When Amazon announced, in June, that it was buying Whole Foods, for $13.7 billion, speculation arose about what, exactly, the world's biggest online retailer planned to do with the high-end supermarket chain. Amazon had taken steps to enter the business of selling fresh food, but it was far from the company's areas of expertise. Some noted that Amazon was, and continues to be, one of the most aggressive investors in robotics and artificial-intelligence technology. Six years ago, Amazon purchased Kiva, a company that produces mobile robots that would make it easier to automate Amazon's distribution centers, potentially saving the company billions of dollars. It seemed obvious at the time of the Whole Foods takeover that Amazon could try to automate the supermarket chain as well. With the opening this week, in Seattle, of the first automated Amazon grocery store, called Amazon Go, Jeff Bezos's vision for the future of the retail industry is fully on display—and it's a vision that involves very few actual human workers. What Bezos has created has implications for economists, employers, and policymakers, and will surely fuel the debate about automation and the future of work.
As I reported in The New Yorker in October, automation has been spreading throughout manufacturing industries around the world, introducing technology into assembly lines to take on some of the most physically taxing and repetitive work. Robots are often designed to initially make human workers' jobs less stressful and more efficient, until the technology evolves to the point at which the roles almost reverse. Eventually, the humans are simply helping the machines to execute nearly all tasks, sometimes hovering in the background in case they break down. At some point after that, the human workers may not be needed at all, or at least not in the same ways they have been.
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