Is Amazon Reaching the Singularity First?

Gideon Rosenblatt recently posted an excellent article on his Vital Edge blog. He comments on the environment at Amazon.com that includes both blue-color and white-color employees being squeezed out by automation and algorithm experts that are rapidly replacing manual labor and knowledge labor jobs with technology.

In addition to raising specific questions about Amazon’s human capital management practices, this issue brings attention to a much larger question — Is Amazon.com simply the canary in the coal mine that illustrates our technological future?

I develop and teach courses in the Department of Integrated Science, Business, and Technology (ISBT). It is an undergraduate major that examines scientific discoveries, the collaborative business practices used to leverage them into new products and services, and the disruptive effects they have on the cultural and business environment. Since 2000, we have been studying the rise of big data, analytics, robotics, automation, and machine intelligence. In those 16 years we’ve gone from a very young Internet to the advent of IBM Watson, self-driving cars, 3D printing, and the Internet of Things.

Politicians who stump for bringing off-shored manufacturing jobs will be surprised that those jobs are being bot-sourced to automated factories, teamsters will be surprised at how fast over-the-road trucking and delivery systems will become self-driving, and even those delivery chains will be disrupted when consumers purchase the design of a product and print it in their oven-sized home 3D printer.

My colleagues and students are discussing the obvious question, “how do humans find meaningful work in this new environment?”