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Amazon Accused of Hiding Worker's Death for a Week, Making Employees Keep Working as Corpse Lay on Floor (futurism.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
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[–] 36 points 6 months ago* (17 children)

...sound dampening material allegedly installed to keep noise out of nearby offices had blocked airflow, causing temperatures to climb.

Sounds like they may have used foam in the relevant HVAC ducts instead of baffles. The latter creates a maze for the airflow which dampens noise through increasing surface area absorption. For the former, assuming they (hopefully) used foam on the bottom of the ducts, that friction creates tons of eddies for the fluid, meaning they need a much higher upstream fan pressure to get the same air transmission.

Imho forcing humans to do menial work is holding up progress. I realize it's an unpopular opinion (irl at least) but I believe paying more UBIs (Universal Basic Income) for just enough to survive (e.g. food, rent, necessities, incidentals) and allowing robits to take over those jobs would allow humans to focus on work that interests them. AI has already brainsmaxxed us on memorization (crystallized intelligence) but humans are still the pros for lateral problem solving (fluid intelligence).

Why not embrace that?

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  • [–] 20 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    If Amazon was technologically ready to do this, they would have already. You think they prefer having the meat grinder of labor abuse they run globally, over what would be "buy once" robo-employees for the warehouses? It's been their top logistics focus for well over a decade, and while they've come a long way, it's still not ready for wholesale labor replacement for all those roles.

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  • [–] 18 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Amazon arent the ones who would distrubute UBIs.

    But if people had access to UBIs, amazons working conditions and salary would improve drastically, or they'd suddenly decide they can actually afford those robo-workers because developing that technology is cheaper than taking care of their workers when the workers have options.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Obviously they would not be distributing UBI. My point is, the robot conversion is already their end game. It's not an issue if money, it's an issue of readiness if the technology.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    I’d argue that in many cases, it is still an issue of money.

    Are there some jobs technology can’t solve for yet? Yes. But if the company invested in research, they may be able to solve those problems.

    Are there some jobs that technology can solve for, but the solution costs more than human labor right now? Also, definitely, yes. (Plenty of jobs are automated in the US but still done by humans in other countries.)

    The above person’s point, as I read it, is that if people have UBI, they will be less motivated to do those jobs so supply of available labor goes down and the cost of acquiring that labor goes up. Then the company has a choice: invest more in people or in technology. At that point, scales may tip to technology.

    To put imaginary numbers on it:

    • If a technology will take $1T in R&D and $100M each to roll out to each of 1,200 warehouses, then the technology cost is $1.12T.
    • If each warehouse employs 1,000 people at $50k a year, a year’s worth of wages for 1,200 warehouses is $60B.
    • Human labor costs the company more than just wages though, usually anywhere from 1.25–1.4x more. Let’s go with 1.25 for $75B.
    • So that would take ~15 years for the technology to exceed the cost of labor.
    • But if people had more bargaining power thanks to UBI and wages double, they’d have to pay $120B in annual wages.
    • If they also need to provide better benefits to attract employees, the multiplier would go up; let’s say 1.35x. Now labor cost per year is $162B.
    • So now it’s less than 7 years for the labor costs to exceed the tech investment.

    Companies aren’t great at long-term investments because they don’t show immediate shareholder value. Reduce the length of time for an investment to pay out, and they’re a lot more likely to do that.

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  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    If robots can do work for us, why have a monetary system at all?

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  • [–] 13 points 6 months ago (7 children)

    Humans are still better, faster, cheaper at menial work than robots. We’re in the transition, but the adoption curve is still really shallow. The problem here is treating the humans like the robot you wish you had.

    We really do need to figure out some variation of UBI for when we hit the steep part of the robot adoption curve. Amazon won’t hesitate to replace humans as soon as robots can actually do the job, but there are a lot of Amazon workers. There are small communities with a high percentage of people working at Amazon. If robots happen those communities will be hit hard and fast. Ideally we would already have a safety net spread out and waiting

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (6 children)

    We're already on the steep part of the automation curve! The best time for UBI was a century ago, the second best time is today.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (5 children)

    While true this is different. Previous automation tended to create more jobs overall. It sucks to be a coal miner in Appalachia but now you have higher paid jobs building, operating, fixing big machines. Society as a whole benefits. Automation really only happened for specific scenarios and there’s always so much that automation couldn’t do

    However the new phase of automation, self-driving vehicles, ai, humanoid robots, promise to automate things that only humans could do until now. We may suddenly see a significant percentage of jobs disappear to automation, without creating new jobs for humans. They also promise to be adopted far faster than society can adapt. Businesses become more efficient but overall number jobs goes down . Permanently

    Consider Tesla self-driving vehicles. There are already millions of tesla cars out in society that can be self-driving, plus soon tens of thousands of semis. If self-driving succeeds, that could easily be hundreds of thousands of uber and taxi jobs, and tens of thousands of trucker job gone in as little as a year. And no new jobs created

    Consider humanoid robots. The promise is mass produced by the hundreds of thousands and easily trainable without the infrastructure and scaling limitations of existing industrial robots. Every amazon warehouse job gone. As fast as they can be shipped. No new jobs created

    Consider ai. Previous rounds of automation have helped software developers do more faster better, leading to explosive growth in the field. If ai actually works that would be hundreds of thousands of coders gone, with very few new jobs

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (4 children)

    Devil's advocate: wouldn't it have looked like this to someone early in the industrial revolution as well? They couldn't have imagined all the jobs that would be created to do things that didn't seem necessary at the time.

    I agree that AI that actually works would be the exception, but IMHO we're nowhere close right now.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    I don’t know what they would have seen: certainly now we see automation has replaced brawn, speed, precision, and it tends to hit specific jobs at a time. Intelligence, creativity, adaptability have remained strengths of humans until now. They probably didn’t have that paradigm but we do: if there’s something humans could still do better, don’t we have the context to have thought of it?

    The direct comparison there might be the self-driving cars I mentioned. If that succeeds, it really only replaces one type of job, just like earlier automation. However the difference is the speed it can be adopted and it’s all software so scales orders of magnitude more per new job as a creator. And in the case of Tesla those new jobs are already allocated and the rollout is well underway - just needs software switch to turn it on. Millions of jobs gone. At once.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (2 children)

    They probably didn’t have that paradigm but we do: if there’s something humans could still do better, don’t we have the context to have thought of it?

    We will have no idea what those new jobs will be, because they're in new sectors that are only now opening up. So when the internet replaced newspapers, those paper boys became Fortnite streamers, not ISP technicians. I could speculate, but even if I guess correctly it'll probably sound silly to us.

    LLMs have terrible intelligence, creativity, and adaptability. But like most technology, they enhance human efficiency, they don't completely replace humans. The Jevons paradox tells us that increasing efficiency will increase total demand, not decrease it.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    LLMs have terrible intelligence, creativity, and adaptability

    But terrible creativity is already enough to make a difference. While I’m typing this I’m also listening to a video of an ai reading an ai generated script. It’s not great: neither authors nor narrators have any reason to fear yet - on quality. But it is entertaining and I don’t have to pay much attention. It’s ai slop that is actually providing value

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    Maybe. But if new automation replaces menial labor (humanoid robots), drivers, and greatly reduces all sorts of paperwork and even low end “creativity” jobs, and scale vastly more than previous automation, what type of work could those new jobs even be?

    They’re not repair nor development nor deployment, they’re not service economy or menial labor, they’re not any variation of driving or most gig economy, fewer are creative, fewer are paperwork jobs or even management ….. what’s left are skilled labor, personal services, medical, business owners, and I can’t see any of those making up for millions of jobless people. We can’t all be plumbers or nurses

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