People have been left in shock after it was revealed that half a million Amazon employees could be on the ‘cusp’ of losing their jobs to robots, according to a new report.
With nearly 1.2 million members of staff, the e-commerce giant is said to be on the brink of replacing over 500,000 jobs with ‘robots’ in a bid to cut out ‘menial, mundane and repetitive’ job roles.
This is according to a report by the New York Times, which detailed how ‘bots would allow the company to avoid hiring more than 160,000 U.S. employees it would otherwise need by 2027’, saving ‘about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs, and delivers to customers’.
Amazon reportedly has aims to automate a whopping 75% of all its operations.
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Tye Brady, who is the chief roboticist at Amazon, was careful with his words when he spoke at the Brainstorm AI event in London earlier this year.
Taking to the stage, he said: “We aim to eliminate … every menial, mundane, and repetitive job out there, we will never run out of things to do for our employees. We want them to focus on higher-level tasks.”
However, it does not seem like everyone is as convinced by the plans Brady detailed, with many people having taken to social media to share their own reactions to the news.
On Reddit, one user wrote: “The future we were promised: Robots will do all the work so you can just relax and enjoy life! The future we got: Robots do all the work, so now you don’t have a job. What are you supposed to do now? Not my problem. I’m a billionaire. F*** you.”
Another said: “TLDR; Amazon, a company with more money than the entire population of the planet combined could ever spend, will choose not to hire humans in the pursuit of having even more money than anyone could ever spend.”
A third person commented: “They can’t see that they are negatively impacting their customers by this decision? If people (their customers) don’t have money (produced by jobs) to buy their useless junk (products) how will they continue to increase revenue/profitability? More robots/AI? Robots/AI don’t purchase anything! It may take a couple of years but it will happen.”
And a fourth added: “All we got to do is delete the app and shop locally.”
In other news, one Amazon worker has shared claims that the firm has a ‘kill switch’ which it allegedly tested when there was a major outage with Amazon Web Services (AWS) earlier this week.