Amazon leading the way in the race to get rid of all the people

According to latest reporting by Kevin McLaughlin with The Information, Amazon is developing robot 'pickers' to replace tens of thousands of its warehouse workers. And according to Mr. Martin Ford, a futurist and writer following the matter closely, this could happen within the next five years.

Now, considering this alongside the 'cashier-less' stores that Amazon is intending to open countrywide (3 are already operating in Seattle and Chicago with success and 3000 more planned), it would be safe to say that Amazon is quite the leader in the infamous race to show everybody which jobs would be under threat as Robots and AI takeover.

At the beginning as we all observe it is mostly low skill service jobs such as warehouse pickers, stackers, and cashiers etc. but make no mistake, as technology and AI evolves, and it will evolve rapidly with all the money, interest and profit drive, it won't be only these kind of jobs at stake and probably from University Professors to Brain Surgeons all jobs will be under threat, eventually.

There is also the economics of all these developments. There is no 'Economics of AI or Robotics' yet, as far as I know, but we might come across it pretty soon, however looking at these developments from a macro perspective might help shed some light into the society of near future. (They work well from a micro perspective, at least for the firm)

Some argue that all those gains in productivity, from employing 24/7 working efficient robots for a lot of the service tasks, won't have an overall positive impact on economic growth due to sudden shift in the workforce and wide ranging unemployment and falling consumption (If only there was a way to replace all those unreliable consumers with reliable robots!).

Others argue that similar to the shift in manufacturing jobs where robots replaced thousands of factory workers, the coming age of robots for service jobs will not have that big an impact on the society and new jobs will be created as a result.

I am not sure if we will be able to switch hundreds of thousands of e-commerce fulfillment center workers to jobs where they maintain and repair robots or write and maintain AI software, or switch all those Amazon, Instacart etc. grocery and also restaurant food delivery workers, Uber, Lyft, Via drivers to positions where they maintain the hardware and software of self driving delivery drones or vehicles.

Looks like time is ripe for a huge amount of structural unemployment following the recent transitionary era of employment growth created by the historical transformations around consumption and other service sectors with the introduction of online shopping and mobile apps.

Taking all of this into account alongside the historically record levels of economic inequality, growing authoritarian politics and rising global tensions in a quickly de-globalizing World, it would be quite safe to say that we are heading into some 'interesting times'.