Almost a Billion $s to Freedom

Or the Robots are taking all the sweet forklift jobs and leaving the go-bot zombie crap behind, shallow tasks for our superior Parallel processing brains to cope with.  Stunted abolition in the form of fatigue inducement that is the sucking quagmire of Monotonous.  Welcome to the stunning "Revolution".  Oh!  How the Division of Labor shines in the 21st Century.

The Deskill movement worries me the most.  I personally have dreaded the tasks at many a cavernous, dead-eyed warehouse.  But the work is honest to a point.  It is dishonest that most Management iron clad adheres to Lean Manufacturing. 

"Lean," is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination.  

 Waste reduction is a sane enough principle.  But I have seen from the inside of the Machine, that the first "waste" to go is pride in a multifaceted job done well.  Because time spent cross training is money lost, large brained mammals are reduced to one-button automatons. 

Do nothing but hammer out these engine mounts the whole graveyard shift.  Swiftly put miles of plastic casing on streaming glop to make thousands of hotdogs for three 12 hour days.  Run like a hamster in a ball, sort out photos every minute of the hour until they tell you your done.  Socialize on your own time, Frankenstein's monster.


What ignited this industrial diatribe is an article i just read on Venture Beat, Amazon buys Kiva Systems for $775M — prepare for even smarter warehouses.