It's so strange that a site full of software developers reacts so harshly to the idea of robots. What exactly is it you people think you are building? You automate stuff for a living.
Is it okay to automate sales and customer service and marketing, but warehouse workers are where you draw the line? Do you have any idea how many jobs this industry has already "killed"?
we realized that we don't want all the money/profit to circulate around the top 10 tech companies in the world where all of us are out of the equation...
HN isn't a monoculture. Many people visit this website to hear the criticism from a diverse constituent of software developers. If you expect any unanimous conclusion, I'd argue your expectations are the strange one.
My foremost concern is that robots, particularly American-made ones, aren't ready for primetime yet. Human bodies solve problems that aren't easily automated even with a perfectly capable humanoid robot and AI-powered IK solver. I've worked in the computer vision and factory automation fields, and outside a completely automated redesign I don't think robots will significantly reduce headcount in this field.
It's so strange that a site full of entertainment workers reacts so harshly to the idea of Madame Web. What exactly is it you people think you are making?
Well, a the scale at which AI and other things are proceeding to replace humans just for the sake of saving money for few top earning people. It's horrible. I shall say you should ban AI for most of the things where it can help solve issues! Now that's upto to humanity how it want to keep people eating food or have a proper life
Because I care when those people land on the street.
Unfortunately something I have seen happening a few times in our capitalism society where only shareholders happiness matters, hitting those quarter goals of exponential growth.
Not everyone thinks of others as disposable resources.
Software jobs replaced administrative white collar jobs where instead of the bureaucracy being human interaction and paper forms, it is computerized and encoded in malleable and evolving code.
Sales underwent consolidation where the same human interactions scaled to bigger deals. Customer service was outsourced. Marketing still remains a mysticism with no clear evidence of a return on investment.
This news topic is also a thinly veiled replacement outsourcing. The engineers involved will replace these roles. When the robots fail, it will most likely have foreign pilots taking control.
The barrier to entry only gets higher, and the people left behind are stuck in a donut hole.
And has meant that some professions are basically dead and fewer people are in lots of jobs. The folks that lose jobs aren't generally qualified for the jobs that opened and aren't always even located in the same country.
And that happens with a lot of advances. Creates but also takes away.
…Yes? Someone needs to design the robots, build the robots, administer and direct the robots, repair and maintain the robots, evaluate the performance of and improve upon the existing design of the robots… not to mention write the software that controls the robots in the first place, design the UI that users use to interface with the robots…
Pre WW2 the USA had skid rows and flop houses full of men who didn't make the cut to the new industrialized economy. People literally rented a rope to lean on for the night. WW2 changed things for the US where that was no longer a common thing.
People fear that we are heading back into that, with no plan other than 'things turned out fine last time this happened' ignoring the, you know, skid row, flop houses, etc and no idea what the magic jobfairy will bring us to be these new, magically appearing 'jobs to come'.
The cotton gin is the literal textbook example of a technology that ethically backfires and induces magnitudes greater suffering than what it was intended to obviate. It saved and expanded the institution of chattel slavery in the USA.
Before people bring their pitchforks to this headline, take a look at existing automation in factories [1][2] and ask yourself why would we ever want humans to do something that robots can do this well? Also despite the fact that humanoids are all the hype now (and included in the article), note that amazon has been investing in much more specialized approaches for quite some time [3][4].
There are so many things we can be doing with our time, and moving objects from a left-bin to a right-bin simply does not need to be one of them. The real question is if we have the collective will to get all these folks education and opportunities to do something else before they feel too much pain in the near term.
> Before people bring their pitchforks to this headline
In addition to your points, something people forget is that in the previous model of brick and mortar stores, the consumer is the person that did the walking around the store and picking the items off the shelf and carrying them to the checkout.
So a portion of what Amazon is automating used to be performed for free by the consumer. This was one of the big arguments about their business model for shipping books early on, the additional costs in a competitive retail market seemed like it would be unprofitable.
That leads to the cost of cleaning up after the customer to make sure they can buy what they need.
Before Amazon, there were the club warehouse retail models like Costco where the frontend experience was cut down and the backend infrastructure scaled up. This all led to cost savings passed onto the customer.
Amazon seems like the next step where the last mile delivery infrastructure was expanded and the retail frontend was replaced by a website. Instead of millions of frontend retail workers, it's software knowledge workers with an accompanying expansion of the backend retail workers.
Now, the software knowledge workers are eating backend retail.
Imagine the crash in book sales if humans were not hustling and could spend time socializing meaningfully.
Job culture is nothing but empty competition. Billions of normalized thinkers reduced to nothing but tools of a "trade". Where trade is normalized to time for money.
Not a fan of the racism and gender bias, but am 1000% indifferent to bougie labor exploiting office workers being handed their hat.
"Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!" Yeah but you all suck to work with because that's all you are; HR slang, marketroid speak, programming language gibberish. Yawn.
Am psyched the zeitgeist is turning on "knowledge workers" who ignored worker exploitation and devaluation of others just the same.
> if we have the collective will to get all these folks education and opportunities to do something else
I hear this often, but have not read a single explanation of what the "something else" is that these people are supposed to do (a "something else" that we aren't also actively trying to replace with AI or AI driven processes). Barbers? Nail salons? I think we have enough of those already.
absolutely; but nobody is planning for this or even seriously considering it. to the contrary, we now have a government that is happy to take away healthcare and food stamps from its working class citizens
> we will have masses of disenfranchised and dissatisfied people
I fear this is coming
> with no incentive to keep society working
as long as the rich get serviced, they won't care much whether society is "working" or not
Oh, yes, everyone can "just" switch careers into difficult, underpaid, passion-driven work paid for with money that already doesn't exist, let alone in an economy where Amazon & friends rake in 90% of all cash flow and has no employees to pay it out to.
ICE got billions of dollars this year seemingly out of thin air, and they are paying up to $50k for a signing bonus. The manhattan project went from nothing to an operation with 130,000 people in just four years.
You really don't think we can just fund people to go into healthcare or teaching? You understand that there is no real reason for those professions have to be chronically underpaid and overworked, right?
Yes exactly - "Anything we can actually do, we can afford"
I would also suspect that more than 50% of the people working this kind of unskilled labour do have aspirations to do more, it's just that it's hard to switch because they cannot afford to, they're working towards it or they're kind of stuck.
We certainly have the money, but there is no political will to make it happen. I'd love to see the military budget cut it half and it fund social programs and more teachers. But baring a social revolution (which may indeed be forthcoming) it won't happen. That's the harsh reality of our late-stage capitalist society.
nursing is a highly skilled job which the vast majority of people are _not_ cut out for; it's also highly competitive. Your average Amazon warehouse worker or truck driver is _not_ becoming a nurse
> elderly care
this would be something like a CNA; doesn't require the skills of a nurse ,but most people do not want this job (and also wouldn't be very good at it); there's a reason why a lot of undocumented people do elderly care in America
> environmental remediation
sure, this would be a good one. but who is paying for that? it's not a money maker, so unless it's government funded like the CCC, it's not going to happen. and given that work programs like that are "socialism", it's not going to happen in the US any time soon
> teachers
teaching, like nursing, is a job that most people are _not_ well suited for. more importantly, like the last one, who is paying for this? our government is trying to gut public education, not spend more money on it.
So, again, unless there is a _new_ industry that can provide a _large_ number of jobs, which is driven by _profit-seeking companies_ (because otherwise, who is paying?), it is _not_ happening. And so far, there is no indication that such jobs or companies exist.
So my point stands. This is _not_ like the Industrial Revolution or any other "revolution" (computerization, internet, etc.), all of which spawned entire new industries.
We could be spending our time more wisely, but our addiction to quarterly cycles needs something now as opposed to a hypothetical better future for the displaced workers.
> Job losses could shave 30 cents off each item purchased by 2027.
This is incredible. It's far less than I would imagine. It represents how well optimized the warehouses are. If we roughly estimate a median product price to be $20, then the automation represents less than 2% cost saving. Of course, Amazon is at a scale that this is still net positive despite all the R&D cost. But if automation was to reduce the cost of living, there are probably better areas to focus on.
It represents how well optimized the exploitation of the warehouse workers is - extract maximum amount of work from employee while paying them as little as possible. And once the "cobots" (robots that work alongside humans) come along, they will feel even more like a cog in the great Amazon machine, until they probably quit on their own rather than waiting for their turn to be replaced...
They won't be destitute. Population collapse is coming, it's imperative we automate anything we can, so those workers are freed up to work in non-automatable jobs. 94% population loss in South Korea over the next three generations. Similar numbers in South America as well.
Maybe, in three generations. That’s a long time from now. And these job losses are happening in the next decade, during a population peak, at least in the US.
There are barely any customers in this country now. We're operating off credit: the US (as a currency, not just the government) is 1.2 trillion in the red. It's an accounting identity, it can't be argued with.
It's an inevitability that people unproductive in the real economy will get cut off. You can't run an economy on gigwork that just makes parasitic upper-middle and upper-class lives more comfortable. Elite comfort isn't real production. You cannot feed, clothe, or house people with Uber rides and advertising. Instead, in the US, you feed, clothe, and house people with imports, purchased with borrowed foreign currency.
And the government takes whatever it gets and redistributes it upwards to capital-intensive industries and "US" businesses that are completely supplied by imports. It's almost an optimized destruction.
How do you square that China is way more in the red than the USA and things like their high speed rail aren't able to pay down the construction loans, let alone cover the coming maintenance?
China is operating on the 'I just bought a new house so my only expense is my mortgage and I have no technical debt because it's all new' position, which doesn't last.
The USA is in the 'all we have is technical debt' phase. Which means smart investment spending can bring real gains IF we don't allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by where we currently are.
The problem is our 'elites' got addicted to that post 2010 hyper short term growth based on digital products. Boeing management moved to DC away from production, because to modern American business the product is removed from the company, something to outsource to someone else. Our MBA/management/leadership types are too precious to be wasted on those sorts of details.
The same thing we are doing now: nothing. The poor already aren't customers, and what remains of the middle class is already being priced out of basic necessities.
Have no fear, they are gunning for the upper class, now. A quick glance at big tech gutting their ranks is just the beginning for high wage earners.
History shall repeat itself, and many of those jobs will vanish forever.
This is a discussion Jimmy Carter wanted to have when computers were just becoming mainstream --- the idea was the taxes on the sales of computers would be used to fund worker re-training --- cue old news stories about the compositor unions bargaining for sinecures and the last compositor retiring after decades of punching in and sitting in the breakroom all day.
LLMs and robotics look to be the first mainstream technological development in a long while which not only reduces the number of workers needed, but also doesn't have a commensurate increasing of the size of the economy in terms of increased wages through efficiency and profits being paid as wages --- instead, it is the concentration of profits by those who own the means of production as Karl Marx warned about and the Luddites feared.
If less work is needed to keep society running, why not have a reduction in the work week, and either pay folks overtime (in keeping with the increased efficiencies/profits) or have more workers (to reflect the added efficiency and spread out the workload).
> Or, perhaps it's time for universal basic income?
Funded by Carters idea where we tax corporations for job elimination. For every head you reduce with automation you pay a tax to help support that head in their time of unemployment. Then we tax the automation products.
Of course with the current government situation this isn't happening. Ever.
Sounds unironically great, this way only startups that have nobody to fire will grow
let GM figure out how to file the paperwork and another company can replace it
To jump in on the political, in minimum wage "debates" the conservative side was always that higher minimum wage will encourage automation.
But as we look at post-pandemic automation (the counter operator is mostly replaced by an app) or automation (China's robots per capital), or tax policies that encourage capital spending (2018 tax bill, depreciation) it becomes obvious that automation will happen and is in many ways good. But our policy makers, media, and therefore average voter miss the forest for the trees.
>LLMs and robotics look to be the first mainstream technological development in a long while which not only reduces the number of workers needed, but also doesn't have a commensurate increasing of the size of the economy in terms of increased wages through efficiency and profits being paid as wages
This article (with limited data I'll note) only talks about the first part -- that it's eliminating jobs. It doesn't say that it isn't also creating jobs.
LLMs have only been a big deal for 2 years. are you saying that all of this middle class shrinkage arrived because of that specifically? the original comment was saying this is an LLM-specific issue.
UBI is going to be the only option eventually, outside of a moneyless, post-scarcity utopia.
Investing in subsidized worker retraining can work very short term, but with widespread automation and a reduced requirement for human workers, that can only go so far as the demand for employees simply won’t be there.
So we either have strong laws and protections that enforce that everyone receives the benefits of automation, or we don’t and only a small percentage of the population receives the benefits while everyone else starves to death.
There is no reduced requirement for human workers. Our infrastructure is crumbling, and we're using as many Chinese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Pakistani, Indian, Mexican, etc. workers as we always have.
The only reason America itself fell into dust is because they couldn't figure out how to ship bridges and high speed rail from China. They were hoping that removing all border controls would be the answer, but people who used to have good paying jobs making and building things got upset.
The Democratic Party strategy to ridicule and censor them into silence seems to have failed miserably, but the Republican strategy of making a huge show out of deporting 30 poverty-stricken refugees while ignoring businesses who employ tens of thousands is working.
Nobody has managed the politics of a true UBI, and America will be one of the last places to get it. The need to punish perceived slackers is just too high.
> The need to punish perceived slackers is just too high.
That's because the US was always in a race to find more enemies to fight. It's an easy way to rally the many under a single banner and then move the banner around as needed by the few.
Well, sometimes perception is reality. If you have too many slackers, then your group/society stops functioning altogether and/or succumbs to other, more successful groups.
Then it doesn't matter what entitlements you think you should have been getting (or were getting)
Also, based on your phrasing, you seem to think that the current system punishes slackers (and/or perceived slackers) and that's our collective preference? In your opinion is this being done deliberately, or just through regular pricing mechanisms of capitalism?
As a whole, in the US, people don't even want people to have free healthcare. What do you think the chances are that they want people to have "free" money?
Nobody has been talking about UBI except in the same sense that people talk about warp drives, i.e. as a nice-to-have-someday bit of speculative fiction. Everyone is aware that if UBI were actually proposed in the political sphere it would be killed immediately, by most of the some oligarchs who dishonestly talk about it now.
But when consumers disappear and the wealth is threatened, won’t it simply be the only solution to keep the show going for the oligarchs? It may well be inevitable.
High income consumers are a steadily increasing percentage of consumer spending, and the bottom 60% of consumers are something like 20% of all spend. One outcome is just that the trend continues and high income consumers spend more which offsets decreases in low income consumers.
I think this is part of the reason why Apple has been promoting subscription services. iPhones have historically been apple's largest revenue source, but revenues have been increasing, from about 10% to 20% over the last 10 years.
Lets say the lower 50% of consumers buy something like a $1000 phone every 4 years currently, and they switch to buying a 16e for $600, or a decrease of $100 a year per customer. In revenue terms you could offset this by selling .5 customers a $240 a year Apple one subscription, up-selling a iPhone pro customer to 1TB storage, or convincing someone to buy a pair of Airpods Max over regular Airpods.
I'm supportive of effort to mechanize work, but humanoid robots always seemed like a "horseless carriage" approach to me. The human body is powerful in its adaptability but most industrial processes are better enhanced by purpose-built machines.
Not to mention that general purpose robotics seem like they will always be more expensive to buy, run and maintain than a human is. Perhaps bountiful renewable energy will change that.
A reliable and effective general purpose robot will always be more expensive than a less reliable, less effective human being. Why would you sell something better than the average human willing to take the role, for less than that human wants?
I see too many students treat a robot arm like an automation hammer when watching a few episodes of "How It's Made" will give you a much better view into true automation.
I know we’re living through turbulent times with a lot of disruption. I’m struggling to decide whether to keep my retirement investments in equities or move to something more stable. While AI and robotic automation clearly benefit corporate bottom lines, fewer people will have jobs. Who will be buying the products and services these companies sell?
> At the Shreveport facility, more than 160 people work as robotics technicians, and they make at least $24.45 an hour. Most of Shreveport’s 2,000 employees are regular hourly workers, whose pay starts at $19.50.
And this is for a prototype plant where you would expect the need for more and top-qualified technicians. (Most likely this does not count the robotics installers and tuners which might be from a different sub-company and classification - but still.) This might change when demand for qualified robotics technicians keeps increasing.
Another noticeable thing was that even with this automation push, Amazon is mostly planning to hire LESS. Not really reduce yet. It seems they are still growing beyond the potential improvements of robotics.
Still another is the insane capital-intensiveness of retail now! Wow.
> And this is for a prototype plant where you would expect the need for more and top-qualified technicians.
One would think, but that's not really the reality for the technicians. Amazon assuredly brought in some experienced techs from other facilities to help with launch, but most of the staff are just locals.
> At the Shreveport facility, more than 160 people work as robotics technicians, and they make at least $24.45 an hour. Most of Shreveport’s 2,000 employees are regular hourly workers, whose pay starts at $19.50
The associate pay sounds right, but the average starting pay for robotics technicians is in the low-mid 30s. The $24.45 figure is for apprentices, who are not a large part of any maintenance cohort.
The next disruption (possibly by Amazon) will be in getting products more directly from the point of manufacture to the point of use. Warehouses are an oversized cache for physical goods.
Normally I'd be against this kind of thing, but Amazon warehouse work is notoriously abusive and people would be better off out of it .. if they had alternatives.
There were some bad weather incidents where warehouse workers were not permitted to seek shelter from tornados = from which they died [0].
Additionally, the warehouses are staffed by contractors, who once laid off from the subcontracting company are permabanned from ever working for any other contracting company that Amazon will use. Amazon is literally running out of humans that they can hire. If they are unwilling to address their "one and done" policy, Amazon will have to use robots in order to stay in business.
I strongly feel the same way about agriculture. Farm work is back breaking, and the people who work in the fields are constantly exposed to pesticides and other environmental dangers, not to mention the physical severely dangerous work they do at times automating that kind of labor would be much safer for workers.
Amazon doesn’t do a good job of handling workers. So I guess this is a good thing. Mistreatment is a bad thing.
Prices will be lowered. And the appeal of warehouses will go up this way. But for the remaining workers, I don’t think Amazon will come up with a better work environment. I don’t think they have that skill set.
There was a reasonable argument floating around that Bezos decided to resign because they had burned both their blue collar AND white collar labor pools in the markets they were in- meaning people wouldn't work for them even at higher rates in that market. I guess this is their solution?
It is obvious that Amazon wishes to replace all its employees for cheaper alternatives. That is true for all big companies. How realistic is this plan that is the question.
American companies lie so often about the feasibility of future capabilities that it is becoming just background noise. If the plan is not realistic, if it is not based in well argued projects, then they are just lying to the public and to investors. Currently the bar is so low, that anything counts as "we just though that it was possible" so it is not illegal. That should be solved.
the desire to save money/replace workers is real (though I wish that they would start by recycling packaging/materials in the warehouses) and there are certainly a lot of ways in which this could be done --- the issue of course is how society will work through this --- I suspect we'd all feel a bit differently about this if Amazon were a public benefit corporation rather than one focused on profit for shareholders. Their motto is:
>Work Hard, Have Fun, Make History.
and it really should have included something about making the world a better place or doing good.....
> How realistic is this plan that is the question.
FTA:
Amazon has considered steps to improve its image as a “good corporate citizen” in preparation for the anticipated backlash around job losses, according to The NYT, reporting that the company considered participating in community projects and avoiding terms like “automation” and “AI.” More vague terms like “advanced technology” were explored instead, and using the term “cobot” for robots that work alongside humans.
You're not wrong, but an important distinction in this case (at least according to TFA) is that these were internal documents, not intended for the public/investors.
It can be trusted that someone wrote this for a specific audience. Whether the contextual understanding of that audience matches our own is another matter.
Internal documents doesn't mean they weren't lying. It just changes the target, the expected audience, of the lie. Many workers lie to their bosses. They speak what they think their bosses want to hear, and bosses tell them what lies they want to be told.
And this is why they don't care how many people they fire. The intention was always to automate the warehouses, and as long as they do it before they exhaust the workforce, turnover doesn't matter.
Every time this comes up there are the people who say, "but look at the Industrial Revolution, all the farmers found new jobs; so certainly everyone laid off by AI will find new jobs too".
I would like to hear, from one of those believers, _what_ type of _new_ jobs these laid off warehouse workers are going to get? (And no, they won't become AI prompt engineers.)
I have not heard a single satisfactory answer to this very simple question. And if no one has any idea of what type of _new_ jobs are opening up, then it's highly unlikely to happen.
In the Industrial Revolution, billions (for that time) were being spent on creating whole new types of jobs (i.e., factories). Which companies today are spending any money on creating new jobs?
isn't the dexterity and precision of the human hand to robotics as the problem solving ability of the human brain is to LLMs? Like, are robotics even close to that level of performance?
Yes, but you don't need to replace all human tasks, or come anywhere near the level of performance of a human.
If they can get robots to successfully handle any item packaged in a cardboard box, that is a tremendous boon, even if you still have to hire people to deal with blister packaging, bottles and other irregular shapes.
Hell, Amazon has enough market power with suppliers that if they say they only want to sell things in robot friendly packages, most suppliers will rapidly find a way.
Future-of-work stuff aside, I’m always confused when I see bipedal robots. Doesn't make any sense unless one is dealing with rough terrain — and there, four or six legs would probably be better. I guess they're cool for Boston Dynamics investor videos.
For floor work, wheels seem the most logical. There is the issue of loading trucks (which I did at UPS for a couple summers), for that I’m thinking maybe a ceiling-mounted arm that could extend the length of the truck?
The expense is in its deficiencies, which include (in my perception) plentiful long-tail bugs and issues, lack of flexibility, and in some cases lack of maintenance, as a single author can leave their work for whatever personal reason.
I don't think it's particularly surprising that humans are better at things than robots, sometimes even purpose-built robots. The question is if robots are good enough that the difference doesn't really matter.
It's throwing shit in a box. Who cares how neat it is? As long as things arrive sealed and intact, it's fine.
its also not going to happen. They arent going to shave off 30 cents because thats just not how it works, they'll make 30 cents more an item. Realistically, they'll charge even more and make even more on top of that.
but what does this have to do with capitalism? (apart from it being the scapegoat for all problems as per the current narrative).
it's a cute phrase but I'd suggest 'late stage fiat' is more apt. I think this as with hard money instead, there's no need to perpetually eek a living, as the rising tide lifts all boats.
Doesn't China print a huge amount of money and have their currency tied to fiat currency, making theirs a fiat economy as well?
Someone here wrote they are pro free markets, but anti-capitalism/a capitalist class.
The thought being markets are efficient and liberating mechanisms for coordinating production and exchange but concentrated ownership of capital turns those same mechanisms into systems of control and extraction.
in a fiat world yes. in a world using money (not the fake fiat we have now), everyone else gets wealthier at the same time. that's what was taken from us. 'late stage capitalism' etc is just mindless division to distract people that are getting robbed.
i don't understand what you mean. capitalism existed before fiat currency. carnegie, morgan, rockefeller etc all made their fortunes by owning the means of production long before the gold standard was abolished in the united states. we were able to share their wealth via heavy progressive taxation, not because we didn't use fiat currency.
A key feature of “late stage capitalism” is that people move up the value chain, stop doing menial labor, and find better, more fulfilling jobs that don’t involve putting boxes in other boxes.
In the past, this has meant that people who had manufacturing jobs (i.e. producing something tangible that they could conceivably be proud of doing right) were moved to service jobs like call center operators, delivery workers, Uber drivers, Amazon warehouse workers etc. etc. Not really a step up, I would say. And in the foreseeable future all these jobs (and also some better qualified ones) will be replaced by robots - probably the most dangerous and least fulfilling of them, like delivery workers, will be replaced last. Yay, progress!
Have you ever worked in a manufacturing job? Surveys have shown that people are much happier, on average, with their service jobs than they were in the past when manufacturing was more prevalent. That's because factory work involves doing dangerous, repetitive, mind numbing work in a loud, often overcrowded, odorous, and hot space. It's a meme that everyone wants to bring back manufacturing jobs, but no one actually wants to work in manufacturing. People want cozy office jobs.
Or aptitude. Not everyone is suited to work like electrical engineering to build the robots, or software development to make the software for them. Computer Science and Engineering is hard, and there’s a lot of folk that just won’t excel in that type of work.
We’re going to hit a point where we need UBI, and as a society, be OK changing our views on existence and dispel the notion that one has to “earn” their right to exist within society, because the only other alternative is the top few percentage are the only ones that benefit from the automation while everyone else starves to death.
Robots can't unionize so of course they hope to replace everyone in the US.
None of it will matter anyway, they're shoveling enough money to the right people to have any regulations or oversight squashed, nevermind the sheer number of jobs that will be lost, I might be wrong but it would be a dent in the national unemployment numbers ?
Is it okay to automate sales and customer service and marketing, but warehouse workers are where you draw the line? Do you have any idea how many jobs this industry has already "killed"?