As Amazon Pushes Forward With Robots, Workers Find New Roles<br />“It’s certainly true that Amazon would not be able to operate at the costs they have<br />and the costs they provide customers without this automation,” said Martin Ford, a futurist and author of “Rise of the Robots,” a book about automation.<br />No people were laid off when the robots were installed, and Amazon found new roles for the displaced workers, Mr. Clark said.<br />For now, there are warehouse tasks — for example, picking individual items off shelves,<br />with all their various shapes and sizes — where people outperform robots.<br />When Amazon installed the robots, some people who had stacked bins before, like Ms. Scott, took courses at the company to become robot operators.<br />Unlike the warehouse robots in Kent, which were based on the machines Amazon<br />got through its Kiva acquisition, these arms come from an outside company.<br />Amazon has added 80,000 warehouse employees in the United States since adding the Kiva robots, for a total of more than 125,000 warehouse employees.<br />Maybe the first indication is they don’t get rid of those people but the pace of job creation slows down.”<br />Amazon’s Mr. Clark said history showed that automation increases productivity and,<br />in some cases, demand from consumers, which ultimately creates more jobs.<br />In 2014, the company began rolling out robots to its warehouses using machines originally developed by<br />Kiva Systems, a company Amazon bought for $775 million two years earlier and renamed Amazon Robotics.
