The Robot Revolution Nobody Asked For: Amazon's Automation Play and What It Means for the Rest of Us
There’s been some noise online about Amazon’s plans to replace 600,000 workers with robots by 2027, supposedly saving 30 cents per item. On the surface, it sounds like one of those efficiency wins that corporate types love to brag about in quarterly earnings calls. But dig a little deeper, and it’s just another chapter in the story of late-stage capitalism eating itself.
Let me be clear: I’m not a Luddite. I work in IT and DevOps, I’m fascinated by technological advancement, and I’ve spent enough time automating workflows to understand the appeal of efficiency. But there’s something deeply unsettling about the way we’re approaching this particular wave of automation.
The supposed 30-cent saving is laughable. Anyone who thinks that discount will flow through to consumers hasn’t been paying attention. When was the last time a major corporation automated something and passed the savings on to customers? I’ll wait. This is pure profit maximisation, plain and simple. The savings go to shareholders while 600,000 people lose their livelihoods. And before anyone says “but the jobs are terrible anyway” – yes, Amazon warehouse conditions are notoriously grim, but the solution to bad jobs isn’t no jobs. It’s better jobs, better conditions, and better pay.
Here’s what really gets under my skin: the complete lack of forward thinking. Someone in the discussion threads raised the obvious question that seems to elude every MBA-wielding executive out there – if robots replace workers, who’s going to buy your stuff? When you hollow out the middle and working classes, when you eliminate entry-level positions that young people use to get their first foothold in the workforce, when you concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands, eventually your customer base evaporates.
The economy isn’t just a collection of balance sheets and efficiency metrics. It’s an ecosystem. You can’t extract value indefinitely without putting anything back. Yet that’s exactly what we’re watching happen in real-time.
There’s a conversation that desperately needs to happen about Universal Basic Income, about taxing automation, about how we distribute the productivity gains from technology. Some folks online were discussing how we should be using robots to free us up for creative pursuits and meaningful work. That’s a beautiful vision, and I’d love to live in that world. But that requires intentional policy choices. It requires us to collectively decide that automation serves humanity, not just shareholders.
Right now, we’re on a different track entirely. We’re letting market forces dictate social outcomes without any guardrails. The same people who’ll happily automate 600,000 jobs will then complain about rising unemployment benefits and social services costs. The hypocrisy is stunning.
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately, particularly in the context of the AI boom we’re experiencing. Every week brings some new AI tool that can do someone’s job faster and cheaper. The tech is impressive, genuinely. But we’re deploying it without having the hard conversations about what happens to the people displaced. We’re letting billionaires make decisions that will reshape society, and then we act surprised when those decisions prioritise profit over people.
The thing is, there’s nothing inevitable about any of this. Automation is a choice. How we implement it is a choice. Who benefits from it is a choice. We could choose to use productivity gains to reduce working hours while maintaining pay. We could choose to invest in retraining and education. We could choose to tax automation to fund social programs. But those choices require collective action and political will, and right now we seem to be in short supply of both.
Someone mentioned the origin of the word “saboteur” in the discussion – workers throwing their wooden shoes (sabots) into industrial machinery during the Industrial Revolution. It’s darkly amusing that we’re facing similar circumstances over a century later. Maybe we haven’t progressed quite as much as we like to think.
Look, I’m not suggesting we reject technological progress. That ship has sailed, and frankly, there are plenty of genuinely dangerous and soul-crushing jobs that probably should be automated. But we need to be honest about what we’re doing and who it serves. We need policies that ensure the benefits of automation are broadly shared, not concentrated among a tiny elite.
Because right now, we’re building a future where wealth pools at the top, opportunities evaporate for everyone else, and the social fabric frays. That’s not sustainable, and it’s not the future most of us want. We can do better. We just need to demand it – from our employers, from our politicians, and from the corporations that seem to have forgotten they operate within a society, not above it.
The robots are coming, sure. The question is: who do they work for?