Amazon has officially surpassed a fleet of 1 million robots, an arsenal of mechanical arms, Roomba-like floor loaders, and hulking pallet sorting machines.
Each robot is a node in an intricate web allowing the corporation to speed up delivery times and lower overhead. But for the over 1.5 million full- and part-time workers relying on Amazon wages to pay their bills, the company’s bot army represents rising competition — not just metaphorically, but physically.
As George Mason University professor of business Brad Greenwood told Ars Technica in a recent interview, Amazon’s warehouse robots aren’t just helping Amazon cut costs on labor, but are literally boxing humans out of workspaces in the company’s facilities.
“For the last 100 years, most of the automation that we’ve seen usually happens away from workers,” Greenwood explained. “You’re taking that high-risk task away from the worker, and you’re doing so in a way that is not physically proximate.”
