{"id":94518,"date":"2025-05-12T05:08:08","date_gmt":"2025-05-12T05:08:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/94518\/"},"modified":"2025-05-12T05:08:08","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T05:08:08","slug":"amazon-offers-peek-at-new-human-jobs-in-an-ai-bot-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/94518\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon offers peek at new human jobs in an AI bot world"},"content":{"rendered":"

The tech industry seems to have two thoughts when it comes to where human workers fit into the AI-powered world they are creating: Either they think that all the jobs, except perhaps their own, will be done by bots.<\/a> (VC Marc Andreessen seems to think<\/a> that his work as an investor could never be automated).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Or they think that bots will do the icky, boring work, acting as human companions in jobs while humans do brand-new jobs that the bot revolution creates. The latter is the one most supported by historical evidence. The World Economic Forum predicts that 92 million roles will be displaced<\/a> by current technological trends, but that 170 million new jobs will be created.<\/p>\n

For those who don\u2019t have the economic power, or the intellectual interest, to get a master\u2019s degree in AI and machine learning \u2014 especially the people who now occupy unskilled labor roles like warehouse workers \u2014 what does the bot-filled future look like for them?<\/p>\n

Amazon offered a hint of one sort of path on Wednesday when it announced major progress toward replacing warehouse workers with robots with its new Vulcan robot that can \u201cfeel.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cVulcan is helping make work safer by handling ergonomically challenging tasks, while creating opportunities for our teammates to grow their skills in robotics maintenance,\u201d CEO Andy Jassy posted on X<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In one breath, Amazon\u2019s blog post<\/a> about Vulcan described how the robot will work alongside humans, gathering items from the warehouse\u2019s highest and lowest shelves, so humans won\u2019t have to climb ladders or bend down all day long. Humans will then gather items stored only in the middle and\/or items that the new \u201cfeeling\u201d robot still somehow can\u2019t manage to pick up.<\/p>\n

In the next breath, Amazon talks about how it is training a small number of warehouse workers to become robot technicians, as it uses the bot for more of the warehouse picking role.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

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\u201cThese robots \u2014 which play a role in completing 75% of customer orders \u2014 have created hundreds of new categories of jobs at Amazon, from robotic floor monitors to onsite reliability maintenance engineers,\u201d the blog post said, adding that it offers a job retraining program for some workers to gain these robotic maintenance skills.<\/p>\n

Although Amazon didn\u2019t say so, this would obviously not be a 1:1 conversion. It wouldn\u2019t require an army of humans to oversee the robots in the same way it needs them to fulfill warehouse orders directly. Nor would everyone have the aptitude or desire to become robot mechanics.<\/p>\n

But the fact that Amazon included info on its retraining program alongside its Vulcan announcement is meaningful.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because there\u2019s been very little evidence so far of what the post robots-doing-all-the-jobs looks like for working-class humans. (One AI startup founder even suggested<\/a> to TechCrunch that in an AI-does-all-jobs world, the humans would somehow just live on government-issued welfare.)<\/p>\n

But perhaps, instead of grocery clerks, there would be \u201cautomation monitors,\u201d much like we have one clerk overseeing every row of self-check today. Instead of fast-food cooks, workers would oversee the cook bots, and so on. Running robots becomes like operating a PC: Pretty much everyone needs to know how to do it to be employable.<\/p>\n

Then again, this fully bot future may never really materialize. Bots could remain the purview of only the biggest and most deep-pocketed companies \u2014 like with Amazon or how they\u2019re used in things like automotive manufacturing \u2014 while the vast majority of retail, restaurants, and driving jobs continue to be done by humans. At least for decades more.<\/p>\n

Remember, Amazon is a company that was trying to sell its just-walk-out automation Amazon Go technology to a wider retail\/grocery industry<\/a>. The retail industry is none too fond of its biggest competitor, Amazon, and wasn\u2019t terribly interested. The tech was later found to be using humans in India to watch and label videos<\/a>, and even Amazon later scaled back on its use.\u00a0Such tech (by Amazon or others) is hardly visible<\/a> in the wild today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The tech industry seems to have two thoughts when it comes to where human workers fit into the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":94519,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,324,1942,897,3694,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-94518","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-amazon","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-jobs","12":"tag-robotics","13":"tag-technology","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114493135440225320","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94518\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}