Amazon is reportedly preparing automation plans that will allow the company to avoid hiring more than half a million U.S. workers.
The New York Times reports, citing interviews and internal strategy documents, that Amazon expects its robots to replace more than 600,000 jobs in the United States that it would otherwise have to hire by 2033, even as it is projected to sell about twice as many products during that period.
The documents reportedly state that Amazon’s robotics team aims to automate 75 percent of the company’s operations and expects to eliminate 160,000 U.S. jobs that would otherwise be needed by 2027. That would save about 30 cents for every item Amazon warehouses and ships to customers, and the automation efforts would save the company $12.6 billion between 2025 and 2027.
The NYT, reporting that the company considered participating in community projects and avoiding terms like “automation” and “AI.” More vague terms like “advanced technology” were explored instead, and using the term “cobot” for robots that work alongside humans.
In a statement to The NYT, Amazon said the leaked documents were incomplete and did not reflect the company’s overall hiring strategy. “Nobody else has the same incentive as Amazon to find the way to automate. Once they work out how to do this profitably, it will spread to others, too,” Daron Acemoglu, winner of the Nobel Prize in economic science last year, told The NYT.
If Amazon achieves its automation goal, “one of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator.” – he adds.
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