FOREW
ORD
4
FORTUNE.COM // JANUARY 2020
CHANCES ARE THAT VIRTUALLY ALL OF YOU received a box, or several, at your
doorstep this holiday season. And there’s a very good chance that it was
put there by a cheerful, brown-clad driver for UPS, which dispatches
nearly 21 million such packages to an untold number of doorsteps each
day. In which case, it almost certainly passed through a sorting facility
like the one in western Atlanta that UPS opened in October 2018—one
of six new complexes the company has built across the U.S.
Here, at the Southeast Metro Automated Routing Terminal (a name
no doubt designed with acronym in mind), boxes zoom through a
spaghetti tangle of conveyor belts at 600 feet per minute, not slowing
for a second as they’re photographed on all six sides—traversing from a
drop-off truck at one of 104 unloading bays to a new set of exit bays (and
waiting delivery trucks) in an average of just seven minutes.
All of this kinetic wizardry—as Fortune senior writer Aaron Pressman
explains in his marvelous feature on UPS (please see “Stand and Deliver”
on page 76)—is made possible by a wealth of unseen technology. Ultra-
high-speed cameras and image-processing computers, for instance, send
encoded destination data to one of the most complex route-optimization
algorithms on the planet, as smart mechanical “shoes” guide packages
through a sorting building the size of 19 football fields. Hogwarts has
nothing like it.
UPS’s tech arsenal already includes everything from drones and robotics
to self-driving vehicles, and the company is deep into a three-year $20 bil-
lion tech upgrade to keep the competition—including Amazon, which is
building up its own delivery service—at bay. By every measure, the invest-
ment is making an already efficient company all the more so. But the gains
don’t come without disruption—there’s that dreaded word again—to UPS’s
global workforce of nearly half a million people. It’s pushing some com-
pany veterans to face retraining or early retirement, even as the company
has brought in some lower-paid weekend workers to handle the demands
of online shoppers who want everything the next day.
Fortune has long reported on the technology arms race. And Fortune’s
Robert Hackett offers another enlightening take on tech’s relentless ad-
vance as he investigates Facebook’s continuing effort to create a financial
ecosystem around Libra—a digital currency known as a stablecoin—before
another company or country gets there first (please see page 58).
But what seems more and more apparent these days is that the
competition isn’t so much among companies as it is between technol-
ogy and people. Indeed, as we explore in our cover package, “20 Ideas
That Will Shape the 2020s”
(page 41), gracefully shep-
herded by editors Lee Clifford
and Kristen Bellstrom, this is
a theme that is sure to play out
in myriad ways over the next
decade. How will human beings
coexist with rapidly advancing
technology that is taking away
traditional jobs—and creating
new digital divides in its wake?
How will we rein in machine-
learning algorithms that may
have built-in biases? Or protect
our privacy in an age in which
digital identities are as fungible
and free-flowing as the Internet
itself? How can we turn social
media interaction into simply
social interaction again?
For our first issue of the new
decade, we’ve tapped a host of
the world’s sharpest minds to
answer these questions.
Which brings me at last to
Fortune’s own self-disruption,
which will be unveiled later this
month as we launch a new pre-
mium website, a robust video
portal in which to explore our
conference content (and much,
much more), and a comprehen-
sive, customizable app—which
will make it easier for subscrib-
ers to engage with us anywhere.
The following month we’re also
relaunching our print edition
with a brand new design—one
elegant enough to celebrate
Fortune’s 90th anniversary. And
better still, you can get all of
the above without ever opening
a box.
CLIFTON LEAF
Editor-in-Chief, Fortune
@CliftonLeaf
PANDOR A’S
BOXES
