WORLD WITHOUT JOBS, THANKS TO AUTOMATION

Land robots will replace all jobs. Working will be optional — like growing your own vegetables instead of buying them from the store.” This was how the world’s foremost innovator and entrepreneur, Elon Musk, reacted to a New York Times story on Amazon — the second-largest employer in the US, with over 1.2 million employees — which is quietly working to replace almost half of its workforce with robots.

- DIPAK MONDAL @New Delhi

The NYT story has dropped the ‘automation bomb’, which only a few years ago sounded like another Hollywood sci-fi plot. It no longer is, if you go by Amazon’s plan to automate 75% of its operations.

According to the report, Amazon’s robotics team plans to replace more than 600,000 jobs with robots. The calculus is purely economic: achieving this could save 30 cents on every processed and delivered item. Automation would also help the company avoid hiring 160,000 US employees by the end of 2027, resulting in savings of about $12.5 billion over the next two years.

This is not a distant vision — its testing ground is in Shreveport, Louisiana, where a warehouse swarming with a thousand robots operates with 25% fewer humans. The company’s strategy involves drastically slowing hiring and reducing its workforce through attrition, with the explicit goal of “flattening Amazon’s hiring curve over the next 10 years”.

The NYT report quoted Daron Acemoglu, MIT professor and Nobel laureate in economic sciences, as saying: “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.”

Operations in India, where labour remains cheaper than robots, are untouched by this development — at least for now.

Walmart, another retail behemoth, is following suit. The company is aggressively automating its supply chain, with over half its distribution centres currently undergoing upgrades. By the end of this year, Walmart expects 65% of its stores to be serviced by these high-tech hubs.