(Daily Caller)—Amazon now fields more than one million robots in its warehouses and says parity with its human headcount is coming soon, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Roughly 75% of the e-commerce giant’s global deliveries already involve a robot somewhere along the line, the Journal reported, from wheeled Kiva droids that shuttle shelves to the new Vulcan bot that can “feel” its way through cluttered bins. Average staffing has fallen to about 670 employees per facility, its lowest in 16 years, even as packages handled per worker have soared more than twenty-fold since 2015.
“They’re one step closer to that realization of the full integration of robotics,” Rueben Scriven, a robotics consultant at Interact Analysis, told the Journal.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
That supposed march toward integration sits uneasily beside Amazon’s May statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation that Vulcan and its brethren are meant for “augmenting — not replacing — human capabilities.” Similarly, Amazon Robotics chief technologist Tye Brandy framed the company’s automation push as an “augmentation strategy,” insisting that “people and technology working together” will remain the model in a February interview with Business Insider.
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