Little Songs

I once worked a job where my only purpose was to stand next to a machine and make sure it didn’t jam. Eight hours. Fluorescent lights. The machine did the work. I watched. When the paper caught — maybe twice a shift — I’d reach in, pull out the crumpled mess, and hit the green button. The rest of the time I stood there thinking about lunch, about the woman who’d stopped returning my calls, about whether the parking lot had a fence low enough to climb if I decided to leave at half shift and never come back.

They called it “machine tending.” I called it dying slowly under good lighting.

Now Amazon has a million robots in its warehouses. A million. That’s nearly as many as the humans. The average facility is down to 670 people — lowest in sixteen years — while the number of packages shipped per worker has gone through the roof. The math isn’t complicated. More machines, fewer bodies, same boxes arriving at your door by Tuesday.

A warehouse worker in Southern California described his robot as “effectively your partner.” You work with it. You’re responsible for whether it does its job. When it takes too long, that’s on you. Not on the robot. On you. The human whose role is to be accountable for the thing that replaced the job you used to have.

They’ve got color-coded hallways now. So the robots don’t run you over. The robots beep. Some of them play music when they’re coming through — little songs to announce that the machine needs you to get out of its way. A worker in North Carolina said it’s “definitely weird.” Which is maybe the most polite word for what’s happening.

I remember the post office. Sorting mail by hand into those little cubbyhole slots, each one a street, a house, a person who’d either be happy or disappointed to find something in their box. It was tedious. It broke your back and your spirit in equal measure. But you were doing something. Your hands knew something. The letters moved because you moved them.

One day they put in a machine that read zip codes. Optical character recognition, they called it, like giving it a fancy name made it less obvious what it was — a device that could do in a second what took me thirty. The supervisor said it would “free us up for other tasks.” I’m still waiting to hear what those tasks were supposed to be.

Amazon says the same thing now. They’ve got programs — the Mechatronic and Robotics Apprenticeship, Amazon Future Ready — names that sound like they were invented by a committee that has never shared a break room with a warehouse worker. Take some classes. Learn to maintain the robots. Move up. The company says it’s upskilled 700,000 employees. What they don’t say is that you can’t absorb millions of workers into technician positions because there simply aren’t that many robots to fix. The machines are reliable. That’s the whole point. If they broke down as often as humans call in sick, nobody would buy them.

A woman named Bianca Agustin runs a worker advocacy nonprofit. She’s been watching the automated facilities in Georgia, where one of the newest Amazon warehouses sits just miles from three older ones that haven’t been upgraded yet. The workers at the new facility sit and watch. “You’re literally sitting there watching a robot do a job,” she said, “and your only role is to unstick that thing if it stops working.”

Unstick that thing.

A robotics professor at Berkeley named Ken Goldberg said something that stuck with me. He said robots can’t do what you do when you reach into your purse and pull out your keys. You feel around. You grab them. You don’t think about it. No robot can do that. They don’t have the tactile sensors. They don’t have the dexterity.

For now.

That “for now” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It’s the same “for now” that kept typesetters employed until it didn’t. The same “for now” that kept elevator operators pushing buttons until someone realized the buttons could push themselves. Every “for now” in the history of labor has an expiration date. The question was never whether the robots would figure out how to reach into a purse. The question is what happens to the six hundred thousand people who were useful in the meantime.

A worker and organizer named Medelius put it plainly. “If you start off as a warehouse associate, it’s very unlikely that you’re going to move up. That’s one of the main complaints about Amazon — that they kind of want you out the door.”

There it is. The quiet part. Not out loud, never out loud — the spokesperson will say it’s “misleading,” will point to apprenticeship programs and career pathways and upskilling initiatives with names designed to look good in a press release. But the building is designed for the robots. The hallways are color-coded for the robots. The music plays for the robots. The training slideshows have AI-generated voice-overs, which means even the part where they teach you about the machines was made by a machine.

I think about that Southern California worker. Four years at Amazon. Watched his own position get automated in real time. Dock doors he used to manage, one person covering multiple stations now because the robots handle the rest. He worries about the young people. Says they’re already leaving because there’s nothing stable to grow into.

He’s right. And here’s what nobody in a corporate boardroom will say out loud: the upskilling promise is a fig leaf. It exists so that when the job numbers crater, there’s a press release ready. We offered training. We invested in our people. It’s not our fault they didn’t become robotics engineers.

The same script the coal companies used. The same script the auto plants used when the line went mechanical and the parking lot emptied out over the course of a decade. We’ll retrain you. We’ll transition you. We’ll help you adapt. And then five years later you’re in a town where the biggest employer is a building full of machines that play little songs as they roll down color-coded hallways, and you’re standing outside wondering where the future went.

Amazon came into these towns waving tax breaks and job numbers. County officials rolled out the red carpet. They built access roads. They rezoned farmland. In Georgia, one site is shutting down entirely because it can’t be retrofitted for robots. Can’t be retrofitted. Like a building has to earn its right to exist by being useful to machines.

A million robots in the warehouses. Still not enough, apparently. They want more.

The packages will arrive on time. They always do.

Source: What will the robot jobs apocalypse look like? Ask Amazon warehouse workers