When it comes to speed and efficiency, there’s no doubt that robotics is the answer – as the army of robots employed by Amazon in its global fulfilment centres clearly demonstrates.
But is this at the expense of human employees? This was one of the questions put to chief technologist for Amazon Robotics, Tye Brady, at an MIT Technology Review conference earlier this year. He denied the allegation that in finding more ways to automate what humans did Amazon was a job destroyer.
“There are opportunities for human/robot collaboration which will create new kinds of jobs,” he said. “Collaboration is key. Humans are wired to think of new solutions and come up with great ideas. As a systems engineer I want to maximise the contributions of both. When we think about how to create the greatest efficiency in our fulfilment centres we think of collaboration – we want our robotics to extend human capability to accomplish the tasks at hand and create a symphony of humans and machines working together.”
According to Brady, Amazon is obsessed about the customer experience.
“More traffic will bring more sellers which will bring a wider selection of goods – and a lower cost structure will lead to lower prices.
“Amazon robotics allows us to have a greater variety of selection in fulfilment centres. When you design collaborative robotics in the right way you can lower the cost structure which passes on a lower price to the customer.”
And not at the expense of human employment. “Machines are helping me focus on what matters – which is efficiency and the obsession of the customer to have a huge variety of goods. “Plain and simple, you have to add automation to be more productive – and better collaboration with robots will yield greater productivity which yields more jobs and more tech investment.”
While the jury is still out on whether robotics will replace humans, an example shared by Brady illustrates his point.
“When a jar of popcorn butter popped out on the floor resulting in a buttery mess, the robots kept driving through it and would slip resulting in an encoder error.” Without human intervention, the problem could not be solved.
One of Amazon's 'new age' warehouses.
