"Amazon reached 1.6 million employees in 2020, and now they're down to 1.5 million.[2]"
I agree in the bottoms-up automation / displacement theory, but you're cherry picking data here. They had a huge hiring surge from 1.2M to 1.6M during the Covid transition where online ordering and online usage went bananas, and workers who were displaced in other domains likely gravitated towards warehouse jobs from other lower wage/skill domains.
The reduction to 1.5M is likely more a regression to the mean and could also be a natural data reduction well within the bounds of the upper and lower control limits in the data [1]. Just saying we need to be careful when doing root cause analysis on these numbers. There are many reasons for the reduction, it's not a direct result of improvements in robotic automation.
I agree in the bottoms-up automation / displacement theory, but you're cherry picking data here. They had a huge hiring surge from 1.2M to 1.6M during the Covid transition where online ordering and online usage went bananas, and workers who were displaced in other domains likely gravitated towards warehouse jobs from other lower wage/skill domains.
The reduction to 1.5M is likely more a regression to the mean and could also be a natural data reduction well within the bounds of the upper and lower control limits in the data [1]. Just saying we need to be careful when doing root cause analysis on these numbers. There are many reasons for the reduction, it's not a direct result of improvements in robotic automation.
[1] https://commoncog.com/becoming-data-driven-first-principles/