Amazon is spending copious amounts of money looking for ways to automate labor currently done by human workers.
The company is hoping to replace more than half a million jobs with robots by 2033, as the New York Times reported this week (the company is currently the United States’ second-largest employer after Walmart.)
And in the meantime, it’s looking to make the human workers it’s stuck with as machine-like as possible. Just look at the company’s efforts to enhance its delivery drivers’ productivity with new smart glasses that can scan packages and provide turn-by-turn directions on the road.
Whether the goal is to make the lives of its already overworked drivers easier, or to squeeze every last drop out of them by turning them into dystopian cyborg drones that record their every move, is up for debate. In either case, it’s unlike anything we’ve seen in the workforce previously, meaning a lot could be riding on the success or failure of the experiment.
The smart glasses, which Reuters first got wind of in November, were officially revealed this week. The chunky wearables are meant to “help Delivery Associates (DAs) identify hazards, seamlessly navigate to customers’ doorsteps, and improve customer deliveries,” according to an official announcement.
Amazon claims it developed the glasses with the “input from hundreds of DAs, drivers who work for Delivery Service Partners.”
“If there are hazards, or a need to navigate complex environments like apartment buildings, the glasses will guide [drivers] safely to their destination,” the company wrote.
Instead of relying on an accompanying smartphone for number crunching, as is the case for similar offerings from the likes of Meta, Amazon’s glasses come with a vest that contains a battery and a camera trigger button.
Besides allowing drivers to detect “hazards” and “mistakenly dropped” packages, the glasses could reignite a heated debate surrounding the tech’s glaring privacy implications.
The advent of camera-equipped smart glasses has raised concerns among privacy advocates as they allow anybody to easily record everything and everyone around them, with or without consent.
As The Verge points out, Amazon made no mention of the ethical implications of its new “smart delivery glasses.”
To the contrary, the company’s continued doubling down on robotics suggests the wearables are only a stepping stone until deliveries can be done entirely via robots.
Earlier this year, The Information reported that the company is developing AI software to allow its robots to operate as package delivery workers — potentially foregoing the need for clunky eyewear altogether.
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