Amazon Plans To Avoid Hiring 600,000 Workers Through Automation by 2033, Leaked Documents Show
- Reference: 0179842596
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/10/21/1316207/amazon-plans-to-avoid-hiring-600000-workers-through-automation-by-2033-leaked-documents-show
- Source link:
Amazon expects to sell twice as many products by 2033. That projection translates to more than 600,000 positions Amazon would not need to fill. Amazon opened its most advanced warehouse in Shreveport, Louisiana last year as a template for future facilities. The site uses a thousand robots and employed a quarter fewer workers than it would have without automation. The company plans to replicate this design in approximately 40 facilities by the end of 2027. A facility in Stone Mountain, Georgia currently employs roughly 4,000 workers. After a planned robotic retrofit, internal analyses project it will process 10% more items but need as many as 1,200 fewer employees. The documents show Amazon's robotics team has set a goal to automate 75% of its operations.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/technology/inside-amazons-plans-to-replace-workers-with-robots.html
I Love You (Score:2)
Well in the future Idiocracy, you can always be a Costco greeter.
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Naw, that can be automated by a cute, friendly robot willing to push your cart, chat with you, and help you find anything you want and even try to sell things you don't need.
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I'd much rather be a Costco greeter than a warehouse picker. I mean, that isn't even a close call.
I worked in a warehouse for a couple of days as part of a study I was doing. In those days, I was racking up 15 miles/day. Much harder on the body than being a greeter.
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I worked in two different warehousing jobs when I was younger, they both sucked, the pay sucked, and both were fairly dangerous. When I worked at Amazon (physical security, not logistics) some of the people that I regularly worked with had started in the FCs (Fulfillment Centers) as contractors and moved to full time employees. What they described as their jobs there was absolutely nothing like what I had done. Sure, it was boring, repetitious work, but the pay scale was much higher, there were full bene
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> An efficient economy can support more people through welfare or universal basic income...
It's also efficient to stuff 6 people into a 900 sq ft apartment. Neither that nor UBI will lead to anything good.
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UBI is the libertarian answer to everything. It lets them imagine they can let everything collapse but somehow capitalism survives.
It's what happens when you're thinking is completely constrained by your upbringing.
I don't actually know for sure what the solution is but Ubi is useless by itself. Monopolies form and even if you manage to get Ubi passed into law they just soak up all the money using high prices from Monopoly power.
Meanwhile the billionaires have noticed they are dependent on a cap
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> UBI is the libertarian answer to everything. It lets them imagine they can let everything collapse but somehow capitalism survives. It's what happens when you're thinking is completely constrained by your upbringing. I don't actually know for sure what the solution is but Ubi is useless by itself. Monopolies form and even if you manage to get Ubi passed into law they just soak up all the money using high prices from Monopoly power. Meanwhile the billionaires have noticed they are dependent on a capitalist system and have decided they don't like that. They shouldn't have to drive their power and prestige from us filthy consumers. The idea that capitalism might be killed by the capitalists never really occurred to anyone. I mean outside of a few academics I think and some sci-fi authors.
UBI is the only answer most people can even begin to wrap their heads around, having grown up in a world where capitalism is the driver of nearly every aspect of their lives. In truth, we're past the point where scarcity is a real problem, but we continue to act as if it is a problem because that allows the capitalistic system to continue to churn. Fuck you, pay me, is the way our world operates.
I think any real, long-term solution, would have to consider options outside the capitalist ideal. Note: That doe
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Welfare and "universal basic income" mean that there's still work being done; it's just that the people not doing the working are getting the benefit. As with Russell's hereditary landowners, "their idleness is rendered possible only by the industry of others".
Re: Good on them (Score:2)
What if we can each do the work we want, aided by AI, without needing a boss or profit motive?
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Then you've found Sir Thomas More's Utopia . As the name implies, you haven't.
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"It takes four hundred thirty people to man a starship. With this, you don't need anyone. One machine can do all those things they send men out to do now. Men no longer need die in space, or on some alien world. Men can live , and go on to achieve greater things than fact-finding and dying for galactic space, which is neither ours to give or to take. They can't understand. We don't want to destroy life, we want to save it!" - Dr Daystrom
If you ignore the plot of the episode (where M5 is doing buggy shit and
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I have been thinking of post-scarcity society where we wouldn't all be "fat slobs". Perhaps we could pair UBI with the requirement to take 1 or 2 classes a semester. They could be pure theory, trade school, college level, HS, whatever. Also make gigs available to people based on classes that they have been taking where they could make extra $$ and experience. Basically the hope would be that different people would want to do a wide variety of tasks, and have an easy path to be educated or trained in tho
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Amazon has been fairly open that automation of the Fulfillment Center jobs has been the goal for years, this is why they even sponsor pick-and-pack robot competitions. I remember here on SlashDot when Amazon bought Kiva Systems there was widespread scoffing at the likelihood that they would be successful in implementing the system, now there are over a million robots in FCs around the world and the cost savings are enormous. During orientation new FC contractors are told that they're going to automate tho
What's the big deal here? (Score:1)
I don't understand what's the big deal here? Isn't automation as old as man himself?
Leaked documents show that James Watt was trying to invent a machine that runs on steam and can power locomotives, power flour mills and looms and what not. Putting millions of workers out of job. Leaked documents show an early man was trying to invent the wheel. He was plotting to make it easy to move things around, putting thousands of men who carry shit around with their bare hands, out of work. Charles Babbage was schemi
This is the big deal. (Score:3)
Not just any previous form of innovation and progress, served up the exact same answer for employment disruption. Every damn one of them did. They ALL had the same generic answer; go re-educate yourself.
AI is not targeting a trade or industry. It is targeting the human mind. That is exactly why this revolution, IS different. AI isn’t enabling Greed to make humans temporarily unemployed. It’s looking to make humans permanently unemployable.
Perhaps we grasp that reality about as well as peo
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Factory machines/innovation/automation improved the hand-crafted GUILD system ? By what means and by what measure ? The factory owners were supported by Kings/diktators/tyrants and effectively local warlords. In England people were driven off their self-reliant land ( "Corn Laws" ) to feed the machines sweat and blood. Is *.ai any different now ? Perhaps people jealous of their self-reliance will poison *.ai software, like pouring glue into fabric spinning machines.
Ambitious goals, all the best (Score:2)
Those are very ambitious goals, good luck with that! If they can achieve even half of what the "leaked documents" show, that itself will be great big progress for humanity.
Quit it (Score:2)
Would people quit feeding this shit.
Jobs are resource necessary to live (Score:2)
And we are actively constraining that resource.
But I'm sure it's fine. It's not like we had multiple world wars when unemployment got too high right?
Don't Google that.
And we certainly aren't putting incompetent dictators in charge of large militaries. That would be crazy.
Don't Google that either.
Re: Jobs are resource necessary to live (Score:2)
What if we can get the resources necessary to live on our own without needing quid pro quo trade with money? What if enclosure creates scarcity and dependence and the tragedy of privatization is far far worse than commons?
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tl;dr
Keep up doing your shit work forever.
Bezos be like.... (Score:2)
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0mO6UY6uTg
1% (Score:1)
Amazon makes a total profit of 1% ~ 2% per year off of retail. On bad years (like during the Rivian investment) it was -1%. They're literally the largest retailer in the world and they simply break even.
I've also know people who worked procurement at Amazon. One girl said if they hire 30 for the warehouse, 15~20 actually show up. Less than 10 make it past four weeks. She once had to figure out where a bunch of missing hours went, and found a hidden stash near one of the roof exits with Nintendo switches,
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