Amazon drivers have a hard gig. They've struggled for years against long hours with limited breaks, unreasonable delivery quotas, and wage theft — not to mention repressive union-busting efforts to make sure none of that changes.
Those are the conditions that led the Teamsters to launch the largest labor strike against Amazon in US history just days before Christmas of last year.
But as calls grow to stop treating its workers like robots, Amazon has decided to cut out the middle man — and just use actual robots instead.
That seems to be the goal, at least, behind a new robotics facility meant to test humanoid robots in a real-world delivery environment, a development first reported by The Information.
Dubbed a "humanoid park," an anonymous source described the site as an indoor obstacle course located at an Amazon facility in San Francisco. The retail giant is seemingly testing bipedal bots to work with its fleet of Rivian electric vans to deliver packages to homes, which were reportedly part of the simulated delivery habitat.
At the core of it all — as with just about anything these days — is a nebulous commitment to AI.