Amazon still arriving today12/25/2023 ![]() Humans are still required to sort packages that are either smaller than a T-shirt or larger than a flatscreen TV. These tasks demand dexterity that we have been not able to replicate, or teach, in robots. Similarly, at the FedEx sorting center, humans are still required to sort the packages that are either smaller than a T-shirt in a poly bag or larger than a flatscreen TV. There is, as yet, no robot on earth that can do Tyler’s work with the same speed or accuracy. He performs this series of tasks in about ten seconds. When an item flashes up on a screen, Tyler pulls out the matching one from a bin of random goods, checks that it’s in good condition, scans its bar code, puts it into a container, and sends it along a conveyor. In an Amazon warehouse, Mims observes an associate named Tyler while he is on a “pick” station selecting goods for shipping. Humans are also still required for the small number of specific tasks that automation finds tricky. As the book makes clear, for these workers, the employers consider the redundancy of these workers a step toward a fully automated future. In an automated truck, there is a human with “his hands off the wheel but always hovering near it.” This work requires a lot of knowledge and skills but little application of them. A senior sailor has become “a human fail-safe for automated systems that usually require no intervention.” A longshoreman has swapped a life of knives, hooks, barrels, and sacks for “an ergonomic office chair” in a quiet office, required to be “in the loop” if a crane encounters difficulty. ![]() Automation has pushed them aside and now accomplishes the vast proportion of what they used to do, but it still requires supervision. His encounters with ship crews, longshoremen, warehouse workers, truckers, and delivery drivers all head in the same direction. But Mims balances firsthand testimony with a broad appreciation of management theory to find some fresh insight. Two recent examples are Andrés Oppenheimer’s The Robots Are Coming and Daniel Susskind’s A World without Work. The heart of the book is about how workers in the industry are coping, or not, with the introduction of automation. It includes impressive sections on how the different stages of the delivery process work. However, as a study of the logistics industry in the pre-pandemic era, Arriving Today is a fine piece of work. Beyond highlighting that the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of e-commerce, it is difficult for Mims, or anyone else, to look into the future with much clarity.īy Tim Laseter, Andrew Tipping, and Frederick Duiven Arriving Today is peppered with references to the disaster to appear current, but these only have the effect of underlining how much of the industry’s future is unknown. The problem is that, as yet, the firms in the eye of the storm-Amazon, FedEx, UPS-are still figuring out what the post-pandemic future looks like. As Mims discovers, “a period of furious activity…became the new normal for the entire industry.” Clearly, the pandemic had to be accounted for in the book. Christopher Mims, a tech columnist at the Wall Street Journal, attempts such a thing with Arriving Today, a detailed and dedicated explainer about the logistics industry.Īfter Mims has spent years reporting from ships, ports, trucks, and warehouses, the pandemic hits and everything is upended. This process is even trickier when the subject is fast moving. ![]() Writing something that lands with prescience requires unusual foresight and often a big dollop of luck. It is a long, inflexible project, planned years in advance and must fit around existing jobs and publishers’ schedules. Sometimes, writing a book feels like a fool’s errand.
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