• Internal documents reviewed by The New York Times show Amazon plans to automate up to 75% of its operations in the coming years.
• The company expects automation to replace or eliminate over 500,000 U.S. jobs by 2033, primarily in warehouses and fulfillment centers.
• By 2027, automation could allow Amazon to avoid hiring around 160,000 new workers, saving about 30 cents per package shipped.
• This strategy is projected to save $12.6 billion in labor costs between 2025 and 2027.
• Amazon’s workforce tripled since 2018 to approximately 1.2 million U.S. employees, but automation is expected to stabilize or reduce future headcount despite rising sales.
• Executives presented to the board that automation could let the company double sales volume by 2033 without needing additional hires.
• Amazon’s Shreveport, Louisiana warehouse serves as the model for the future: it operates with 25% fewer workers and about 1,000 robots.
• A new facility in Virginia Beach and retrofitted older ones like Stone Mountain, Georgia, are following this design, which may shift employment toward more temporary and technical roles.
• The company is instructing staff to use softer language—such as “advanced technology” or “cobots” (collaborative robots)—instead of terms like “AI” or “robots,” to ease concerns about job loss.
• Amazon has begun planning community outreach initiatives (parades, local events) to offset the reputational risks of large-scale automation.
• The company has denied that the documents represent official policy, claiming they reflect the views of one internal group, and emphasized ongoing seasonal hiring (250,000 roles for holidays).
• Analysts suggest this plan could serve as a blueprint for other major employers, including Walmart and UPS, potentially reshaping U.S. blue‑collar job markets.
• The automation push continues a trajectory started with Amazon’s $775 million acquisition of Kiva Systems in 2012, which introduced mobile warehouse robots that revolutionized internal logistics.
• Recent innovations include robots like Blue Jay, Vulcan, and Proteus, aimed at performing tasks such as sorting, picking, and packaging with minimal human oversight.
• Long-term, Amazon may require fewer warehouse workers but more robot technicians and engineers, signaling a broader shift in labor type rather than total employment.

for - progress trap - AI -

article details - title - Hollow, world! (Part 1 of 5) - author - James Allen - date - 10 July, 2024 - publication - substack - self link - https://allenj.substack.com/p/hollow-world-part-1-of-5

summary James Allen provides an insightful description of ultra-anthropomorphic AI, AI that attempts to simulate an entire, whole human being.

In short, he points out the fundamental distinction between the real experience of another human being, and a simulation of one. In so doing, he gets to the heart of what it is to be human.

An AI is a simulation of a human being. No matter how realistic it's responses and actions, it is not evolved out of biology. I have no doubts that scientists are hard at work trying to make a biological AI. The distinction becomes fuzzier then.

Current AI cannot possibly simulate the experience of being in a fragile and mortal body and all that this entails. If an AI robot says it understands joy or pain, that statement isn't built on the combined exteroception and interoception of being in a biological body, rather, it is based on many linguistic statements it has assimilated.

In 2000, Bill Joy predicted that advances in computing would allow an intelligent robot to be built by 2030.

As a case in point, the self-replication of misinformation on social media networks has become a substantial physical risk in the early 21st century causing not only swings in elections, but riots, take overs, swings in the stock market (GameStop short squeeze January 2021), and mob killings. It is incredibly difficult to create risk assessments for these sorts of future harms.

In biology, we see major damage to a wide variety of species as the result of uncontrolled self-replication. We call it cancer.

We also see programmed processes in biological settings including apoptosis and necrosis as means of avoiding major harms. What might these look like with respect to artificial intelligence?

Joy contends that one of Hans Moravec's views in his book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind is that robots will push the human species into extinction in much the same way that early North American placental species eliminated the South American marsupials.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/RUR

Kate Darling (MIT, Econ/Law from Uni Basel and ETH ZH) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Darling http://www.katedarling.org/ https://octodon.social/@grok

antilibrary add [[The New Breed by Kate Darling]] 2021 https://libris.nl/boek?authortitle=kate-darling/the-new-breed--9781250296115#

Vgl the 'alloys' in [[Meru by S.B. Divya]]

I think it was a bad idea to tax robots, because why are taxing them, yes they can make everything, but to be honest while paying taxes is not something normal for humans why are we making robots to tax them

https://www.wired.com/2010/08/robot-laws/

Last.fm's robots.txt file includes the following Easter egg:

Disallow: /harming/humans<br /> Disallow: /ignoring/human/orders<br /> Disallow: /harm/to/self

I'd love to have a commonplace book robot that would do this sort of linking process within it for me. In the meanwhile, I continue to plod along.

This article was referenced today at [[I Annotate 2021]] by [[Mark Graham]].

https://www.fanucamerica.com/products/robots/series/m-1ia-delta-robots

Not only are these robots less rigid, they are heavy. Sometimes you have to slow them down because they shake the mount (often a cart). Also, the faster (and proportionally heavier) 5-6 axis robots are terrifying at full speed.

https://www.robotics.org/userAssets/riaUploads/file/12-TR15066Overview-SafetyforCollaborativeApplications-RobertaNelsonShea.pdf

Gent, Edd. ‘Robots to the Rescue: How They Can Help During Coronavirus (and Future Pandemics)’. Singularity Hub (blog), 1 April 2020. https://singularityhub.com/2020/04/01/robots-to-the-rescue-how-they-can-help-during-coronavirus-and-future-pandemics/.

I'd be frightened of the drone that could walk my two!

This is a key point. Watching those impressive astounding videos about these robots we forget how much humans are behind that

They should put heads on them to make them less scary.

That would have to include the vendetta that prompted the call to The Hasbeen, resulting in your misguided story drawing on incomplete facts and coverage dating back to 2014.

Mental note: This is the type of story that will be perfect for robot journalists when The Hasbeen boosts its editorial quality by replacing its newsroom with robots.

Future of transport after the zombie apocalypse?

Robots

Robots

This is a great way to understand human relationship to automation. See also Vonnegut's Player Piano.

I think this is cool!

Really interesting!

this is one of the coolest things I've ever seen!

Interesting way to think about it.

You have to start somewhere!