Why the Robot Revolution is Our Fault
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So think of a very, very large, fair space. So like multiple halls, big high ceilings, warehouse spaces. Like imagine you're 10 out of like 5,000 people all arriving with like electronics kits, robotic systems, and a madness of random robotic construction starts. This is Yuxi Leitner.

He's telling us about a huge robotics competition. It happened in 2017 in Japan. It's called RoboCup. And Leitner's team was there to compete in something special, something sponsored by Amazon. It's called the Amazon Robotics Challenge. Leitner's team is from the Australian Center for Robotic Vision.

And they had designed a robot that could pick up objects. The kind of objects you might buy on Amazon. From like, you know, a DVD to like a three-pound dumbbell, ten pairs of socks, curtain liners, these sort of things. Nothing too crazy. But it turns out that picking up an object can be a really hard thing for a robot to do. We unfortunately had a bit of an accident and we broke the whole robot.

The robot arm that was supposed to pick up the objects fell out of our Cartesian design system by running into one of the shelves, which was not particularly great. So we didn't perform stellar on the first task, partly because we broke the robot. So that was the first task, just picking an object off of a shelf and placing it in a cardboard box.

But there were two more. The second one is stowing, which is sort of the inverse problems. Like think of returns that are being put in a tray and then you actually need to sort them and stick them in the right part of the shelf. And the third task, if you were to qualify for the last day, was to do a combination of those two. You were given a set of objects that you were to place into the shelf and then you were given an order to pick out these objects that you just placed in the shelf. So the mess that you made, you had to deal with in the third step.

Leitner and his team spent months training their robot to recognize a variety of objects using a camera. But the robot also had to be smart enough to recognize objects it had never seen before. Amazon had told them that half of the objects would get swapped out during the competition. And that made the third and final task even harder. So how do you prepare for...

Basically knowing at some point you're going to be unprepared in terms of the selection of items that Amazon chooses. Yes. Yeah, so how do you prepare for the unknown? That's actually a very good and interesting problem.

So over the day you could see the excitement growing in the team also realizing that we're in the top half and then we're in the top three and then we're in the top two and then the final team actually had the last half hour run and it was really up to the last object that they picked. And then you just have to wait the last five, six minutes for Amazon to officially announce the last score. And that's when we knew that we were winning. It was just...

It's somewhat hard to describe, but it's a really, really exciting feeling of knowing that all the work that we've done over the last five, six months was actually not just good, but really one of the world's best. So, Leitner's team won the Amazon Robotics Challenge, but not without a struggle. Why is it so hard for a robot to pick stuff up? And why is Amazon trying so hard to solve that problem?

Here's the voice from last week's episode, former Amazon warehouse worker Juanita Kepner. If I was there, I'd be real skeptical. Okay, am I going to have a job tomorrow? Is this robot going to take my job? They're going to say, okay, Juanita, you're done because this robot's doing 10 more than you are or something. But yeah, I'm thinking if they get enough of me in there, they will eliminate a lot of jobs. I'm Jason Del Rey, and this is Land of the Giants.

In this series, I'm looking at the rise of Amazon, and in this episode, robots. How is automation coming to Amazon's warehouses, and why? And what does that mean for its human employees, and maybe even the rest of us? Let's start with those humans. For now, people are much better than robots at a whole bunch of things, but for Amazon specifically, picking stuff up.

Which is why Amazon employs so many humans in its warehouses, around 200,000 in the U.S. alone. So many, in fact, that it's the second largest private employer in the country, only after Walmart.

By now, I'm sure you've heard some of the stories of how tough those jobs can be. People worried that some of the warehouse workers have been overworked. Ellen says she processed an average of 600 items an hour on the job here. That the working conditions at times can be unsafe. At a broken workstation that injured her back. But the atmosphere of the Amazon warehouse I worked in was what I imagine the atmosphere of a low security prison would feel like.

So I went on a tour of an Amazon warehouse recently in Staten Island, New York. It's a new facility, which means we would get to see robots, a whole lot of robots. But the first thing I saw was a reminder of humans. When you enter the warehouse, there's a big TV screen hanging from the wall next to the entrance. I'm just going to highlight this real fast. This is the voice of associate board. This is pretty standard in our fulfillment centers across the country. That's Ashley Robinson.

She's the Amazon spokesperson who led the tour of what Amazon calls a fulfillment center. So these are things that associates can anonymously raise questions, comments, concerns, and then managers, HR, respond directly. And then other associates can see those questions. So if they had similar concerns or feedback, then they can see that it's already been raised and how we're addressing it. Yeah, the one at the top right now is...

Sign myself out of emergency room because fear of losing too much time. Something better put in place of sick workers. Okay, so I walk into an Amazon warehouse with all of these stories in my head about bad working conditions. And the very first thing I see on this screen is a worker telling Amazon that they had to sign themselves out of the hospital because they were that concerned about the repercussions of missing work.

So I asked Robinson what Amazon does when it gets disturbing feedback like that. Yeah, I mean, that's a pretty intense piece of feedback, right? So as you saw from the HR managers, he said, come and find us. We've got lots of leave options. We've got medical care. This is why our associates get medical insurance starting on day one. You know, as you can see, we have lots of leave.

And that's unfortunate, too, because for us, safety is the top priority. So we want associates to know, like, their personal well-being is more important than the number of hours they work in a fulfillment center. That sounds good, right? But guess what might sound even better? Robots who won't complain about their personal well-being, who don't need medical insurance or sick leave. Not surprisingly, Robinson quickly moved our tour along.

Amazon calls these robots drive units.

The first versions were made by a startup called Kiva that Amazon ended up buying in 2012 for almost $800 million. Since then, Amazon has placed 200,000 of these robots into its warehouse network. They're orange, they're square-shaped, they can lift up to 3,000 pounds. Basically, there was a dance going on, a robot dance.

These orange robots, which kind of look like those large Fisher-Price cars that toddlers ride in, were carrying eight-foot-tall shelves. How'd they know where to go? They scanned small QR codes on the floor, which essentially give them directions. Some of these robots were bringing full shelves over to workers, who would empty them. Other robots were carrying empty shelves over to workers, who would fill them with products.

These robots are eliminating one big part of the work that many Amazon warehouse workers used to do. That's the miles of daily walking up and down aisles to retrieve products or drop them off. So you can be a picker, you can be a stower, you can be a packer, and you can move around in different roles. Say you're like, "I love pack, but I actually want to try picking. I'm a little bit more interested," or vice versa. All jobs humans do in this warehouse, not robots.

At least, for now. This is Katie. Hello. Hi. I'm good, how are you? Nice to meet you. Katie is a stower. Katie DelVal is 25 years old. She's worked in this warehouse since right after it opened last fall. As a quote-unquote stower, her job was to place products into empty bins. The bins all sit on these tall shelving units called pods that are carried to her by the robots. I pick up the item.

I put it in the bin, scan the bin, it's confirmed. Well, I could keep stowing if there's space and I have other items that fit in this pod. If not, I just press the button and it releases. And I can bring in my next pod. Sounds pretty straightforward. But for now, Katie's job isn't easy for a robot to do. She has to pick up and move objects of all different shapes and sizes.

Neither is the job of the next person we meet, Natalie Rodriguez. So this is Natalie. She's a picker. This is one of our a little bit more automated robotic machines.

pick stations. So you can see she's using a little bit different technology than Katie was using as a stower. And these are customer orders that she's picking. She's putting them into the totes and whenever the tote is filled, she presses a button, pushes the tote, it goes down some conveyance up this little elevator and along the conveyance that circles just above head level and it heads down to the packing mezzanine.

And then Natalie has also been trained to use our Cerberus vests, which are our robotic vests that means she can go out onto the floor. And if, say, a piece of inventory comes out of one of the shelving units, she knows how to safely go out there and get it. Because no one can go out onto the floor or even extend over it without proper safety training or technology. What happens if someone does that? Their employment gets terminated. It's a pretty serious safety violation.

The fear is injury. Like, the reason why it's termination is... Yeah, it would be like walking in front of a car. A really cute, tiny car carrying an eight-foot shelf. Well, I mean, if we're talking about a shelf unit here that can weigh up to 3,000 pounds, right? Like, you need to make sure that you are being safe around it. So this is what it's like when humans and robots work together. Sure, no robot wants to run you over, but robots don't want anything.

I asked Natalie about this working relationship. What did you think about the idea that you were going to be working with robots, essentially? When I first started, I honestly didn't believe that they were robots. I was like, no, there's no way. I'm probably going to do it manually. And then when we had a tour of the warehouse, I saw them moving and I was like, whoa. So just having that...

second knowledge of actually knowing how to deal with them and how to take care of the floor so everyone can work cohesively. I think it just really helped out in understanding like the part I play in this warehouse. So a lot of people who don't work here and just hear Amazon robots think like they're going to take all human jobs at some point. Like,

What do you think about that idea? I think personally that in every Amazon facility or warehouse, we need humans. I don't think the robots are ever going to take us over because we need that human touch to get from us to the customer. That's why we're so good at customer obsession. We're just so good at getting things done because we have that middle step of robot, human, and then to the customer. Okay, let's be clear. The workers I talk to are people Amazon selected for me.

They say they love the work. They use Amazon speak like customer obsession. Maybe they even believe it. But there's one last worker I want you to meet, partly because his job may be the one that disappears first. We've seen the picker and the stower. Finally, the packer. All right, basically, we're just going to scan any item. His name is Matt Pervosti.

He works at a station where items are placed into boxes and sealed so they can be shipped out. You know, after a few times packing, you understand where all the boxes are.

What's your goal with this job? Is it a job to make money and that's it? I was born and raised in Staten Island. I came home from playing minor league baseball and was like really just delivering food, you know, odd jobs around town. I went to college but didn't graduate. New York is a really competitive job market and Amazon opened up in my backyard, great wage. So it just worked perfect for me, you know.

Do you see this as a long-term job or a stepping stone? Yeah, well, the thing is you can see Amazon as a long-term career path and each job you have is a stepping stone, right? So if you, for example, like my area manager started as a packer, he's been with the company three years and now he's in a salary position. That would be the goal for a guy like me that's staying here, has a level head, wants to work.

Everything Matt is saying, it sounds so great. But Amazon has started testing machines in some of its warehouses that handle the packing job. I came away from my tour feeling more strongly than ever that a lot of these roles are going away. I don't know if it's in three years, five, or if it'll take a decade. Why? The work is really monotonous and the robots, they're amazing.

Not only do they carry thousands of pounds of products, but they know exactly where to go and when, and they're only going to get better. Now I'm thinking, what the heck is going to happen to people like Matt if all these jobs disappear? After a break, we'll ask how close is that future, and we'll hear from someone who thinks they've solved the dilemma of the robot picker. Back after a break.

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When you go inside a new Amazon warehouse like I did and you see all the robots there, it kind of feels like we're approaching a tipping point from human to robot. Amazon is a retailer, but they are also arguably the most important robotics company in the world. This is Martin Ford. He's the author of a book called Rise of the Robots, Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future.

People are incredibly good biological robots, right? We have enormous capacity for visual perception, for manipulating the environment physically, for fine motor skills, things like this. And there definitely are no robots out there that can approach what a person can do overall. But that's changing, especially at Amazon. Amazon warehouses are really ideal environments for the progress of this technology, and it's one of the places where we're likely to see the impact.

That's because of the massive amounts of data Amazon already has about its inventory. Inside an Amazon warehouse is a very controlled environment, and it's also a very data-rich environment.

Before Amazon even processes an order, of course, it knows exactly what's in that order. It will know whether a robot will be able to handle each of the items in that order, and it will be able to sort of route things around robots that maybe can't handle certain items. So even if in the near term robots will only be able to deal with, say, half of the items in an Amazon warehouse, we're still talking about the potential for enormous disruption. Right.

So what about a future where an entire warehouse is run by robots? But I mean, in China, I know there are already, you know, lights out facilities that are running in manufacturing, and I think in some distribution areas. So it's not something that's total science fiction. I mean, it's probably the future. Ford mentioned the phrase lights out just there. That means a factory or warehouse where no humans are needed.

Fully automated. All robots. It's not common yet, and definitely not at Amazon. Right now, only a fraction of the company's 110 U.S. warehouses have robots in them. But there is a new data point that suggests things might already be changing. This past holiday season was the first time in Amazon's history that it actually hired robots.

fewer temporary seasonal workers during the holiday season than it had the year before. So perhaps that's an indication that we are about at a kind of an inflection point. If this is an inflection point, the next question is how long before robots can do everything that Amazon workers can? The picking, the packing, and the stowing.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recently said he expects robots to be able to grip things as well as humans within the next 10 years. But Martin Ford thinks a lot can happen in less than 10 years. I would say certainly within five years, robots are going to get a lot better at doing some things and being able to handle at least some of the items. Five years from now. Imagine that. But maybe even sooner, depending on who you ask.

Carl Voss is CEO of a startup called Soft Robotics. He says his company already solved the problem. We're there today at Soft Robotics. I think this is one of the most important inventions, and I think it solves this big problem in robotics. Soft Robotics is one of many companies trying to invent robots that can grasp things of all shapes and sizes. But we called Voss because his company has reportedly caught the attention of Amazon.

According to Reuters, Amazon has tested soft robotics technology. Voss wouldn't confirm or deny that, but what he would talk about is how soft robotics has tackled this problem. Traditionally, engineers have tried to solve the picking problem by attempting to make the best picking tool we know.

We use the human hand as our inspiration. So we're trying to recreate the human hand, which is actually one of the most complex devices on the face of the earth. And soft robotics thought maybe it doesn't have to be quite that hard.

Because hands have nerves and joints and all sorts of other stuff. Stuff that you might need if you're trying to play, say, a violin. But not if all you're doing is picking up an object and putting it somewhere else. So Voss's team went in a completely different direction. It's a cross between a finger and an octopus tentacle. An octopus tentacle. Made out of soft materials, not hard metal.

that gives it a kind of flexibility that the traditional robot hand doesn't have. It's these layered composites that are precisely engineered so that when you apply, in this case, air pressure to the device, it really picks things up like a human finger does and conforms to it. Watching this in action on Soft Robotics videos, it's pretty mesmerizing.

The same robot is able to pick up everything from a rubber duck to pizza dough to tomatoes. And it's that versatility that Voss says is the real innovation. A robot with that capability maybe, just maybe, could start doing warehouse work that right now at least humans have to do. For example... One of the big things that once again we probably don't think a lot about, but if we buy T-shirts or jeans online, they get shipped to us in plastic bags.

Now, plastic bags are something that is super hard for a robot to handle. But once again, there are people that are working in 100-degree warehouses doing nothing but sorting plastic bags because a robot can't. And we want those people doing more important jobs. And so today with soft robotics, we can handle something as delicate and weird-shaped as a pair of designer jeans and a plastic bag that needs to get shipped to somebody's house. It's not yet clear whether Amazon will buy into soft robotics or some other solution.

But one thing is clear: a big reason for this wave of interest in robot pickers is the rise of online shopping. Because in the past, traditional retailers mainly focused on shipping whole pallets of products out to physical stores.

But now, with e-commerce, warehouses need a different kind of agility. Customer orders of all shapes and sizes have to be picked and arranged individually. A lot of this is being driven by the consumer. We're the ones that are driving one day prime. We're the ones driving, I can buy five t-shirts and send four back. This is an idea I've been really curious about. That we, the consumers, are responsible for this transformation.

It also came up when I talked to Martin Ford, the author we heard from earlier. And we nerded out a little bit. Should consumers care about this future that we're working toward? They should, but I mean, it's a very hard challenge to get consumers to walk away from low-cost and convenience products.

because they're concerned about what's happening with workers. Keep in mind that Amazon delivers enormous value. I mean, your experience as a consumer today relative to what it was 10 years ago or 20 years ago is dramatically different because of Amazon, and it keeps getting better and better all the time. And there definitely is real value there. And so the question becomes, would we want to hold that back so that we have less convenience and higher prices in the future? And I think most accountants

Economists, for example, would certainly say, no, we don't want to do that. We want to have that progress. The question is, as a society, how do we get that and at the same time make sure that things don't become too unequal and too many people are left behind? Isn't it too late for that? Well, certainly the situation is very bad already and it's going to get worse. And that's because we haven't addressed it. And that's why I do think ultimately we're going to need policies to directly take on that challenge. Yeah.

And you can debate, is that an issue for society as a whole or is it something we should push on to Amazon and say the corporations are going to be responsible for this? I do think it's the nature of capitalism that there's this drive for efficiency. Competition is certainly one of the most important dynamics that pushes that forward and therefore capitalism.

it's going to be inevitable that these kinds of efficiency improvements are going to happen. I mean, Amazon executives and leaders have a lot of favorite phrases, but efficiency may be, I'd say it's probably top three. But there's everything that comes behind efficiency that the company does not love to talk about.

Yeah, but I mean, it is true that today we live in a world where even a lower middle class person in the United States probably has a better life than a very wealthy person 100 years ago, right? I mean, that's all down to progress and technology and what you might define as improving efficiency. However, I do think that with the advent of artificial intelligence and advanced robotics, we are kind of approaching an inflection point where...

The impact on inequality, the number of people that could be completely disenfranchised and left behind is going to be unprecedented. And the reason is that machines are really beginning to compete with our core competency, right? Our cognitive ability, things that previously only human beings could do. And I think that that's going to be kind of unprecedented. And therefore, we're going to need to think about ways to address that. So that's a pretty bleak picture, but one that sounds to me like it's very plausible.

For now, it feels like we're in this in-between phase where machines haven't taken over completely.

But they are playing a bigger and bigger role in certain types of jobs, like the jobs we saw in the Amazon warehouse. If you're one of these workers in that environment, you're truly just going to be kind of a cog in the machine as a human being that is performing some task that right now the robots and the AI can't do. You're essentially a human bridge, but being asked to act more and more like a robot until...

robots can actually do the work that you're doing. Exactly. And the key thing is that you're being asked to act like a robot probably under the direction of a robot or of an AI system or an algorithm or some kind of automated system. So one way to think of it is that maybe your job has not been automated, but in a sense, your direct boss is

you know, that job has been automated and now you're really working for a system under the direction of an algorithm. And that algorithm is going to continue to push you to work at your absolute limit. I kind of fear that that gets worse. And of course, then as it gets worse, that becomes an excuse for Amazon to say, hey, you know, let's get rid of these jobs because, you know, people are not happy with these jobs. It's better that we don't have human beings doing this. And that

In many ways, that's a correct argument. But then that brings us to the question, what do we do about that situation when those rules begin to evaporate? So there's this dark vision of the future where robots tell us what to do. There's also a more optimistic vision where humans get to do more satisfying work while robots do the boring, repetitive stuff.

But not knowing which of these visions will become reality has led to ideas like universal basic income. That's where people will get some amount of guaranteed income separate from any work you do. It's a way to put money in people's pockets at a time when there might not be enough work to go around because the robots have got it covered. Back in the Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, I had all these ideas in my head after I finished the tour.

the sort of inevitable creep of automation, what this rise of warehouse robots means for the employees I just met, and whether Amazon is actually willing to engage in that discussion. So I asked my tour guides about it, Ashley Robinson, the Amazon spokeswoman, and a guy named Scott Anderson, who's the director for Amazon's North American warehouses that have robots in them.

I keep hearing efficiency and I know my brain goes long term, what is the goal of ultimate efficiency? And I can't help but think it's robotics doing as much as humanly possible. Should I not think that way? So I think what you saw today is robots are really good at doing certain tasks. One of the tasks that robots are not good at, and even in looking at state-of-the-art technology, is manipulation arms.

We are many, many years away from a robot replacing a person and doing what people do really well, which is cognitive recognition, identifying really hard problems. Spatial recognition is a problem we just can't figure out yet with existing technology. And while I think...

It's an emerging market. If you look at what's out there right now, I think this is a much longer horizon than what you're picturing in your mind. Yeah, and it's not out of... What I'm picturing is not out of thin air. Amazon, I think, in past years has even had contests around the idea of people competing to create something that can maneuver like a hand. So it makes tons of business sense. And so...

I guess I'm just, when I get pushback from the company on this topic, like I see why you don't want to say like jobs are going to go away, but I also, there's like a middle ground between. We have some facilities where we're using more automation than others. It just depends on what is the task. Because some tasks are going to be awesome and rewarding and they're going to be really great fit for a human. Some tasks are going to be pretty menial in a way that can be

you can use automation for that. But what's really cool about that is there's not necessarily the job replacement piece. It's creating new jobs with new skills. So in a building where we're using automation, you have to have someone who's trained up on how to use that automation and be able to work with other people to train that. And that doesn't have to be someone who's got an engineering degree. That can be someone who started off as an hourly employee and now they've got this specialized task, the specialized skill that they didn't have before. So...

I come back here 10 years from now. It may not be sooner than that, but we'll see. Depends on how the podcast turns out. So I come back here never. I come back here sooner than 10 years, and then I also come back here 10 years from now. What does this look like then?

I think it's a great question. If you would have asked me what is the future of Amazon seven years ago when I started, I would have thought I was at the pinnacle of technology. And I look at this now and I'm consistently excited with the technology we're rolling out and we're iterating. But I think the landscape is

really interesting. Right. When we're looking long term and we're looking at what does the customer want, the customer wants convenience. They want lots of inventory to choose from and they want fast shipping speeds. So for us, it's about how do we create efficiencies? How do we use the technology? How do we use our human workforce that is the heart and soul of the operation to get those orders out and continue to delight our customers? So basically, Robinson is blaming us. And she's not wrong.

We reward Amazon for its speed, selection, and convenience. Our actions drive Amazon's reactions. That's what happens in capitalism. I also think people at Amazon understand better than most of us how this robot human story is going to go. Case in point, Amazon recently announced a plan to, quote, upskill 100,000 of its U.S. employees. That means training to do more complex work.

It's not only for warehouse workers, but some of the programs are geared towards them. For example, a picker or a packer could learn to do IT support. In its press release, Amazon cited a "changing jobs landscape." But was the word "automation" mentioned anywhere? Nope. Of course not. They're not going to spell it out. And so my fear is that the end result is still going to feel like a surprise.

and one our society is not prepared for. Next week on Land of the Giants, how did Amazon become one of the most valuable companies in the world? We'll go back to the company's early days to find out how it created such a unique relationship with Wall Street. It didn't promise profits. It said, trust us. We'll find out how Amazon got away with it.

News clips about Amazon warehouse workers come from CBS News Consumer Watch, Democracy Now!, and NBC Nightly News. Thanks also to the Australian Center for Robotic Vision for sharing videos of their entry in the Amazon Robotics Competition. Rebecca Sinanis is our show's producer. Allison McAdam is our editor. Gautam Shrikashen engineered this episode. Brandon McFarlane composed our theme.

Golda Arthur is the show's senior producer. Art Chung is our showrunner. Nishat Kerwa is the show's executive producer. I'm Jason Del Rey, and I'm back next week with a new episode. In the meantime, subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. And let us know what you think. Our email address is landofthegiants at voxmedia.com. You can also talk to us on Twitter. We're at Recode.

Land of the Giants is a production of Recode and the Vox Media Podcast Network.