In January, The Guardian reported that Amazon had patented designs for a new wristband. The device would not only follow the movements of company workers, but could track where they place their hands and ‘use vibrations to nudge them in a different direction’.
Another Amazon patent would ‘put workers in a cage, on top of a robot’, allowing the caged worker to move through a warehouse on the same mechanized system used to cart around merchandise. The cage, Amazon’s spokespeople promise, is not actually in use in the company’s fulfilment centres, but such insistence is only faintly reassuring.
