As Amazon Pushes Forward With Robots, Workers Find New Roles 

We are seeing little by little, Humans being replaced by robots in the work force. However Amazon is handling the robot situation differently. Instead of laying off workers an replacing them with robots, Amazon is finding them a new position within the company instead of laying them off. For instance Nissa Scott is a warehouse employee for Amazon in the New Jersey warehouse facility and she was replaced by a big yellow mechanical arm not long after she started working for Amazon.

When Nissa started with Amazon she used to stack plastic bins the size of small ottomans. After 10 hours of lifting 25 pounds of bins it got tiring, said Nissa. Now Nissa supervises a big yellow mechanical arm doing the lifting of the plastic bins. Nissa's new job now is to supervise several robots at the time, troubleshot them when necessary, and making sure they have bins to load. In 2014, Amazon spent $770 million and started using robots in their warehouse, they have now over 100,000 working robots around the world. I believe it's kind of refreshing seeing a company this big still worrying about their employees and finding new ways to keep them around while they roll out with robots that are meant to replace them. I think a lot Americans at some point are worried about future robots taking their jobs, a good example is the car manufacturing industry. The industry started with robot arms in the 1920's and the robot arms were only suppose to help employees and all of sudden it took over the industry and American jobs. Another company that is trying the robot idea is McDonalds, in some McDonalds' restaurants now they have a kiosk so people can order their own meal instead of a person taking their order. I think is crazy how the robot industry is taking over and it's only going to get crazier within a decade or so.

In essence I believe that Amazon is doing something great keeping their employees around as arm robots take over their jobs, the only question I have is, how long is that going to last? In the article Amazon states that they added 80,000 more warehouse employees making a total of 120,000. However with technology improving in a rapid pace how long will this last? Lastly, I believe that this article was very informative and clear on sharing facts. 

Work Cited

Wingfield, Nick "As Amazon Pushes Forward With Robots, Workers Find New Roles". www.nytimes.com, 10 September 2017  Web. 14 September 2017