The Amazon.com, Inc. BHM1 fulfillment center is seen before sunrise on March 29, 2021 in Bessemer, … More
AFP via Getty Images
Leave it to traditional media to miss the point. Specifically, all the recent coverage of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s comment that AI advances would empower the Seattle technology and retail giant to replace human effort in its executive suite.
The insinuation has been that Amazon is positioning itself to permanently downsize its roster of human workers that require nights and weekends off, lunch and bathroom breaks, and – gasp – vacations. Quite the opposite.
As these columns have been arguing for years, Amazon spends enormous sums on the automation of human effort to enhance the productivity of the same humans in its employ. What’s true in its warehouses is similarly true for its executives. Investment in automation and thought is not about shrinking its workforce, rather it’s about automating what saps human effort to substantially expand that same human productivity.
It’s already revealing itself. Think a Wall Street Journal article from this week that indicated “There will soon be as many robots as humans” in Amazon’s warehouses. Well, of course. Why on earth would Amazon invest such substantial amounts in human capital with an eye on shedding it?
Humans aren’t a cost, they’re an input. Amazon’s sizable investment in AI and other robotic advances (said to be over $70 billion in 2025 alone) plainly isn’t taking place to jettison the humans it’s put so much money into, but to elevate them. That’s why the proliferation of robots in Amazon’s warehouses won’t occur to the employment detriment of the humans working alongside them as much as it will increase the urgency of expanding its human workforce.
MORE FOR YOU
Think about it. And in thinking about it, contemplate what happens to the productivity of humans when their work is paired with other hands, human and mechanical. It skyrockets, and the reason it skyrockets has to do with the happy fact that specialized workers are exponentially more productive.
What this foretells about Amazon warehouses that will almost certainly grow in both size and number is that the powerful need for Amazon to hire many more capable workers will grow by leaps and bounds. See its investment in robotic and AI advances yet again. Every dollar spent propels the effort of humans to greater and greater heights.
What’s true in Amazon’s warehouses will be true within its various executive suites. That AI advances have the capacity to replace so much human effort is a certain sign that the value of human effort within Amazon’s executive workforce is set to soar.
This is what a media stalked by zero-sum thinking failed to grasp in Jassy’s comment. Naturally Amazon’s AI investment will render redundant a lot of human effort. Technology by its very name replaces human effort, but never at the expense of opportunity.
If technological advances were the path to breadlines, then logic indicates the world’s poorest locales would be its most technologically advanced. Which is backwards.
More realistically, progress is defined not by what workers are doing on the job, but what they’re no longer doing. Assuming Amazon’s copious investment in AI and robotics bears fruit, it will have a much larger workforce employed in much better, much more productive ways than a much smaller workforce toiled before the automation.
The future is bright for Amazon, and humans in general, exactly because Amazon and other corporations like it think so much of their existing and future workers as to invest in technology that will free them from substantial amounts of wasted effort. The growing number of robots in its warehouses is yet more evidence of this brilliant truth.