Whatever else its faults — and it has many — one of the good things you can say about Amazon is that it employs a whole heck of a lot of American workers.
At least, it does for now.
CNBC reports:
Amazon on Wednesday unveiled a new robotic system that's capable of performing multiple tasks at once in the company's warehouses.
The system, called Blue Jay, is made up of a series of robotic arms that are suspended from a conveyor belt-like track. Those arms are tipped with suction-cup devices that allow them to grab and sort items of varying shapes and sizes.
"Grabbing and sorting items of varying shapes and sizes" is of course like 90% of what an Amazon warehouse worker does.
To be sure, Amazon already has robots doing a lot of suction-cupping and sorting in its warehouses. But, per the New York Times, Blue Jay is part of an ambitious new bid by the company to deploy vast armies of automated workers and thus replace the flesh-and-blood humans that may get hired there in the future:
Executives told Amazon's board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its U.S. work force in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033. That would translate to more than 600,000 people whom Amazon didn't need to hire.
Now, according to materials published by Amazon itself, the new "Blue Jay" robot doesn't look all that different from the current set of Terminators the company deploys in its warehouses:
But the robot is "already able to pick, stow, and consolidate approximately 75% of all the various types of items we store at our sites," and the company says it developed the tech behind it much more quickly than previous innovations:
Blue Jay's development moved from concept to production in just over a year — a process that formerly took three or more years for earlier Amazon systems like Robin, Cardinal, or Sparrow. The reason: Years of trial-and-error were condensed into months of development thanks to advancements in AI.
Ahh, yes. AI.
According to the company, Blue Jay is "like a juggler who never drops a ball" and "like a conductor leading an orchestra, with every motion in harmony." That sounds a whole lot heck of a lot like "perfect non-human worker that will replace a butt load of human workers" to me.
Not a great sign if you work at Amazon, I'm afraid.
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