In May, Amazon hosted the “Amazon Picking Challenge“—a competition to build a robot that can identify objects of any shape and take them off shelves. Such a machine could one day replace most of the human workers in Amazon’s warehouses. So what will life be like when those jobs are gone?
As it happens, Quartz’s Gideon Lichfield had already imagined just such a future. He was one of four writers commissioned earlier this year to produce science-fictional stories for the Intelligence & Autonomy project at the Data & Society Research Institute, a New York think/do tank where he is a part-time fellow. The stories looked at how the rise of machine intelligence and automation might transform warfare, disaster management, medicine, and labor. Lichfield’s story, Override, imagines a fulfilment warehouse in the year, say, 2025…
tinfoilparachute 