Amazon’s new employee Sparrow can pick up and sort millions of individual unpackaged products without even pausing for a cigarette break.
Sparrow is the first warehouse robot with the ability to “detect, select, and handle individual products in our inventory”, a job currently handled by thousands of paid humans.
Sparrow was unveiled at an event in Boston yesterday, and although the intentions are clear, Amazon continues to parrot its party line that these robots will benefit the human workers, who will have less repetitive tasks in the warehouses.
“Robotics technology enables us to work smarter — not harder — to operate efficiently and safely,” wrote Joe Quinlivan, Amazon’s vice-president of global robotics, in a blog post.
Tye Brady, the global head of robotics at Amazon, said in 2019 that the use of robots leads to more human hires, not less.
It’s a myth that automation or robotics kills jobs. It’s actually just the opposite,” he said.
“When you really embrace human-machine collaboration, that changes your productivity and changes your business.
“I don’t see it as humans versus machines. I see it as humans and machines working together to achieve a task or a mission, and when you embrace that sort of thinking you really change business.”
Amazon reduced employees from 1.62 million in March to 1.54 million at the end of September.
The company first introduced robotics into warehouses a decade ago, with a Kiva drive unit that moves stacks of shelves around an area. Since 2012, the company has implemented over half a million of these robots into its warehouses.
75 per cent of the 13 million packages a day that go through Amazon’s warehouses each day are handled by robots during at least one stage of operations.