Amazon is trialling humanoid robots in its US warehouses, in the latest sign of the tech giant automating more of its operations, reports BBC News. It said it was testing a new robot called Digit, which has arms and legs and can move, grasp and handle items in a similar fashion to a human. A UK union said Amazon had ‘been treating their workers like robots for years’. “Amazon's automation is [a] head-first race to job losses. We've already seen hundreds of jobs disappear to it in fulfilment centres," said Stuart Richards, an organiser at UK trade union GMB. Amazon said the move was about ‘freeing employees up to better deliver for our customers’.

The ecommerce said its robotics systems had in fact helped create ‘hundreds of thousands of new jobs’ within its operations. "This includes 700 categories of new job types, in skilled roles, which didn't exist within the company beforehand," the firm said. Amazon added that it now has more than 750,000 robots working ‘collaboratively’ with its human staff, often being used to take on ‘highly repetitive tasks’.

Amazon Robotics' chief technologist, Tye Brady, told reporters at a media briefing in the US that people were ‘irreplaceable’, and disputed the suggestion that the company could have fully-automated warehouses in the future. "There's not any part of me that thinks that would ever be a reality," he said. “People are so central to the fulfilment process; the ability to think at a higher level, the ability to diagnose problems."