Good morning. Colleague Jason Del Rey has a lovely item in the upcoming issue of Fortune magazine about robot-driven automation at the No. 2 company on the Fortune 500. It’s worth your time.
At Amazon, he reports, the rise of automation has been “complicated.” On the one hand, the ‘bots have “eliminated miles of daily walking” for some warehouse staff. On the other hand, the machines have raised the bar so high for workers who pick and stow items that it pushes them to their physical limits.
For a company that delivers 67,000 packages per hour in the U.S. alone, though, there’s a more existential consideration to make: “If automation boots too many people out of the workforce too quickly,” he writes, “the economic fallout from that could be even bigger than the gains from automation.” Touché.
Today’s tech news below. —Andrew Nusca
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