An Amazon Prime drone lands in the UK
The new world arrived, again, just before Christmas. Delivered by Amazon, quite literally. In Seattle, the retail giant has opened a new store, Amazon Go, a basic convenience/grocery store, with basics and ready-to-eat meals, all of them, to judge by the photos, sodding salads. What, Amazon, dealing with all old-fashioned retail, shop assistants, etc?
Well, no. Amazon Go is a shop without shop assistants. You load the app onto your smartphone. To enter the store you buzz in using the phone, through automatic gates. You pick up the stuff you want, the shelves record them as taken (as with automated hotel minibars), and once you leave the store with them, their proximity to your phone records them as bought. The automated checkout — unknown item in bagging area insert card insert card call assistant permission required arrgggghh — becomes an intermediate technology like the fax, something we were passing through on the way to something else. Currently, the store is being beta-tested — i.e. it’s open on the Amazon campus — with a roll-out expected for 2017.
Whether it will be as smooth as they imagine remains to be seen. Presumably, the stores will have security guards — the gates are as leapable at any train station — and the savings will come from having few other staff whatsoever, and the expanded sales from the appeal of just walking out with stuff. For that reason, theft might be up too. Supermarkets have a problem with shoplifting because the visual rhetoric of the store suggests stuff is free — it’s just there like a depot. All the more so with a ghost store like Amazon Go.
But even if it proves less smooth than the Amazons hope, it’s part of something that is going to hit big. The roll-out of automation in fast food outlets has begun, years after it was possible, and much slower than many might have expected. Why so? The plain fact is that the fast food conglomerates themselves are terrified of the landslide they might be about to start. Typically, firms rush for automation at certain times, in the knowledge that the first in will gain extra profits by having costs cheaper than the industry base. But automation is so fast now that big retail and fast food is factoring in the industry-wide effect of any automation move. For obvious reasons: the main customers of fast-food outlets are fast-food and other retail workers. It’s all many of them can afford as a dining out experience. General questions of aggregate demand and rate of profit are things the industry has to take on.
Amazon’s other innovation was its first delivery of an order by drone, a week ago, in an area near its Cambridge UK facility, in an area the UK government has licensed as a test site for drone delivery — a gadget and a bag of popcorn arriving 17 minutes after it was ordered. The entire process, from order to drone-loading to delivery, was automated. In New Zealand, Domino’s is using self-driving mini-delivery vehicles. Just as the delivery of porn appears to have driven innovation on the internet, the automation of transport is in the hands of fast food. Good old humans, we know what we like.
There will be many delays, many of them regulatory, on the way to all this, but it’s possible that the world 10 years from now could look like 1999 did in comparison to 1989, when you had to drive to a “library” and get a mechanical plastic tape-brick every time you wanted to watch a movie or go to one of two or three news agencies in a city if you wanted foreign printed news. Furthermore, because the material revolution has the digital revolution enabling it, it will move much faster. Each new innovation will be a feedback loop, contributing to its successive redesign.
This will of course all be fine. Just fine. All the jobs and work of the unskilled and low-skilled that are being vaporised will be replaced by new and interesting jobs arising elsewhere, to which the invisible hand of the market will slowly usher them. Just like what happened when mass, high-employment manufacturing and industry closed down in the US and the UK, for example. Thank God that went well and all those industrial areas weren’t allowed to become haunted wastelands of the socially excluded, disregarded by a new elite, and ready to follow anyone giving them a bit of hope and recognition. Mind you the unemployment rate in the US is only 5%. Mind you, with successive redefinition, the unemployment rate can always be set below 10%. When there are only 10 people left with jobs — and that job is to supervise killer robots vaporising the excluded besieging the walls separating the poor from the rich — the unemployment rate will still be measured as less than 10%.
The third part of this puzzle is the recent announcement that a third of all corporations in Australia paid no tax in 2014-15 (for various reasons, some legit), and the reminder that companies such as Amazon and Starbucks often pay no tax at all in places like the EU, where they can play a shell game between different jurisdictions. As automation increases, so too does the shift of the money that would have been wages, and taxed, to sequestered capital, effectively a double deprivation. The very money that we need to undertake the retraining and restructuring of social life to account for the next-stage evisceration of unskilled work is denied us — because of the evisceration of unskilled work.
Left unaltered, a situation like that yields only one result in the short to medium term: a section of the population defined as surplus to requirements, their labour power value approaching zero, their presence a nuisance to those on the inside. The circuit of getting and spending is contracted to 50-60% of the population, perhaps less, whose lives become ever more automated. The culture changes, so that the excluded are seen as the utterly “other”, blamed for their own failure, a strict separation occurring. This has already happened in a place like San Francisco. The digital revolution there arose from the counterculture that the city had spawned and the ideas — connectivity, universality, randomness, play — that sustained it. But three and four decades on, those qualities exist only as functional means to innovation, not as lived values. Thus, the techs watch as the police clear the homeless out of the path of the Google bus.
The only way in which that pathway is avoided is through a realisation that as corporations approach dominant and monopoly status, in substantially automated manner, they cease to be a private organisation in form and have become de facto a social resource. In immediate practice that means a real tax on their surplus, levied by means of an assumed profit on turnover in-country. Sales tax alone won’t do it — it’s ceaselessly passed on to the consumer. Profit can be ceaselessly hidden and offshored. Taxing assumed profit on turnover is one answer to the problem, a way of reclaiming the social dividend, which can be redeployed. Hopefully, in parallel, liberated technology can be developed, so there’s an opportunity to bypass the market altogether via free-exchange of complex goods. But that’s the long arc. In the interim, without serious surplus recycling, we will embark/continue on a path of inequality, exclusion, indifference and active persecution.
I know, I know, and all you wanted was a salad. Still.
Thanks for this; we should be calling this out, how current democratic institutions are not prepared for digital citizenship and the perils of globalised digital colonialism. You can read more here in a free book available from i-human.com.au.
Thought provoking. This paints a picture of a world in which I won’t have to exist for too many years due to age – suddenly there appear to be advantages in becoming an old croc.
It’s a world which will require plenty technicians to fix the machines & robots. As clever as humans might think we are, I observed two major Oz airports grind to a halt when the conveyors belts in the domestic check-in terminals had a glitch. Chaos, the kick on effect was instant & impacted on everything. No technicians were available to promptly deal with what must’ve been a simple mechanical fault, suddenly every available airline employee was lugging bags for manual processing. So much for the 21st century Master Plan to cut staff to a bare minimum & streamline operations.
And if the machines & robots are manufactured in China expect regular failures & inbuilt obsolescence. Modern manufacturing is hard pressed to produce a reliable kettle or washing machine these days.
Capitalists hate wage labour so much more than Communists ever did. Look at how hard they work to abolish it. I was never particularly down with accelerationism, but here we are anyway, with the corpse of Jobs at our feet. Here’s to Late Capitalism.
One aspect of all this that I have noticed is that the communications networks and software we have remove the need for many management positions that previously had to exist in order to organise a large group of people. I have no statistics but I do wonder what effect this is having.
I suppose middle management too can be seen as low-skilled work. In my experience they were the ones that needed to be moved out of jobs where they actually did stuff so that they could cause less harm.
Anecdotal, but, my mother’s community care job duties currently includes filing all sorts of paperwork via scanner and email. When she started, there was a part time receptionist, a manager and a nurse who was second in charge. Now there is a single nurse who does all medical stuff, no receptionist and the manager is someone in another city.
If they can run your job in software you’re pretty much doomed.
Your absolutely correct–millions of white collar jobs are about to disappear–and it may take a generation to replace them; and all the govt can do is
offer company tax cuts and corporate welfare for ‘the trickle down effect/. That sort of sh*t trickle down is exactly what we don’t need.
Replace them with what, though? There are limited profits in the growing education and services market, which is propped up by deficit spending. The whole tech startup innovation business idea can only sustain a few people and the ones that bring a viable product end up not making a lot of jobs compared to what is invested. We are not finding some new agricultural or manufacturing technology that requires lots of human labour, the trend in these big historical sources of jobs has been the other way.
Managers, as we’ve already remarked, are going to become fewer in number so the jobs won’t be there either. Also robots can already flip a burger, take your order and give you the burger.
Another comment pointed to the skeleton crews fixing the machines, so I don’t think we’ll all get jobs fixing robots.
Well exactly what? That’s the crap that the pundits keep preaching that automation and tech eventually creates new jobs; but other futurists are predicting the end of work and a new system of wealth distribution has to be created. You can read all about it at
i-human.com.au. More people need to be aware of this stuff and politicise the issue.
You took the words right out of my mouth, Draco: “Replace them with what?”
The manufacturing jobs weren’t replaced.
And to Kyle Geany, the corporations have been reducing their labour forces for decades, yet the corporate tax cuts keep coming. So do the profits. Everytime a corporation lays off thousands of workers its share price rockets. Creating unemployment is rewarded.
The mining industry is the most obvious example I can think of, having been raised in Newcastle.
Other progressives tell me the people will wake up shortly and rebel, just as they did after WW2. The right to employment-or at least a decent, liveable income-will be fought for and regained. Old fashioned conservatives think the same (I mean the real conservatives who value social health and stability above all things, not the right wing nut jobs claiming to be and characterised as conservatives today. They are NOT conservatives.)
The problem is after slaughtering the working class in two world wars coupled with low birth rates during the Great Depression, they needed us to man capitalism after WW2. It wasn’t off shored yet. No labour, no profit. Our rights grew out of their needs, not ours.
They don’t need us anymore.
I know many will say they still need our money, but history suggests the rich can survive and thrive with a huge, dirt poor underclass very nicely.
No jobs, no money, no buy stuff, no profits, no tax, no infrastructure, no jobs,…