Amazon’s Clever Machines Are Moving From the Warehouse to Headquarters

If it requires STEM labor then companies will try their hardest to proletarianize it. This is good for us. The professional "classes" are reactionary and should be liquidated.

Ah yes equality of consumption the classic marxist goal.

Software is what tells the machines what to do, dingus.

I think the point is that they aren't replacing software engineers, they are replacing business management types. It will be a while before engineers of any kind are being made obsolete by computer algorithms unfortunately.

Alex Jones time, I'm a well paid STEM Lord and I already feel the push to make our labor leverage ever weaker. But its not working at least in IT, its too interconnected and people quietly passively sabatoge their workplace all the time. Whenever someone on my team leaves it takes 6 months to learn about all the work he neglected on the run up to his departure, and its impossible to prove its done maliciously. It things I know my ex team mates knew better like making mid career mistakes when they are very senior engineers.
I porky knows this and that's why there been all these mind reading technologies.

I'm not a programmer myself, but from what I heard about shit like en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming I figured the main reason this is done is not to increase code quality, but to create the situation that the potential change of one person leaving the team is not a threat, so that nobody has bargaining power as long as the programmers negotiate salary and work conditions as individuals.

Hi, it's the worst kind of lawfag here. I used to think that automation of law was just around the corner, but I no longer think that's the case.
All of the uncontroversial aspects of law have been automated with the exception of maybe objective writing. It's fully possible that that's automated as well and no firm I know of uses it. Briefing, legal research, citing, contract writing are all automated or basically full automated. Firms still hire people to do that shit. Those people get $190k starting now. Firms are glorified sweatshops. On top of that, lawyers are incredibly adverse to change. You might not and probably won't believe me, but the aversion could trump the desire for profits, at least for a while.
Then you have the easily automated but hard questions. Even things like sentencing and the admissibility of evidence aren't close to automated. Those aren't even hard questions, analytically speaking. It's hard to get lawyers to admit that things they consider unquantifiable can be quantified and agree that things they consider unquantifiable should be quantified. I think this is the stumbling block that.
Beyond that you have the stuff that's hard to automate that requires solving hard questions, or at least controversial questions. Unless the "LOL ALGORITHMS ARE OBJECTIVE I'M FUCKING RETARDED ELON MUSK FTW" meme wins, this'll keep the lawyers you're thinking about when you hear the word "lawyer" employed for a while.

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Most firms aren't "big law." Most lawyers are glorified orderlies and paper pushers. Your average lawyer today makes less than your average software engineer for a reason.

You're right. I didn't say anything explicitly about biglaw vs the rest of the profession. That's on me. But I imagine that there's enough people with law degrees and piles of debt who are desperate enough to make automation unnecessary for the time being.

IS AMAZON BUILDING CYBERNETIC COMMUNISM?

They are a great example of how centralized planning can be achieved as long as you have access to enough data.

Also, reposting this because it really is b e a u t i f u l, even if it's state capitalism with Chinese characteristics

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That is a fair point. However as the technology becomes more efficient its price will drop. Fast food workers aren't expensive and yet the capitalists who employ them still want to eliminate them from their businesses (or at the very least minimize their role.)

B-BUT PORKY TOLD ME I WAS THE BEST EMPLOYEE, FAR BETTER THAN THE RABBLE IN THE WAREHOUSES
AUTOMATION WAS SUPPOSED TO CULL THE FILTHY RIFFRAFF, NOT ME
HOW CAN THIS BE?!?!

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daily reminder that lolberts are the least economically literate people
alternet.org/economy/ayn-rand-sears-and-eddie-lampert

So, educated work is automated away first because its the most expensive

Could someone please punch this man into a comma?

This isn't too exciting. All that's happening is that older MBAs are being replaced with statisticians. Amazon isn't automating insomuch as they are making themselves reliant on a different type of worker. This exert is very telling:

In other words, Amazon is now firing all the people that made them into such a huge business and replacing them with data-driven decisionmakers who won't innovate. The WF acquisition and 777 orders are part of this, they're vanilla attempts to reduce costs by verticially integrating. Every other business in existence has done this, although Amazon is fucked here because their food delivery relies on independent contractors and isn't automated with bulk box vans like Safeway's delivery service is.

This is so typical of capitalism, the company has now made so much money they think they can do no wrong and their only goal now is to reduce costs rather than build new products. In doing so Amazon has now set themselves on the same road Sears went down, even though they are 40 years behind them. This is their peak.

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No, Amazon is building Soviet era communism but with computers instead of old people. Ultimately the same mathematical models will be used, largely the same decisions made. Every November 1st you will see a new Christmas-themed item for sale that is "this year's hottest toy". Every time you open Amazon's website you will see an ad for their new product of the year with the product of the season.

Sound familiar? This is what Sears did with their mail order catalogs. The entire thing that made Amazon useful in the first place was because Amazon didn't attempt to build a numbers-driven mail order catalog business to compete with them, instead innovating and building an online website that lost shittons of money for the first ten years. Amazon moving to use purely data-driven decisionmaking is natural and expected of any capitalist business, but also plants the seeds of their inevitable demise.

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I feel kind of bad though. Like I know a lot of guys who went all in on business degrees who now have trouble landing jobs since they have to compete with STEMlords.

What is there to innovate here exactly? These people did the same thing as the algorithms that replaced them.

"Innovation" has become a euphemism for the magical essence that people ascribe to free market economics.

I think this consumer POV misses how much money Amazon makes with other activities, like renting out server capacity as well as physical storage space to other business and what not. I don't think Bezos and gang have any sort of philosophy about what the company won't ever do.

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No because people will just not buy shit from Amazon when it's the same copypasted stock images rotating every four months. Amazon's assumption that consumer desires can be predicted by looking purely at history will yield the same results as any other business trying to predict what people will want inside junk mail most of which gets thrown into the trash. Most retail outlets have this problem too, they tried to guess (based on history) what customers wanted; Radioshack moved into cellphone accessories, Toys R Us did Star Wars toys based on data-driven decisions. Look at how well it worked out, both are bankrupt.

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Bringing new products to market, and knowing how to expand ways in which customers can spend their money, rather than just offering what they are statistically likely to buy. The former can be seen in Safeway doing grocery delivery before Amazon, and Home Depot selling 3d printers and cnc mills. In both cases both Safeway and Home Depot chose to expand what they were selling and introduce customers into it, rather than just minmaxing their existing inventory with existing suppliers to maximize the potential profit.

Stores that try minmaxing customers are ones like Radioshack or Best Buy that ask every customer if they want to be a rewards member, if they can have their email for their rewards club, and if they want to buy the item of the day (usually phone data or cable plan upgrades) with their rewards points. Kohls does it too with clothes, and the result is usually customers not wanting to deal with bothersome employees or advertisements and deals constantly shoved into their face at all times. Amazon is going down this road, even though they're using statisticians to justify it instead of MBAs.

No, it's what happens when an entrepreneur wants to bring a product to market and sees and opportunity. Modern people call it a "blue ocean" strategy. Every company does it at some point in their lives, usually around their peak. Amazon has proven it is a typical capitalist enterprise by doing so.

"Blue ocean strategy" isn't much more than a word salad of marketing terms. My point was that the banal, often flawed and unoriginal decisions made by companies are often assumed to be the work of genius, simply because it "should" be. Apple is a prime example.

But isn't amazon web services what really makes amazom profitable now anyways?

Yes, like any competent business they turned out all their in-house products into services that can be sold to third parties. Amazon's use of Twitch is a good demonstration of this as it's where individual people get access to many of these parts for the purposes of selling subscriptions and merch. However, it also signifies that their retail business has peaked as now the real money is B2B stuff, not consumer sales. This is the same hole IBM and Microsoft have both found themselves in, since consumers tend to be bitchy and their markets less profitable.

Take a look at their attempts to make cashierless stores. The potential money from their own Whole Foods business unit is one thing, the money from patents and selling cashierless store tech is far greater. It's why they aren't serious about competing with Safeway, as that would require rebuilding WF's entire distribution infrastructure which is capital-intensive and only pushes prices down compared to figuring out a way to make cashierless sales work (especially when paired with an Uber-style door delivery service, rather than Safeway's use of bulk trucks).

Feels good man. 99% of the people who study business are self righteous bourgie asshats

Pic related, its how I feel as a programmer

No its just one of many retard tactics invented to try and stop people from making stupid mistakes. It doesnt work, its inefficient and annoying as fuck.

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