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Amazon is on the cusp of using more robots, over one million of them, than humans in its warehouses around the world in an effort to improve productivity. Currently, three-fourths of Amazon’s global deliveries are assisted in some way by robots.
According to a new Wall Street Journal report, the more than one million robots currently in use at Amazon’s facilities is the most it has ever had, and that number is expected to grow.
“They’re one step closer to that realization of the full integration of robotics,” Rueben Scriven, research manager at Interact Analysis, a robotics consulting firm, told the Wall Street Journal.
It’s not all bad news for Amazon’s human employees though. For example, some of the robots have taken over the menial, repetitive work lifting, pulling and sorting that humans used to do. Now, some employees who were doing those jobs are now performing more skilled jobs like managing the robots.
“I thought I was going to be doing heavy lifting, I thought I was going to be walking like crazy,” said Neisha Cruz, an Amazon warehouse employee in Connecticut. Now she ensures mobile robots inside Amazon facilities across the U.S. are working correctly. She also is earning about 2.5 times more than she did when she began working with the company.
“Since introducing robots within Amazon’s operations, we’ve continued to hire hundreds of thousands of employees to work in our facilities and created many new job categories worldwide, including positions like flow control specialists, floor monitors, and reliability maintenance engineers,” an Amazon spokesperson told the New York Post.
Today, around 1.56 million people work for Amazon, most of them in the warehouses. More than 700,000 of those workers, according to Amazon, have been trained for higher-paying jobs, include jobs managing and working with the robots.
“You have completely new jobs being created,” Yesh Dattatreya, senior applied scientist at Amazon Robotics, told the Wall Street Journal.
The company is far from done when it comes to using robots in its facilities. Now, Amazon is testing a humanoid robot with legs, arms and a head. They also have a robot called Vulcan that has a sense of touch for picking up items.