Someone at @Amazon has a sense of humour as, despite being potentially the biggest day in Amazon’s history, they took time to have some fun with the Amazon Robots and programmed them to wish a Happy Prime Day to workers in Italy. It must have been a little bit magical for the workers to see the robots come together and who doesn’t love a light show?
Amazonians in #Italy are working side-by-side with robots to pick, pack, and ship customer orders. This morning for #PrimeDay, the machines delivered a special surprise… pic.twitter.com/G7c0wPN950
— Amazon News (@amazonnews) July 17, 2018
Amazon Robots, formerly Kiva from the robitics company they acquired, are pretty amazing as they autonomously wander around the warehouse picking up racks of goods and delivering them to picking stations. In reality it’s a closely monitored sequence controlled by Artificial Intelligence as the robots communicate with each other to decide who will do which job and ensuring that they don’t run into each other.
For the sequence in the film above, someone had to manually take control and program in a set sequence for the robots to perform. Cute, largely pointless, but it does show that Amazon have a human side and at least for a few workers in Italy, they had a brief respite from their warehouse labours.
2 Responses
From what I’ve read of workplace conditions in Amazon warehouses, it seems the robots are treated better than the humans. As for their packing quotas, one of the reasons I dislike shopping on Amazon is their slapdash, un-green, often downright sloppy packing. I once received a flat packet of Halloween ghosts (those vinyl ones where you stuff a wad of paper into a corner and fasten a twist-tie below it to form the “head”, then hang the resulting ghostie from a tree limb or what-have-you) packed in a 10x14x4-inch box, with an air pillow or 2 tossed in for good measure. So ridiculous!
And you’re right: Who doesn’t love a light show?!
Am sure their workers were absolutely delighted on their zero hours temp contracts to be reminded they will even have to work harder on prime day. Always more for less.