IN a vast warehouse, three of Amazon’s newest recruits are resting with their arms behind their heads, legs splayed out.
With the flick of a button that marks the end of break time, they roll up to a standing position as their eyes flash awake with a whirring sound.
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Because these aren’t human employees — the juddering, humanoid machines are Amazon’s robotic workers.
The Sun on Sunday this week had one of the first looks at the online tech giant’s new “Digit” robots inside the nerve centre of Amazon’s development centre in Seattle, Washington.
The first impressions are that they are undeniably creepy.
At just under 6ft tall, when one marches towards you with long legs and knee joints that face the wrong way it is disconcertingly menacing and unsettling.
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Earlier types of assistant robots, such as Pepper, made by Japan’s Softbank, have been given a cute, cheerful face to make it look more like something from The Jetsons rather than a nightmare.
But Amazon’s Digit robot looks more like a Star Wars Storm Trooper.
Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, told me the global company was more interested in how the robot could walk and work alongside human workers than its looks.
He said: “The fact that it’s in a humanoid shape, that’s not the primary interest.
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“I’m really interested in what the robot can do. If the humanoid shape is a barrier, then we can change it.”
At the moment, Digit’s use is limited to stacking empty crates in the test facility warehouse, alongside human workers, while Amazon works out what it could be capable of.
Amazon insists it wants robots to “work collaboratively with people”, while founder Jeff Bezos has said that robots will not replace humans.
Mr Brady added: “It allows people to focus on higher-level tasking. We will never run out of things to do.”
The online giant has also developed a robotic arm to help pack goods, a drive-thru chamber that uses artificial intelligence to scan worker’s delivery vans for defects, and another new robot system, Sequoia, which lifts and spins crates on a conveyor belt.
In 2017, Kiva robots were brought in to carry towers of hundreds of random products to workers to pick and pack from.
A year later Amazon bought the company that made them in a $775million (£638million) deal.
They are now used in 30 of Amazon’s UK robotic warehouses.
Amazon says these technologies mean it can pack a customer order 75 per cent faster than before.
Yet despite investing significant amounts into robotic technology since 2012, Amazon has still hired hundreds of thousands of new workers.
It has 750,000 robots now working in its warehouses, with a global workforce of 1.5million people.
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Fears about artificial intelligence and the rise of robots are at fever-pitch at the moment.
Amazon’s test site is giving all of us a glimpse of the future — whether we like it or not.
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