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Friday, April 26, 2019

Robots And Humans 

Amazon in its warehouses seems to have blended robots and humans and is holding people to machine standards.  If so, it is poor PR and is likely to end in union organizing.  Timing employees at their tasks is not new.  It was an essential part of scientific management at the turn of the 20th Century and involved names like Taylor and Gilbreth.  What these innovators left out of their stop-watched procedures was the thinking and creative power of the brain.  It is easy to train a machine to produce the same motions time and again.  It is mind-numbing to expect a human to do the same.  Amazon is a throw-back and it is likely to end badly for the corporation.  Already there are horror stories circulating in the media of exhausted people falling asleep at their stations, of no time to go to the bathroom, of a relentless line of boxes swamping package points and defying anyone to keep up.  At some point, Amazon might automate its warehouse procedures, but that might not be soon enough for its stressed workers.  

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