
Warehouse jobs, a thing of the past?
Warehouses are one area where the impact of replacing workers by robots of various types is already being felt. Practically all companies that make things have warehouses, and the development of new logistics is imposing the need for ever-greater efficiency and automation, along with traceability, while eliminating errors. Logistics is increasingly a key factor in reducing operational costs, and the pressure on companies is increasing. Everything indicates that innovations such as self-driving vehicles will be put to use in warehouses before making their way onto the roads.
A warehouse is a much more predictable environment than a road. Its dimensions and particularities are perfectly mapped in detail and precision, and conditions such as temperature, lighting, visibility or obstacles are easy to assess. On the other hand, warehouses, particularly above a certain size, are enormously subject to human error: a material placed manually in the wrong place is not only hard to find, it takes up space that could be used for something else.
Amazon’s famous (and fantastic) video featuring its Kiva robots, which I’ve been using since 2011 in my classes and lectures, has already been overtaken by other alternatives, such as this Chinese logistics company. But beyond relatively small, stunted and orange robots capable of transporting entire packages or shelves, a warehouse has other requirements. According to statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2,924,300 Americans worked in warehouse registration tasks in addition to another 3,719,300 dedicated to moving materials manually on their shelves and another 679,900 in charge of handling machines to move pallets and other heavy loads.
In the image, a self-driving Seegrid forklift: the classic forklift found in warehouses the world over, but in its autonomous version. Able to move more than three and a half tons of materials without a human operator, thanks to five cameras that provide stereoscopic vision and allow it to drive in a warehouse previously mapped to perfection. Contrary to the case of autonomous vehicles, the cameras provide sufficient information for the optical recognition system without the need for systems such as radars or LiDAR, due to the greater predictability of the warehouse environment. In addition to moving loads, it is able to collect and release them without human intervention, which eliminates not only wages, but also allows it to gain precision in repetitive tasks that typically tend to generate a certain error rate.
How many companies are going to consider eliminating most of their workforce in their stores in the next few years? How many of those who cannot do so will go on to subcontract management of their warehouses out to specialized companies, capable of extracting much greater returns from logistics? How long will it be before warehouse jobs are a thing of the past? But above all… what sense does it make, once machines have developed the ability to carry out repetitive and heavy tasks, to employ people to do them?
(En español, aquí)

