{"action":"created","issue":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/robertocarroll/ideas/issues/9","labels_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/robertocarroll/ideas/issues/9/labels{/name}","comments_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/robertocarroll/ideas/issues/9/comments","events_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/robertocarroll/ideas/issues/9/events","html_url":"https://github.com/robertocarroll/ideas/issues/9","id":48280789,"number":9,"title":"Visit Amazon warehouse","user":{"login":"robertocarroll","id":1565953,"avatar_url":"https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/1565953?v=3","gravatar_id":"","url":"https://api.github.com/users/robertocarroll","html_url":"https://github.com/robertocarroll","followers_url":"https://api.github.com/users/robertocarroll/followers","following_url":"https://api.github.com/users/robertocarroll/following{/other_user}","gists_url":"https://api.github.com/users/robertocarroll/gists{/gist_id}","starred_url":"https://api.github.com/users/robertocarroll/starred{/owner}{/repo}","subscriptions_url":"https://api.github.com/users/robertocarroll/subscriptions","organizations_url":"https://api.github.com/users/robertocarroll/orgs","repos_url":"https://api.github.com/users/robertocarroll/repos","events_url":"https://api.github.com/users/robertocarroll/events{/privacy}","received_events_url":"https://api.github.com/users/robertocarroll/received_events","type":"User","site_admin":false},"labels":[{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/robertocarroll/ideas/labels/article","name":"article","color":"fbca04"}],"state":"open","locked":false,"assignee":null,"milestone":null,"comments":2,"created_at":"2014-11-10T16:08:08Z","updated_at":"2015-10-18T18:52:45Z","closed_at":null,"body":"I was working on [a project for MSN earlier in the year about jobseekers](http://extras.uk.msn.com/jobseekers) and one of the areas we touched on but didn't really explore was automation and how we work with machines.\r\n\r\nAmazon are at the cutting edge of this automation. Their warehouses aren't organised according to any taxonomy a human could understand like alphabetical or by genre, but rather by algorithms which calculate frequency of use and maximise efficiency. The result is that lasers direct workers from one shelf to another. I wanted to spend a day at an Amazon warehouse to see how people work with machines, but [you've already done it](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2286227/Amazons-human-robots-Is-future-British-workplace.html)\r\n\r\nSo another angle on this subject would be to look at this process through the \"magic\" of ordering online: you click to order and the next day the item you ordered drops through your letterbox. But what are the underlying physical structures - the people, the places, the actions - behind this process? I bet most of us don't think about them at all when in reality the magic of ordering online is just the tip of a huge infrastructure. I'd like to trace an order from clicking buy to it being delivered: from the data packets and cables of your computer to the warehouses and delivery. A bit like the meat industry, we've come to expect certain things without really thinking about how they are made possible: my article would expose that and serve as a springboard for a wider debate.       \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nhttp://booktwo.org/notebook/how-to-see-through-the-cloud/\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nAmazon \r\n\r\n\r\nAutomation - Jobs - How we work with machines - spend a day at an Amazon warehouse \r\n\r\n\r\nInfrastructure \r\n\r\n\r\nThe \"magic\" nature of ordering online - \r\n\r\nfabric, underlying physical structures \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nQuick delivery \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nhttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/13/jonathan-franzen-wrong-modern-world\r\n\r\nIn my own little corner of the world, which is to say American fiction, Jeff Bezos of Amazon may not be the antichrist, but he surely looks like one of the four horsemen. Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews in choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own promotion. The work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with the money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for them, will flourish in that world. But what happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels? As fewer and fewer readers are able to find their way, amid all the noise and disappointing books and phony reviews, to the work produced by the new generation of this kind of writer, Amazon is well on its way to making writers into the kind of prospectless workers whom its contractors employ in its warehouses, labouring harder for less and less, with no job security, because the warehouses are situated in places where they're the only business hiring. And the more of the population that lives like those workers, the greater the downward pressure on book prices and the greater the squeeze on conventional booksellers, because when you're not making much money you want your entertainment for free, and when your life is hard you want instant gratification (\"Overnight free shipping!\").\r\n\r\n(via Instapaper)\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nLiberationtech (@Liberationtech)\r\n\r\n15/09/2013 22:10\r\n\r\nAutomation tends not to destroy jobs that entail creative/social skills or in professional & unionized occupations ow.ly/d/190z\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nhttp://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2012/10/23/callback/\r\nHere's part of the reason why I think this is happening.\r\n\r\nThis is a photograph of a warehouse equipped with robots from Kiva Systems. Kiva was purchased by Amazon last year. A year or two before that Amazon purchased the online shoe retailer Zappos as much for their expertise in warehousing – in the art of space-fitting a gazillion boxes of shoes – as for their customer base.\r\n\r\nThese warehousing systems, and the robots that work in them, are amazing pieces of technology. They are terrifying in their own way because by virtue of their robot-ness they allow for an efficiency of storage and retrieval in ways that aren't possible for humans and our puny meat-y limbs.\r\n\r\nIt is a system that humans, unaided by robots and sensors and algorithms, simply don't understand. I have friends who've visited some of the warehouses and they report that there are lasers on the ceilings whose purpose is simply to direct humans to move items from one shelf to another.\r\n\r\nWhich seems sort of grim and, well, in-human on the face of it. That is the conventional thinking until you actually buy something from Amazon and have that thing show up the next day.\r\n\r\nThere are some very real costs associated with this bit of magic that may dictate its longterm viability but, all things being equal, I have never met anyone who wants to go back.\r\n\r\nShort of promoting a particular noxious smoke and mirrors around the idea of \"artisanal warehousing\" this is the future because it makes possible a kind of expectation around access and delivery.\r\n\r\nIt's access and delivery to things like books and cat litter today but if we can make it work for those sorts of generally trivial things I am pretty sure we're going to start expecting it for the important stuff.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nhttp://www.domusweb.it/en/design/2012/06/04/from-books-to-infrastructure.html\r\nAnother example is provided by the warehouses of Amazon itself, which long ago grew to such levels of complexity that they require algorithmic management. Objects placed within them conform not to any human taxonomy — books alphabetised by author here, music CDs in another corner, DVDs over there — but to a mathematical equation, a computation of frequency that ensures goods are stored as close as possible to multiple sites of use and packaging. As a result, only an augmented human can find stock in its millions of seemingly randomly distributed square feet; if the inventory software fails, mere people are adrift among millions of scattered flotsam. "},"comment":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/robertocarroll/ideas/issues/comments/149038234","html_url":"https://github.com/robertocarroll/ideas/issues/9#issuecomment-149038234","issue_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/robertocarroll/ideas/issues/9","id":149038234,"user":{"login":"robertocarroll","id":1565953,"avatar_url":"https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/1565953?v=3","gravatar_id":"","url":"https://api.github.com/users/robertocarroll","html_url":"https://github.com/robertocarroll","followers_url":"https://api.github.com/users/robertocarroll/followers","following_url":"https://api.github.com/users/robertocarroll/following{/other_user}","gists_url":"https://api.github.com/users/robertocarroll/gists{/gist_id}","starred_url":"https://api.github.com/users/robertocarroll/starred{/owner}{/repo}","subscriptions_url":"https://api.github.com/users/robertocarroll/subscriptions","organizations_url":"https://api.github.com/users/robertocarroll/orgs","repos_url":"https://api.github.com/users/robertocarroll/repos","events_url":"https://api.github.com/users/robertocarroll/events{/privacy}","received_events_url":"https://api.github.com/users/robertocarroll/received_events","type":"User","site_admin":false},"created_at":"2015-10-18T18:52:45Z","updated_at":"2015-10-18T18:52:45Z","body":"Had to cancel. Try again? http://uk.amazonfctours.com/tour-an-amazon-fulfilment-centre/"}}