Amazon Worker Cage

In 2018 researchers Kate Crawford and Vladen Joler published Anatomy of an AI System, which described “The Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources” in a diagram and an essay. Among this macro-mapping of the Amazon smart speaker’s planetary impact, they highlighted an Amazon patent filing from 2016 for “a metal cage intended for the worker, equipped with different cybernetic add-ons, that can be moved through a warehouse by the same motorized system that shifts shelves filled with merchandise.” The researchers went on to describe this patented design as “an extraordinary illustration of worker alienation, a stark moment in the relationship between humans and machines… Here, the worker becomes a part of a machinic ballet, held upright in a cage which dictates and constrains their movement.”
As Crawford and Joler (and the patent itself) described, the cage design would insert the human worker into the same automated systems that shelving units are moved around on inside Amazon warehouses. Developed by Amazon Robotics, formerly Kiva Systems until its $700m acquisition by Amazon in 2012, the orange floor units (at one point called Betty Bots, at others simply “drive” units) that carry and sort the large shelving units full of Amazon stock, optimise and organise according to economy and not human legibility. These automated guided vehicles operate in “human exclusion zones” inside Amazon’s “fulfilment center” logistical warehouses. The patented cage becomes a way for humans to re-enter these machine-populated exclusion zones.
When news outlets picked up the research, Amazon commented that it never implemented the technology and has no plans to do so.