The Bigger Amazon Story: How a Human Becomes an “Amabot”

You may be aware of the spotlight that a recent New York Times piece has placed on working conditions at Amazon. Like me, you may also be wondering how a company that’s so smart about creating great customer experience can be so stupid about the experience it’s creating for employees. But the Amazon story is a much bigger story. It’s the story of how automation accelerates both blue-collar and white-collar work; Amazon just happens to be at its cutting edge.

Blue Amabot, White Amabot

This quote from the New York Times piece piqued my curiosity:

Company veterans often say the genius of Amazon is the way it drives them to drive themselves. “If you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot,” said one employee, using a term that means you have become at one with the system.

In another context, being “at one with the system” might connote ecological wholeness or some transcendental state, but here, we’re talking about being a cog in a machine. When we think of organizations as machines, the cog is a robot, or in this case, an “Amabot.”

The best description I’ve seen of the “blue-collar Amabot” at Amazon is an excerpt from the book, “Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans.” It details some disturbing examples of Amazon’s use of systems for monitoring the minute-by-minute movements and performance of employees, including reprimands for box packers who occasionally failed to use the bathroom closest to their workstation. It paints a picture of a high-tech form of old-fashioned Scientific Management thinking (aka “Taylorism”), and Amazon uses it to minimize “time theft” and increase the overall throughput of its fulfillment centers and other blue-collar workplaces.

The systems for the salaried, “white-collar Amabot” differ from the time efficiency systems for hourly blue-collar workers. Most white-collar Amabots focus on knowledge work, and the overriding goal here is to harness individual intelligence so as to maximize the collective intelligence of the greater system that is Amazon. For white-collar workers, the system is designed to capture maximum share of mind, which translates to eighty-hour workweeks and harvesting time from employee weekends and vacations. Another critical element of the systems design is finding and promoting the most promising minds with a software-enhanced version of the “up or out” talent cultivation techniques used by consulting firms and other organizations that rely heavily on brain power.

Dehumanization

Dehumanization is easier to see with physical labor. When companies tag employees with satellite navigation systems to ensure their movements are optimally routed through a warehouse, it’s hard not to see these people as cogs in a machine.

Dehumanization in knowledge work is more subtle. To see it, it helps to first look at the more general relationship between human labor and automation. In our economic framework today, the role of human labor is to do the work machines have not yet learned.

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If Amazon has humans carrying out machine-like work in its fulfillment centers, it’s simply because they haven’t yet figured out how to automate those particular jobs. In this sense, human labor provides a flexibility that fills in the edges of where our automation hasn’t yet reached. As machines gain scale and efficiency, the system becomes increasingly productive. That accelerating flow of work then adds more and more pressure on the inefficient human bottlenecks in the system. This is what we’re seeing with the Amazon stories.

Our initial efforts to automate knowledge work focused on email, websites, databases, and other tools for improving the generation and distribution of knowledge. As these tools took hold, information exploded. Machines weren’t yet capable of understanding this information, so human knowledge workers came under growing pressure as they raced faster and faster to maintain the accelerating throughput of the system. Stress increased, working hours increased, and work-life balance disintegrated, as we lost ourselves in the ensuing flood.

The effects we’re talking about here are two-fold: it’s a ‘de-humanization’ in the sense of a literal replacement of humans by machines, and it’s the more subtle erosion of our humanity from our frantic treading in that flood.

Rise of the Machines at Amazon