Photo: SBH
The AI workforce armies.
AMAZON SYDNEY
The largest warehouse ever built in Australia officially opened late last year.
It spans 200,000 square metres across four levels – about the land mass of Taronga Zoo – and can house up to 20 million of the smaller items sold on Amazon.com.au including jewellery, books, electronics, pantry items and toys.
But there is something different about this warehouse.
It is a warehouse that uses a robot army to pick, pack and sort orders, allowing Amazon to dominate the retail market.
Photo: Amazon
Inside, the warehouse is equipped with cutting-edge AI technology, including yellow robotic drivers that work as Amazon stock pickers — moving pods of inventory and ‘helping to slash the delivery time for new orders’.
An Amazon Australia employee explains how this process works in the video below:
Robotic drives work collaboratively with Amazon team members by moving pods of inventory to them all by themselves.
Amazon’s scale is unrivalled, and the “marching army” are able use AI to direct themselves through warehouses and change their course of direction, while understanding tasks needed to be done and the perimeters in regards to other robots.
Listen to how this is done according to the main facility in Boston U.S. that develops the technology:
Yes, they “graduate” machines from the “nursery” and see them as developing children.
The robotic drivers can lift as much as 680 kilograms of inventory stored in the pods, of which there are 30,000 in the Sydney facility, primarily using QR codes to navigate the shelving system.
In total, Amazon now has over 500,000 robots in warehouses across the world.
Amazon entered Australia in late 2017 to the fear of many local retailers that lagged in terms of online and digital investment.
And when they scale up to robotics, it means more job loses for human employees.
Amazon, just last month, said it will cut another 9000 jobs in its second major staff cull this year.
In January, it made 18,000 workers redundant.
And it’s not like they can’t afford to keep them on, either.
Amazon Australia had a strong 2022, with reported revenue rising 50 per cent year-on-year, surpassing $2.6 billion.
Big conglomerates that first sucked up all the jobs, only now to
Only engineers and system developers will prosper in these new AI environments, as human packers dwindle.
As soon as they can find a way to make robots pack the items together, we could see even more loses.
But Amazon are not the only ones here in Australia switching to automated workforces.
Other major companies are also joining the move to robotic warehouses.
THE ROBOTIC FUTURE
While Amazon may be doing it the biggest, they are not alone in the quest for robotic workforces.
Myer’s new national distribution centre, for example, features more than 200 autonomous mobile robots (AMRs).
This includes three different AMR technologies: The Geek+ RS8 Shuttle, P800s, and Körber’s sortation solution.
Technology at the site includes pedestal sorters that arrange products by store and/or carrier for cross dock, store replenishment and online orders. It handles over 70% of online orders for Myer.
The design of the NDC includes water harvesting and recycling, LED lighting throughout the warehouse and offices, energy efficient fittings, water saving taps, the use of sustainable materials and more.
Mainstream supermarkets have been doing this as well.
Woolworths was first to announce their transition to automation in April 2018, revealing a new $215 million fully automated facility that they said is“…the biggest and most advanced automated distribution centre in the southern hemisphere.”
Which it was, before Amazon come in.
The Woolworths Group released a promotional video on their Melbourne robotics facility at the time:
In 2019, Coles also announced plans this week to build new automated warehouses (valued at close to $1 billion), overseen by an “electronic robot workforce”.
In the same vein, it is all about ‘efficiency’, ‘cutting costs’ and ‘scaling up’ their business.
Of course, this comes at the expense of the human labour that will no longer be required the more that this spreads.
An 2015 analysis from the Committee of Economic Development of Australia warned that more than five million jobs could disappear in the next 10 to 15 years because of technological advancements.
It has been eight years since that report was released, and here we are now seeing the patterns begin to emerge.
‘Intelligent automation’ is already allowing these companies to transcend conventional performance trade-offs to achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency and quality.
This is the vision of the future, in truly science fiction terms.
Massive, unreachable corporations, handling all of society’s resources from obscure facilities run by robots.
The 27 April 1958 edition of the Sunday comic strip Closer Than We Think by Arthur Radebaugh ran in newspapers throughout the U.S. and showed people of the 1950s a glimpse of the robot-driven world to come.
Titled, “Robot Warehouses”, the strip features red metal robots whirring about with packages and small trailers.
What a time to be alive.
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Good News, when All the Humans have lost their collective ‘Jobs’, No One will be able to afford the ‘Robot House’ merchandise! So hopefully, the New Human Sparta, will see warehouses FULL, but Nowhere to go. Maybe then, the ‘Robots’ could sit around playing ‘Cards’, with Nothing to deliver!
Pull your expenditure from these Corporations & go back to local human suppliers – Banks as well – Find a local community orientated bank! Use carbon life forms at checkouts, & leave the self scanners checkouts – WEAR the time NOT using, these self scanners, OR, WEAR the Job losses! K-Mart & Big W, have been quietly introducing these systems for years – I no longer shop there! Banks did the same with ATMs via reductions in ‘Tellers’.
Wellness