Meet Amazon's robots

I was stunned by the corporation biased “report” or was it a paid PR piece.

Shouldn't this segment have a "paid promotion" disclaimer?!?

My son's best friend lasted about 1 full month at an Amazon fulfillment center. He came home after his shifts feeling like he had been run over. The pace was so fast, he simply couldn't keep up. When he complained, he was terminated. By the way, he is fit, and in his early 20's.

"Safety is our top priority with our employees..." This guy looks like he'd sell you land off the coast of Florida.

Kermit, Ernie and Burt will be replacing humans within 5 to 10 years.

I've worked in factories as a RSI (repetitive strain injury) mitigation engineer for a while, and pretty much none of anything I just saw was very impressive. Other than the LIDAR guided bots, lots of assembly facilities across the US are using these same systems to move product around their facilities. What I did see is that the columns of bins in these places were at heights WAY outside of the limits we set for ourselves at the facility I work at. Nobody should ever have to reach up or bend down 100+ times a day to do their job. This should be obvious to anyone on their team.

The Amazonians don’t move that slow when management says it’s “Vital” and move faster. How about trainers on the floor to back up the “Industrial Athlete” that’s going to fast!

Should have interviewed workers outside the building to get the real story.

In the mid 1970’s, the United Auto Workers union at most of Michigan’s automotive assembly plants. Sold the idea to its union members, that robots will assist in building the car. That their jobs are safe. As technology progressed through the decades. Fewer and fewer people were on the assembly line. More and more robots are being used. At one factory in Michigan there is a room in the middle of the plant. One person sits there watching monitors and listening for alarms. When an alarm sounds. The entire line stops and usually means a robot is stuck in one place. The operator goes to the robot with a rubber sledgehammer to force the robot arm to move. A couple of hard smacks to the arm joint. The robot can move. The operator returns to the middle room and hit the go button. Then waits for the next alarm.

The firs thingt that comes to my mind is the " exo skeletal" robots that workers can "wear"to help the workers lift hundreds of pounds of boxes at a time!!! Eventually all those human workers will be replaced by fully humanoid robots like you see in Boston Dynamics videos...yep .... Its coming..real soon.... 👀

You don't NEED Amazon. You can live beautifully without them.

Jobs never disappear, they simply change. Robots allow people to do work which is more fitting for a human. You can't convince me that flipping a hamburger all day, or pulling thorns out of a tuft of cotton, is a suitable job for a human. If you said 40 years ago that someone could make a career out of being a YouTube personality, or that artists could depend on their passions for paying their bills, or that people could train for careers such as being a full-time masseuse, you would sound insane... I recognize that YouTube didn't exist back then, but the point is that automation frees up our time to be spent on more engaging activities, so that we don't have to do the dull/mundane/and dangerous work anymore.

“Worker abuse claims? Let’s go to the company reps for the full story.” This kind of golly gee stenography reporting is a great disservice to your viewers, and the working people who rely on journalists to find the real story behind the company line. Do better.

I was a picker at Amazon for 2 weeks. I was trained for 4 hours, never met my manager, and had to walk 2 football fields to the break room only to have an actual 5 min of break just to walk back. Worst job ever. They didn’t make the robots to make it easier for the human. They made the robot to make the human work faster in a shorter amount of time.

They could eliminate all injuries in their warehouses by completely automating them.

There are at least some people that can see right through Amazon. The headline about injuries didn't hurt. They couldn't care less. It's a shame more people haven't woken up to realize how dangerous it is having such a massive amount of commerce being controlled by just a couple companies like Amazon and Walmart. And twice the national minimum wage is peanuts anymore. Not worth wrecking your body for. The number one way they're "working on the safety problem" is by trying to get human workers out of the equation altogether.

Interesting tech to figure out the ergonomics of what most workers could tell you on day one of their job! Pushing humans to and beyond their physical limits with or without real ergonomic improvements is still abhorrent.

yep, they are creating better working conditions by eliminating jobs with robots.

200 pieces an hour is too much. 😶😣

After seeing Rachel Maddow's discussion about the NY Times reporting of what Amazon employees go through, it is disappointing that this segment is so soft. And after seeing John Oliver's reporting on Sponsored Content, this segment is almost an advertisement for Amazon. Very disappointing.