Amazon’s New Supermarket Could Be Grim News for Human Workers

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Will the technology in Amazon’s new automated grocery store, Amazon Go, in Seattle, put millions of retail employees out of work someday?Photograph by Stephen Brashear / Getty

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.

Retail stores, with their unpredictable physical environments and constant customer interactions, by contrast, were seen as far more difficult than manufacturing to automate. “Retail is delayed in terms of high-tech automation,” Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T. who studies automation and the labor market, told me. “You’ve had the more clerical parts that have already been automated, such as cashiers and so on, but a lot of other areas, such as grocery stores and malls, they’re behind manufacturing in terms of introduction of robots, because the tasks performed by people there are often more complex.” Instead of repeatedly spraying paint onto car-body parts or drilling holes into pieces of steel, retail workers are often assisting shoppers, answering questions, or restocking shelves. “It’s somewhat harder,” Acemoglu said. “At the moment, and probably fortunately, it’s not going to lead to wholesale replacement of all the workers.” Still, Acemoglu acknowledged, Amazon Go is a signal of what’s to come. Retail stores employ 4.8 million people, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They, and the millions of others who work in supporting roles behind the scenes of retail businesses, stand to be directly affected.

For decades, the conventional belief among economists has been that technological advances have created more jobs than (or at least as many as) they eliminated, often moving workers into more sophisticated roles that couldn’t be automated; bank tellers were largely replaced by A.T.M.s, for example, but the number of people employed at banks increased nonetheless. In recent years, though, as the fields of robotics and A.I. have experienced vast technological leaps, the debate has shifted, with many economists acknowledging that the balance of jobs created versus jobs eliminated could start moving the other way, almost certainly leading to more income inequality.

The ability to make purchases in a store using (often maddening) self-checkout kiosks has existed for some time; the small revolution that Amazon Go brings to the experience is the elimination of the checkout process altogether. Instead, computers scan shoppers’ phones as they enter, and they are then automatically charged for whatever items they put into their grocery bags and take home. (The Times said that the experience felt like “shoplifting.”) A few human workers still float around, to deal with glitches, answer questions, and check the I.D. of anyone trying to buy wine. From a consumer standpoint, there isn’t much to complain about: if it truly works, the technology could turn the chore of grocery shopping into a breezy afterthought, without the deadening wait in a long line to pay at the end.

Acemoglu said that it’s far from preordained whether the technology that affords friction-free grocery shopping will put millions of people out of work, or simply create opportunities for them to move into other kinds of jobs. He said that the answer to that question will be decided by politicians and the public-policy choices they make on the tax code, education policy, and infrastructure spending, which have far greater effects than the actions of any one company—even one as large and powerful as Amazon. “These economic and technological conditions that are determining where automation is taking us, they are not set in stone,” Acemoglu said. “They are societal choices.”

Acemoglu pointed out that although much is still unknown about the relationship between automation and employment, current tax law and other government policies have created incentives for employers to replace workers with machines, but not machines that could work collaboratively with human workers. In a new paper called “Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Work,” Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, of Boston University, tried to develop a more precise way to look at the connection between automation and jobs. They concluded that automation had the potential to create greater wealth while also increasing economic inequality. The rise of increasingly powerful machines will inevitably reduce the demand for human labor, they say. But, they argue, with a commitment to sharing the wealth of the robot economy more broadly, and the appropriate investment in education that gives workers the skills they need to thrive, increased unemployment and inequality could be slowed. The survival of the machines themselves might even depend on it. “If we do not find a way of creating shared prosperity from the productivity gains generated by AI,” Acemoglu and Restrepo write, “there is a danger that the political reaction to these new technologies may slow down or even completely stop their adoption and development.”