why amazon may use robotics to take jobs from weary humans

[jonovid]

bone-weary workers reportedly have just nine seconds to process a package during the long-hours at the online store warehouse,
workers are said to be suffering from panic attacks due to their workload
why amazon may use robotics
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5004230/amazon-warehouse-working-conditions/

also
Behind the Alarming Expose on Amazon’s Workplace Culture | NBC Nightly News


also
amazon cumming to Australia

why post this? because this is just the start of a looming 4th industrial robotics revolution in the work place.
were humans become replaceable. this will not stop at just Amazon. any repetitive work ,humans may become replaceable.

[rstofer]

No worries... Somebody has to repair the gadgets.

What it does mean is that those who opted to forgo their education are going to have a problem finding a job.  Those with STEM degrees will always be in demand.  Even technical degrees will be worthwhile.

MBAs will still have jobs, somebody has to dream up the next workplace upgrade.  Chemical engineers, in fact all kinds of engineers, will still be in demand.  Civil Engineers, Structural Engineers, Electrical Engineers and Architects will always have jobs (based primarily on licensing requirements).

For the moment, truck drivers and package delivery personnel will have jobs.  Drones may take over some of the end point deliveries.  We'll have to see.

I don't see it as gloom and doom.  I'm long retired so I don't really have any skin in the game.

[cdev]

Google "Disciplines on Domestic Regulation"  Don't fall for the BS about them not coming to agreement in Buenos Aires, its a trick to make people think they are far from an agreement.

No worries... Somebody has to repair the gadgets.

But many gadgets being repaired does not equal prosperity. Sustainability, not quite either

What it does mean is that those who opted to forgo their education are going to have a problem finding a job.  Those with STEM degrees will always be in demand.

Assuming they have not been priced out of the economy you mean? The big push to digital commerce will create cross border digital engineering for the bulk of the small engineering jobs. The ones involving government spending will get internationally tendered and go to the lowest bidder firms. Which will also get a right to do business elsewhere, paying their workers less, wages which may eventually fall to almost nothing. What's left?

Looking at the Global Value Chains ideology, each country specializes in what its best at producing for the lowest possible cost. What does America produce the best of Lawyers? media? (debatable but they would probably argue that) Aerospace? Each thing is pieced out all around the world. To compete people have to offer the best for the least. Instead of merely a 270 million pool of potential competitors for a job, or a slot in a college, eventually people may have seven billion.

This is making Americans realize that we have been dropping the ball. We're an expensive country to live in, the most expensive, because of things like health care, but most of us are not going to be able to afford to live here the way things are going. Who will? People with more education. Not just two or four year degrees in social sciences. But these are alleged to be "choices" but they have been hidden from everybody in the country and there also is a widespread agreement among all Americans that our current leadership are corrupt and in cahoots with one another to steal the country blind. Thats just one of many things the country all agrees upon. (another fact that the media hides from us!)

Frantically, they are trying to lock in their ill gotten gains and these bad bad deals but the trade agreements they are pushing behind the scenes are not done deals yet, also they are largely illegitimate and should be challenged because they are/have been the products of a huge fraud. We dont owe anybody a debt because of the fraud of a few crooks. If they owe anybody its a debt its their own personal responsibility to those they defrauded. (But the developing countries in fact were in on the fraud, they weren't deceived as they claim) We don't owe them millions of low paying jobs.

Instead we should figure out a better way for their best people to work here one which lets them keep their own wages and make long term professional relationships on a basis of equal rights with their counterparts here.. Not work 60-70 hour weeks making other people rich.

Even technical degrees will be worthwhile.

MBAs will still have jobs, somebody has to dream up the next workplace upgrade.  Chemical engineers, in fact all kinds of engineers, will still be in demand.  Civil Engineers, Structural Engineers, Electrical Engineers and Architects will always have jobs (based primarily on licensing requirements).

See the WTO WPDR's work. They aim to employ the Third World so the lions share of the profit is skimmed off for multinationals. Everybody will lose except for them.

For the moment, truck drivers and package delivery personnel will have jobs.  Drones may take over some of the end point deliveries.  We'll have to see.

I don't see it as gloom and doom.  I'm long retired so I don't really have any skin in the game.

Sure you do, if we have a nation full of people whose careers have been interrupted, you will suffer too, we all will. For example, the Social Security system will be destroyed by a shift to temporary "service providers" because they will demand that they either be exempted from it or the system be privatized so they can take their taxes from their earnings and move them elsewhere. This is a proposal which is likely to succeed if people dont know about it. It strips the protections from GATS from SS, because of the way Article 1:3 of the GATS is worded. See https://www.citizen.org/documents/GATS-financial-dereg.pdf and see "WTO | Services: Annex on Financial Services" Also see the Indian proposals re: Social Security benefits portability keeping in mind what Pat Arnold said..  Also that GATS already caused the 2008 crash (by being the reason they repealed Glass-Steagall in 1999 See US WTO GATS Schedule of Specific Committments SC03 last page, Page 31 top submitted February 26, 1998 )

Remember foreign service providers intentionally lack wage parity. The average wage for an engineer in India? The official "least developed countries"? (the ones that get a special waiver allowing them to bid a bit higher and still get the work) I don't know, look it up. Its probably a fraction of what it is in Australia or the US. Another thing, contracts involving government spending will likely hit new procurement rules soon, if they have not already. So large scale privatizations of government and quasi government (schools, hospitals, labs, etc) entities (federal, state, local down to the municipal level) (of their non-elected positions, the jobs that employ a lot of people, things like office jobs)

Look at how low wages are elsewhere compared to in developed countries. That's what the baseline is.  Subcontractors are not paid by the company that physically they work AT, they are payed by the body shop firm, they are payed by their employer at home. Officially they will still be employed at home, not here. That means wages in fields that make heavy use of Mode Four workers will be impacted via supply & demand. "Average" wages for jobs where this becomes the norm will be forced lower. Because of the influence of people working below current minimum wages. When we add the influence of computers which cost less and less, we have a situation thats been tailor made to lower wages. This has been planned for more than 20 years. Its why so many fields have been held in a state of limbo for decades. The global economy will crash if large scale Mode Four happens to professional jobs of all kinds. But, that is what many seem to want. A race to the bottom. They are making a preemptive strike because they don' t want wages elsewhere to rise, nor do they want industrial or safety or chemical standards to rise, nor do they want health care or higher education to become more affordable or remain affordable to poor people in places where they are still affordable now, any of those things would cause problems for them because of what they have already done. They are afraid they would have to clean up the messes they have already created. They dont want any of the things they claim they want, its all a big scam.

They are not up to any good in Geneva or Buenos Aires!

See  https://www.eff.org/files/2016/03/15/brussels_declaration.pdf

[tszaboo]

To be frank, I think someone reliable should stand before the public, and tell, that 80% of the people are in a dead end job and will be replaced by machines. Consequently, we should all be focusing on re-educating these people. Working hours should be reduced, and the extra time should be spent on education, on something marketable in 5-10 years.

Starting from truck drivers, postmen, fast food, logistics, most people in agriculture, data entry, factory workers, and banking jobs. Dead end jobs, sorry.

I spend 4 hours per week in education as an EE. I dont want to loose the skill of learning.

[cdev]

In 1995 a new "agreement" on services started what has become a global attack on public provision of services including (especially) higher education.

See http://www.eua.be/Libraries/higher-education/GATS_en.pdf
and
http://www.eua.be/Libraries/publication/EUA_Statement_TTIP.pdf

Public entities are being forced to privatize services in an ever increasing war on public everything, broadly called "progressive liberalisation". Public services are framed as a "taking" of "freedom" from corporations in a bizarre parody of the civil rights movement. Countries are claimed to be discriminating against third world companies by providing services claiming that that keeps foreign companies out, so keeps them backwards because they cant bid for and get the jobs (because they are cheaper and have a lot of people with advanced degrees)  Anything that prevents that is likely to be attacked in the not too distant future.

Its important to realize though that while this is happening those poor countries are also being forced to give up their public services like health care and education which they desperately need. So this scheme is doing them no favors. Additionally these highly educated professionals they are hoping to send overseas are generally from affluent families. What would happen were they not being brokered by (their own) domestic firms who then take a large cut of their ages and get a free pass to pay them much less than prevailing wages in he host countries (unlike H1-B visas in the US there is no wage parity requirement, and once a market sector is opened, I think quotas will soon be forbidden. That will be a grossly unfair situation to both the workers, to non-foreign firms in that service sector and to younger people hoping to enter those fields because they will be displaced. How many existing workers in those fields will be displaced in large numbers by subcontractors? Its hard to say. If you read advice to firms as to what jobs to contract out and which ones not to, they have broad guidelines which basically say, don't outsource your core capabilities, outsource supporting roles that can be done more cheaply by specialists. For example, office work specialists. Those jobs will eventually go overseas. Large numbers of "supporting" type jobs will go overseas to be done over the net. They wont be done on site because of costs.  Eventually prices for everything, home values, pretty much everything will have to crash if people are losing jobs in large numbers. All of this will be happening on a backdrop of increasing automation so, eventually, those jobs will be automated. What the services trade will have the effect of doing is transferring the work from developed to developing countries before is automated.

To get that business back the developed countries firms will have to automate it much more completely. So either way billions of unskilled people lose jobs everywhere.  Services trade may keep the owners on both sides of the pond in the black but because the customers will vanish and trust will be gone, the world's economies will likely still all implode nonetheless.

All peoples investments will tank and all people will be trying to cash out at the same time.

The wealthy will swoop in to buy up the housing - I think the financial services industry is gearing up for this. That's what all the push to deregulate -which is then ratcheted in, locked in by the WTO Understanding on Commitments in Financial Services, (which is also the real reason the US ACA is being rolled back) Healthcare insurance regulation on the standstill date, February 26, 1998 was extremely loose and all sorts of bad things were permissible. That state of affairs will be what we must return to. Thats what WTO rules we likely wrote ourselves say. See Lisa Girion's excellent series on insurance rescission for the LA Times, for example.

To be frank, I think someone reliable should stand before the public, and tell, that 80% of the people are in a dead end job and will be replaced by machines. Consequently, we should all be focusing on re-educating these people. Working hours should be reduced, and the extra time should be spent on education, on something marketable in 5-10 years.

Starting from truck drivers, postmen, fast food, logistics, most people in agriculture, data entry, factory workers, and banking jobs. Dead end jobs, sorry.

I spend 4 hours per week in education as an EE. I dont want to loose the skill of learning.

[cdev]

Many of those bread and butter services jobs are slated to become prime candidates for the second wave of skilled services outsourcing across borders. 

Where the providers see the biggest money is to be made is not in the top level professional jobs, the ones that require six or eight or more years of higher education, its in the middle tier of them.

The lower tier of professional jobs and in the vast number of white collar jobs which require only a basic four year or two year adegree or even just high level self trained skills. Because there are SO many more of those jobs which form the core of many communities. There are the areas where large firms located in low regulatory level jurisdications hope to make out like bandits because of the huge loophole in wage laws they have been given by trade agreements and their "Four Modes of Supply" particularly Mode Four..

Firms from other countries that pay lower wages really want to do them, they say, and they are volunteering their services. Why pay more? Why educate when you can rent, they say. Education is expensive and outcomes unpredictable. Those arguments are being listened to by decision makers.  They offer a controllable, low cost alternative to hiring domestically. Their workforces will be extremely hard working as their very presence in the country depends upon a single employer. Look up "kafala' system.

The would be supplying countries are led by India. They are the arguably "least equal countries" They have no intention of changing. Also the Western countries want to keep them poor, by buying off their upper classes while using 'liberalisation' to reverse the fortunes of the middle and poorest. Pulling up the ladders to success, as it were both there and here.

https://sabrangindia.in/article/education-all-keep-out-wto-gats

http://www.cfs-fcee.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2013/05/fs-7%284%29-gats.pdf


Some are playgrounds for huge Western interests with large amounts of raw materials which are being profitably looted now, due to the corrupt regimes that run them. Those regimes want to stay in power which means that the families that run them need to be bought off. Their young people if they remain in those countries will be the ones demanding reform and democracy. So this scheme is largely a scheme to send them elsewhere, put them in a job which pays next to nothing for a few years but which does get them a CV which they can use to get their starts in life.. Without them demanding reform of any kind any where.

The cover story for western firms is a lie. They claim they need to trade the jobs to the developing countries in exchange for market access to potentially growing markets, markets that the firms in the developed countries want to invest in. But they aren't so naive as that, although many others may be - Americans for example, underestimate the greed of their counterparts in those countries and overestimate the gain in incomes to the poor there - which will fail to occur because of automation (those countries generally don't have much of a middle class)

So, the big cover story is this scheme will help the poor but that's a big lie.