturing, but the bulk of retail, restaurant and driving jobs continue to be done by humans. More for at least decades.
Don’t forget that Amazon is a company looking to sell Amazon Go Technology to the wider retail/grocery industry. The retail industry didn’t like its biggest competitor, Amazon, and wasn’t particularly interested. The technology later found out that it used Indian humans to watch and label videos, so even Amazon later reduced its use. Such technologies (such as Amazon) are barely visible in the wild today.