Automation  The Economic Game Changer

At first glance, the title of this article seems old hat. Companies have been automating for years. However, business is now going through a wave of automation that is making a major change in the way many businesses operate and is radically changing the nature of the work force.

Amazon,(of course) is one of the leaders. Several years ago, when the company started, it wanted to automate book sales and started by not even having warehouses. However, it found that warehouses were essential in order to fill orders on a timely basis. So it began to build and maintain warehouses for its books. The was somewhat of an unhappy development, since it raised the operating costs of Amazon and helped to trigger the need for a new business model to cover those costs. After several years of floundering, it did find a business model that worked - one that involved a lot more than selling books.

Now, however, Amazon is employing robots in their warehouses -  robots that move shelves of books around as needed, essentially taking the product to the humans rather than having the humans lug it around. This is more efficient and marks part of the nature of the change taking place. Workers walking the warehouse being replaced by workers at electronic workstations.

There is nothing new about workers being replaced by machines. It's been happening since the early days of the industrial revolution, such as, for example, the introduction of tractors into farming. Generally its been a good thing, with new jobs (such as building and repairing tractors) coming along to replace the old ones (plowing fields by horse drawn plows).

What is new is the growth in the number of cases where hitherto human controlled functions are totally automated, requiring little or no human intervention, through the use of automated processes to take over human paper shuffling and robots to take over physical tasks..

The use of robots is growing radically with even general purpose robots being developed that will be able to do a variety of tasks. Move over R2D2!

Check out this article.