Other companies may overtake Amazon. The UK online-supermarket Ocado is a leader in designing highly automated systems it sells to other grocery chains. Its warehouse system looks like a ‘a huge chessboard, populated entirely by robots’ that engage in tasks of ‘lifting’, ‘moving’ and ‘sorting’ in a ‘hive-grid-machine’; each bot has a central cavity and claws to grab and pull crates inside ‘like an alien abduction in a supermarket aisle’ (Vincent 2018). The bots are interchangeable, switching from one task to another; production can be scaled up or down by the addition or subtraction of bots, and their algorithmic programming allows novel solutions to warehouse organization. China’s warehousing firm JD.com, working in collaboration with Google, claims to have achieved even higher levels of automation (Paquette 2018). There are still plenty of workers in Ocado and Amazon facilities, but as bot systems deepen and spread, the pace of work increases and its security declines.
Circulation culminates in sales. Retail jobs too are registering the tremors of AI’s introduction. Again, ML builds on previous digital changes; online sales have transformed retail business, self-checkout lines are common, and both made deep cuts to in-store employment. AI extends this logic to the creation of staff-less automated retail outlets run almost entirely on downloaded apps and scanned products. These technologies were pioneered in Sweden, initially in remote-area grocery stores (Prindle 2016). They were then deployed by Swedish companies in China (Sun 2017), where mobile phone payment for daily shopping has been popularized through services such as WeChat, and no-staff stores, some operating on a relatively low-tech self-checkout basis, are common. The North American version debuted in Amazon’s Go stores which, as we have discussed, combine mobile phone apps, automatic scanning and ‘artificial intelligence and computer vision to match the face of the buyer with the items in one’s bag, to eliminate checkout altogether’ (Horwitz 2018). Such systems have the potential to include chatbots providing shoppers with ‘customized suggestions’, and IoT delivery orders from automatically self-stocking refrigerators and other smart home devices (Sun 2017; Pirrone 2018). Walmart, already famous for its massive system of computerized inventory control, is researching similar systems in partnership with Microsoft, a development that, given Walmart’s status as the largest single corporate employer in the US, has major labour market implications.
automating the social factory
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