Amazon plans to use automation to replace more than 600,000 workers who would otherwise be hired in the United States by 2033, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times. By that time, the company is expected to sell about twice as many goods as it does today.
Amazon’s robotics team is reportedly working toward the goal of automating 75% of its entire business. By 2027, it is expected to eliminate around 160,000 jobs in the US, saving the company an estimated $12.6 billion — equivalent to around 30 cents per item delivered.
… and they will have automated drone delivery by 2015!!
ISOmorph@feddit.org 11 hours ago
In theory this is awesome. Humans aren’t built for menial tasks. All repetitive monotonous tasks should be automated. However, this doesn’t fit our current economic system. Obviously all automation needs to be taxed, so that we don’t have to live this paradox where each technological advancement is a risk to our livelihood.
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 hours ago
Yeah how exactly do they expect to sell twice as much product to a population that doesn’t have jobs/money to buy it.
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 28 minutes ago
Prisons need supplies
eldebryn@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Depressing bit of the day: I don’t have the source with me right now but there was a claim on youtube that the top 1% make up for like half of the consumer market in the USA.
Half of everything sold in dollars is done by the ultra rich. Everyone else is basically irrelevant and driven to extinction under capitalism, if that is accurate.
TheObviousSolution@lemmy.ca 7 hours ago
Consumer societies need consumer - producer chains. They are where the “proletariat” can rise against the “bourgeois”. Automation makes it all obsolete and begins to taunt with the possibility of making direct chains between actual resources to the ultrarich. Societies are then an artificial construct that can be left to die off like horses and donkeys when they are no longer a participant but an encroachment to the environment they contributed to.
scarabic@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
I think the big danger is that we have an 80% that are living hand to mouth and the main way to make money off of them is through their numbers, and jacking prices on life essentials to the absolute limit they can bear.
Then we have a 20% who are wealthier than the bottom 80% and these folks actually program the robots and run our economic system, and are paid well enough to buy the fancy products, etc. This 20% buy double what the 80% do or more and constitute a whole economy unto themselves.
The big game is convincing the 80% they can move into this 20% somehow. This keeps them from revolt, along with the fact that the 20% control the media and so on and work against wide messaging of even the existence of the problem let alone a revolutionary solution. Of course the absolute top fraction of that 20% have more wealth than everyone else combined and exert the most influence, largely through the 20% professional class that they allow to live in relative luxury.
Right now that top fractional 1% are asking themselves “hm, could AI shrink the 20% to 15%? That would improve our profit margins and shrink the only class of people with enough power to really disturb us.” Because the “we are the 99%!” crowd are really 20%ers most of the time. 80%ers are consumed by their immediate challenges of survival and the ill side effects of poverty AND above all the hustle to move into the 20%.
It’s an interesting comparison with pre-revolution. France where the 1% lived on the backs of an agrarian 99%. With the introduction of that magic 20%, the 1% are vastly more wealthy than if they lived off of pure agrarian peasantry. And they’ve created a buffer between them and the bottom tier that largely manages the masses for them, pacifying it with the promise of mobility. I don’t think anyone consciously plans this shit but if they did they’d be high fiving themselves for their absolute genius.
TheObviousSolution@lemmy.ca 8 hours ago
The problem with that is that either it’s privately owned or all taxes pass through a government that can make an authoritarian transition. Then people are left out.
Humans are the general purpose machine of trivial tasks, it’s literally what they’ve evolved for. Referring to trivial tasks as menial is purely a matter of perception, it can be menial when it’s work and entertainment when it’s for leisure. It’s ironic that AI came for the creative jobs that were supposedly going to be left for humans to achieve first, trampling over the IP rights that could have protected them. It’s a sign of things to come, and those things are not awesome.