Amazon loves Robots more than People

I use amazon regularly and apparently there are 100 million Prime members who love it so much they pay for the privilege. Meanwhile there are about 8 million retail employees whose livelihood is on the line. In 2017 there were about 170,000 job losses while Amazon hired 130,000 plus 75,000 robots from its own company Kiva. So that is an overall loss for the industry… the first in many years. These numbers form progressions that are easy to predict: Amazon will buy 125,000 robots next year; hire no one; and the retail industry will lose 300,000 jobs. If that continues exponentially it will take only 5 years for the retail industry to lose all its 8M jobs. So, exponential growth is unlikely. Just linear growth with an uptick will be bad enough.

If we just look linearly at the last two years, we see Amazon buying 200K robots a year and Retail losing 1M jobs in the 5th year from now. That almost matches the general consensus that 1 robot costs 4 jobs.

There are already millions of robots in the world, and their numbers are growing exponentially at 10 to 15% a year. Each one “replaces”, that is makes jobless, at least 4 human beings. And this has been going on for more than a decade. This will not end well for us.

This is not just in retail, or manufacturing, but everywhere, even in agriculture:

Our Commerce Secretary is so self centered he believes the job problem is a century away. Obviously, he is not that stupid. He simply intends to ignore the problem of jobs until it goes away forcibly: immigrants will be shipped into concentration camps and the jobless will be jailed.

Retail and warehouse jobs are not the only ones to go. Amazon is using software to replace merchandizing jobs. Buying to little or too much ahs always been a merchants biggest problem. It hits Amazon too, but software is proving better at all sorts of tasks, like lighting deals and management too.

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