Amazon Patented A Cage For Its Employees To Work In But Insists It's Not A Big Deal
Seattle Times- A patent Amazon has received would pair humans and machines. In this case, the humans would be in a cage. Illustrations that accompany the patent, which was granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark office in 2016, show a cage-like enclosure around a small work space sitting atop the kind of robotic trolleys that now drive racks of shelves around Amazon warehouses.
Amazon says it never implemented the technology and has no plans to, but the design appeared to be an effort to allow humans to safely enter robot-only zones in Amazon’s highly-automated depots to make repairs or pick up dropped objects.
After God knows how many blogs and Cubicle Chronicles on Barstool, we finally have an example of how your slow slowly dripping out of your body in a cube farm isn’t so bad. Climbing in and out of a cage every day at work to grind for a faceless corporations amongst a bunch of machines is straight out a Black Mirror episode. But you know what? I’m not going to get upset and cry about it. I think we all realize that in order to buy 10 items that have absolutely NOTHING to do with each other and have it arrive on our doorsteps in less than 48 hours, some eggs have to be cracked. I’m not saying it’s right that your new Alexa could be just as bloody as a diamond from Sierra Leone. But I’m saying it could be real. Would people rather Amazon patent something that removes the human worker from the equation altogether and makes this process completely robotic? Of course not. We can’t have those robot take’er jurbbs!
This patent was clearly just about worker safety, right?
Lindsay Campbell, an Amazon spokeswoman, said speculation about the company’s use of the patent was “misguided.”
“Like many companies, we file a number of forward-looking patent applications,” she said. Many don’t see the light of day as finished products, particularly at Amazon, which encourages employees to experiment and invent. Such a cage-like device is not in use in any Amazon fulfillment centers, Campbell said.
See? Just a forward looking patent-looking out for the future common men and women that work for Amazon. Nothing more, nothing less, and definitely not something that could be pivoted to another use if Amazon formed it’s own country and tried to take over the world. Does this look like the face of a guy that would actually lock people in cages for his own benefit?
Shit. I hope Amazon has a patent out there for XXXL cages for their very large human prisoners once Emperor Bezos moves to his North America leg of the world domination plan.
Seriously though, what kind of psycho company would have a cage for its employees?
