AND THEY DON'T GET PLANTAR FASCIITIS:

What I'm wondering today is, can Amazon be morally redeemed by robots?

As far as I can tell, here are the major problems people associate with the company:

*The poor working conditions and pay at fulfilment centers

*The competition with small retailers who cannot compete with Amazon on price

*The long fight it waged to avoid charging sales tax, which gave it an unfair advantage over brick-and-mortar retailers (Amazon now charges sales taxes for purchases in 23 states)

*The squeeze it has put on the publishing industry, most vividly represented in its current conflict with Hachette.

While you may be particularly concerned about one or more of these problems, it does seem to me that the one with the most serious moral weight is the first, how Amazon treats its least-skilled employees (I'm sure the programmers in Seattle are doing just fine, and if they aren't they can probably get good jobs elsewhere). And this is where the robots come in.

There are lots of occupations that may be threatened in coming years by automation. But the task of getting items in vast warehouses from shelves into boxes for shipping is one that is almost guaranteed to be automated. Those fulfilment center jobs may not be gone in five years, but if they're still around in large numbers in ten years, I'd be surprised. That's why in 2012 Amazon bought Kiva Systems, a manufacturer of warehouse robots. At the moment, the capabilities of those robots are limited -- they're very good at moving pallets from one place to another, but not as good at picking the right pair of nose-hair clippers out of a bin.

But eventually, they will be; or more precisely, the warehouses will be built around the robots' capabilities and limitations. Right now it's cheaper for Amazon to hire (often through temporary employment agencies so they aren't technically employed by Amazon, which is its own story) an army of people to run around warehouses picking items, but within a few years it'll be cheaper to have most of that work done by automated systems, with a much smaller number of human employees there to do quality control and service the machines.

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