From ‘A Space Odyssey’ to ‘Black Mirror’, we’ve seen countless chilling examples of machines and technology gaining too much power of our lives. For years now, we’ve all heard the warnings of robots coming to steal away our jobs, and now that is starting to happen on a tremendous scale.
In April 2019 Walmart announced their addition of thousands of new robots to its stores. According to CNN, it “expects to have autonomous floor scrubbers in 1,860 of its more than 4,700 US stores” by February 2020. They also plan to employ shelf scanning bots at 350 stores, and have robots at 1,700 stores “that automatically scan boxes as they come off delivery trucks and sort them by department onto conveyor belts”.
Walmart advocates that these new machines aim to reduce the number of employers finding themselves in “repeatable, predictable and manual” tasks. While the company insists that these new robots will free workers to take part in more meaningful and enjoyable tasks, this utopian illusion seems too good to be true.
Many of the workers who find themselves in “repeatable, predictable and manual” tasks are there because its as far as they have been educated for. They likely aren’t qualified for these more enlightening roles Walmart is suggesting, and there probably aren’t enough of such jobs to keep all their previous workers employed.
Experts suggest that the U.S. middle class will be the most easily replaceable, with skills “that can easily be replicated by technology”, according to a Forbes article.
An article by McKinsey & Company reports that “in about 60% of occupations, at least one-third of the constituent activities could be automated” by 2030. They estimate that worldwide by 2030, “between 400 million and 800 million individuals could be displaced by automation and need to find new jobs”.
As bigger companies begin implementing terrifyingly advanced technology, it seems that the robots might be in charge now…
Amazon is company that has historically been accused of inhumane working conditions for their employees, with 47 hour working weeks (reportedly reaching as much as 85 hours) under strenuous and stressful conditions. And if this zombie warehouse work couldn’t get any worse, the company has now introduced a computer system to monitor employees’ rate of productivity, automatically firing those who can’t keep up.
Like a nightmarish, dystopian novel where the machines are really in charge, the “system tracks the rates of each associate’s productivity,” according to Amazon’s attorney, “and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding quality or productivity without input from supervisors.”
“If an associate receives two final written warnings or a total of six written warnings within a rolling 12-month period, the system automatically generates a termination notice.”
An Amazon spokesperson revealed that between August 2017 and September 2018, roughly 300 full-time employees were fired from the USA based, Baltimore fulfillment center for inefficiency. With about 2,500 full-time employees at that facility, this means Amazon had terminated about 10% of their total staff in one year for the simple purpose of inefficiency.
The program uses a sinister tracking technique called ‘Time Off Task’ (TOT). If the system detects a worker resting for too long, it will issue a warning, and eventually a termination notice. Some employees survive by sacrificing water breaks and going as far as urinating in bottles just to meet their quotas.
Employees dealing with sudden personal crises are given little to no empathy, and others are discouraged from caring for their families. An employee told the New York Times that “if you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot”, explaining that you need to put the company first, and “you have to become one with the system”.
It would seem that this company is not only being run by robots, but is slowly programming the humans into their own minion robots.
This whole story leaves an eerie, unsettling feeling in the pit of one’s stomach, as its exactly what we’ve been warned about through generations of science fiction. And just like in the Terminator movies, where the Skynet system took over and declared war on the humans, you have to ask if this is the beginning of a similar fate. Because everyone knows that, if you spell Skynet backwards, it spells Amazon.