Amazon and its Imperative to Dump Human Workers
October 22, 2025
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
Everyone loves Amazon. The local merchants thank Amazon for allowing them to find their future elsewhere. The people and companies dependent on Amazon Web Services rejoiced when the AWS system failed and created an opportunity to do some troubleshooting and vendor shopping. The customer (me) who received a pair of ladies underwear instead of an AMD Ryzen 5750X. I enjoyed being the butt of jokes about my red, see through microprocessor. Was I happy!
Mice discuss Amazon’s elimination of expensive humanoids. Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough.
However, I read “Amazon Plans to Replace More Than Half a Million Jobs With Robots.” My reaction was that some employees and people in the Amazon job pipeline were not thrilled to learn that Amazon allegedly will dump humans and embrace robots. What a great idea. No health care! No paid leave! No grousing about work rules! No medical costs! No desks! Just silent, efficient, depreciable machines. Of course there will be smart software. What could go wrong? Whoops. Wrong question after taking out an estimated one third of the Internet for a day. How about this question, “Will the stakeholders be happy?” There you go.
The write up cranked out by the Gray Lady reports from confidential documents and other sources says:
Amazon’s U.S. work force has more than tripled since 2018 to almost 1.2 million. But Amazon’s automation team expects the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States it would otherwise need by 2027. That would save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs and delivers to customers. Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its U.S. work force in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033. That would translate to more than 600,000 people whom Amazon didn’t need to hire.
Why is Amazon dumping humans? The NYT turns to that institution that found Jeffrey Epstein a font of inspiration. I read this statement in the cited article:
“Nobody else has the same incentive as Amazon to find the way to automate,” said Daron Acemoglu, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies automation and won the Nobel Prize in economic science last year. “Once they work out how to do this profitably, it will spread to others, too.” If the plans pan out, “one of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator,” Mr. Acemoglu said.
Ah, save money. Keep more money for stakeholders. Who knew? Who could have foreseen this motivation?
What jobs will Amazon provide to humans? Obviously leadership will keep leadership jobs. In my decades of professional work experience, I have never met a CEO who really believes anyone else can do his or her job. Well, the NYT has an answer about what humans will do at Amazon; to wit:
Amazon has said it has a million robots at work around the globe, and it believes the humans who take care of them will be the jobs of the future. Both hourly workers and managers will need to know more about engineering and robotics as Amazon’s facilities operate more like advanced factories.
I wish to close this essay with several observations:
- Much of the information in the write up come from company documents. I am not comfortable with the use of this type of information. It strikes me as a short cut, a bit like Google or self-made expert saying, “See what I did!”
- Many words were used to get one message across: Robots and by extension smart software will put people out of work. Basic income time, right? Why not say that?
- The reason wants to dump people is easy to summarize: Humans are expensive. Cut humans, costs drop (in theory). But are there social costs? Sure, but why dwell on those.
Net net: Sigh. Did anyone reviewing this story note the Amazon online collapse? Perhaps there is a relationship between cost cutting at Amazon and the company’s stability?
Stephen E Arnold, October x, 2025
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