"Manna", by Marshall Brain, remains relevant.[1] That's a bottom-up view, where more and more jobs are taken over by some kind of AI. "AI 2027" is more top-down.
A practical view: Amazon is trying very hard to automate their warehouse operations. Their warehouses have been using robots for years, and more types are being added. Amazon reached 1.6 million employees in 2020, and now they're down to 1.5 million.[2] That number is going to drop further. Probably by a lot.
Once Amazon has done it, everybody else who handles large numbers of boxes will catch up. That includes restocking retail stores. The first major application of semi-humanoid robots may be shelf stocking. Robots can have much better awareness of what's on the shelves. Being connected to the store's inventory system is a big win. And the handling isn't very complicated. The robots might even talk to the customers. The robots know exactly what's on Aisle 3, unlike many minimum wage employees.
"Amazon reached 1.6 million employees in 2020, and now they're down to 1.5 million.[2]"
I agree in the bottoms-up automation / displacement theory, but you're cherry picking data here. They had a huge hiring surge from 1.2M to 1.6M during the Covid transition where online ordering and online usage went bananas, and workers who were displaced in other domains likely gravitated towards warehouse jobs from other lower wage/skill domains.
The reduction to 1.5M is likely more a regression to the mean and could also be a natural data reduction well within the bounds of the upper and lower control limits in the data [1]. Just saying we need to be careful when doing root cause analysis on these numbers. There are many reasons for the reduction, it's not a direct result of improvements in robotic automation.
Amazon hired like crazy during covid because tons of people were doing 100% of their shopping on amazon during covid. Now theyre not, doesnt say anything about robot warehouse staffing imo
Marshall Brain's been peddling imminent overproduction-crisis-but-this-time-with-robots for more than 20 years now and in various forms itβs been confidently predicted as imminent since the 19th century
"Manna", by Marshall Brain, remains relevant.[1] That's a bottom-up view, where more and more jobs are taken over by some kind of AI. "AI 2027" is more top-down.
A practical view: Amazon is trying very hard to automate their warehouse operations. Their warehouses have been using robots for years, and more types are being added. Amazon reached 1.6 million employees in 2020, and now they're down to 1.5 million.[2] That number is going to drop further. Probably by a lot.
Once Amazon has done it, everybody else who handles large numbers of boxes will catch up. That includes restocking retail stores. The first major application of semi-humanoid robots may be shelf stocking. Robots can have much better awareness of what's on the shelves. Being connected to the store's inventory system is a big win. And the handling isn't very complicated. The robots might even talk to the customers. The robots know exactly what's on Aisle 3, unlike many minimum wage employees.
[1] https://marshallbrain.com/manna
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number...