Bernie Sanders this week attended Walmart's annual shareholders meeting in Arkansas to put pressure on the company to pay its employees $15 an hour. Meanwhile in Las Vegas, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was discussing how this would be completely irrelevant within the next decade.
As reported by Reuters at Amazon's re:MARS conference, Bezos said that within a decade the ability for robots to grab items as reliably as humans would be possible. He said that the “vision” of robots would have to improve, though, in order to accomplish this objective. He was confident that even with the current challenges "gripping" robots, this would be an achievable goal within the next decade.
This has the potential to completely automate Amazon’s complex and vast sorting and distribution processes and would put at risk the 125,000 employees that currently occupy them -- not to mention the nearly 100,000 workers they hire during the holiday season.
Amazon has been reportedly working with the start-up Soft Robotics to further their increasingly automated warehouse. An example of their technology can be seen in the video below: