Nicholas West

Activist Post

The outsourcing of human jobs as a side effect of globalization has arguably contributed to the current unemployment crisis. However, a growing trend sees humans done away with altogether, even in the low-wage countries where many American jobs have landed.

Citing brutal working conditions, inefficiency and corporate bottom lines, human beings are gradually becoming redundant. Moreover, there are indications that even skilled labor will soon be replaced, rendering humans obsolete in a variety of new ways.

At this point it doesn’t seem like the outsourcing of human abilities to our robotic counterparts is leading us toward the life of leisure that has been promised, but instead is leading to humans being perceived as nothing more than a troubling quantity within a new economic algorithm. How can we ensure that we maintain relevance during a time of such rapid change?

Product Fulfillment Process: We all have become incrementally familiar with the ways that our orders, requests and demands are handled by non-humans. Fulfillment can range from ATMs, automatic grocery checkout, online order processing, having a movie delivered by mail or Internet, to automated answer systems for nearly all of our products.

Order fulfillment by machines is nearly ubiquitous. A component of this is the warehouse — finding an item, packaging, and shipping it. The following personal account titled, “We are Obsolete” sums up perfectly the company reasoning behind getting rid of humans in this part of the workplace: