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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHow hard will the robots make us work?
In warehouses, call centers, and other sectors, intelligent machines are managing humans, and theyre making work more stressful, grueling, and dangerous
On conference stages and at campaign rallies, tech executives and politicians warn of a looming automation crisis one where workers are gradually, then all at once, replaced by intelligent machines. But their warnings mask the fact that an automation crisis has already arrived. The robots are here, theyre working in management, and theyre grinding workers into the ground.
The robots are watching over hotel housekeepers, telling them which room to clean and tracking how quickly they do it. Theyre managing software developers, monitoring their clicks and scrolls and docking their pay if they work too slowly. Theyre listening to call center workers, telling them what to say, how to say it, and keeping them constantly, maximally busy. While weve been watching the horizon for the self-driving trucks, perpetually five years away, the robots arrived in the form of the supervisor, the foreman, the middle manager.
These automated systems can detect inefficiencies that a human manager never would a moments downtime between calls, a habit of lingering at the coffee machine after finishing a task, a new route that, if all goes perfectly, could get a few more packages delivered in a day. But for workers, what look like inefficiencies to an algorithm were their last reserves of respite and autonomy, and as these little breaks and minor freedoms get optimized out, their jobs are becoming more intense, stressful, and dangerous. Over the last several months, Ive spoken with more than 20 workers in six countries. For many of them, their greatest fear isnt that robots might come for their jobs: its that robots have already become their boss.
In few sectors are the perils of automated management more apparent than at Amazon. Almost every aspect of management at the companys warehouses is directed by software, from when people work to how fast they work to when they get fired for falling behind. Every worker has a rate, a certain number of items they have to process per hour, and if they fail to meet it, they can be automatically fired.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/27/21155254/automation-robots-unemployment-jobs-vs-human-google-amazon
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How hard will the robots make us work? (Original Post)
Newest Reality
Feb 2020
OP
Cartoonist
(7,316 posts)1. What will the CEOs do when the robots find THEM Unnecessar
Should be interesting.
Wounded Bear
(58,653 posts)3. Ask this guy...
question everything
(47,479 posts)2. First, will eliminate our jobs