World's Worst Job? Being a Human Robot at Amazon's Fulfillment Center

Amazon.com's fulfillment center in Rugeley, England, is a sterile kingdom where the algorithm is king – and humans do their best to perform its bidding. Workers' every movement is dictated by a tracking algorithm, which can send them on trips of up to 24 kilometers per day on the quest for packages. The silence is total. Workers can be fired for talking, even as smiling cardboard cutouts remind them that "this is the best job I've ever had!".

With zero-hour contracts – and jobs that evaporate from one day to the next – workers are treated more like cogs than humans. According to photojournalist Ben Roberts, who chronicled the Rugeley center in Amazon Unpacked, "the only reason Amazon doesn’t actually replace them with robots is they’ve yet to find a machine that can handle so many different sized packages." It's dismal proof that if we don't domesticate technology, it ends up domesticating us.

Read more at Fast Company.