Warehouse Pickers

Reader comment on: Michael Spence on Robots

Submitted by Lyle (United States), May 22, 2014 17:03

Reports are that Amazon is moving to having robots deliver all the items of an order to a packer, no more humans wandering the warehouse. I suspect sooner or later an order could be picked, packed and shipped with no human intervention. Then you can run your warehouse longer hours (allowing some time for system maintanence). Most longshormen have already been done away with as you do not break bulk with a container at the port. It used to be folks had to go into the hold and transfer from slings to the hold or vice versa. Then when the sling was unloaded it needed to be sorted by destination. Containers mean you can break bulk inland. The main human tasks today are running the cranes, that on and off load the containers, and driving the trucks (which is not done by longshoremen) between the port and the truck depot, or one loads them on a train and it gets sorted later.

Basically it's any job that is basically routine that can be automated away easily.

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