Warehouse automation hasn’t made workers safer—it’s just reshuffled the risk, say researchers

Rapid advancements in robotics are changing the face of the world's warehouses, as dangerous and physically taxing tasks are being reassigned en masse from humans to machines. Automation and digitization are nothing new in the logistics sector, or any sector heavily reliant on manual labor. Bosses prize automation because it can bring up to two- to four-fold gains in productivity. But workers can also benefit from the putative improvements in safety that come from shifting dangerous tasks onto non-human shoulders.