This, in general, is important to remember - especially if you're planning on being employed by Amazon, or doing business by them. Amazon will do anything* to make the customer experience better - and that means getting maximum efficiency out of every link in the supply chain by pushing vendors, publishers and employees to their limits.

Life can be quite nice as a developer, if you've got a manager who understands that developer efficiency can be cultivated by not putting on undue pressure. But if you're in any role with a single metric which can be ruthlessly optimized, expect that to happen.

* Anything except sacrifice the Long-Term Projects. As a former Amazon site developer, I've been incredibly pissed off about the Amazon website and apps degrading the customer experience in order to aggressively push Prime, Amazon Music, Amazon Mom/Student, etc. There's some stuff on there bordering on dark patterns, and it goes against everything that was drilled into us devs over the years.

I think you mean; They will do anything to make money.

Selling assorted junk from China and some books with a minimum of friction for the customer is just aligned with that goal.

I see Amazon as a company that wants to give a great service to humans but their humans in Warehouses aren't up to the task. I predict in a decade a large part of their warehouse will be automated for the labor heavy skills.

There is an inherent desire to enslave to leverage work off automation. Robots would be perfect slaves for corporations.

Whoever makes electric muscles and sells it at scale is going to be the next billionaire.

I work in an automated Amazon facility - robots carry the bins around to human associates who do the Moravec's Paradox - ridden work requiring fine motor skills and quick visual acuity (those bins can be very messy) or the simple labor that wouldn't be cost effective for a machine that probably costs more than my car (such as pushing juice carts around the facility.)

The problem is, humans are up to the task - if you push them hard enough. A robot isn't going to be more cost effective than that for a long time to come. Given Amazon's culture, I'm not certain they would replace their human workforce en masse even if they could, as long as meat remains fundamentally cheaper.

True. Look at assembly lines in automobile industry. Robotic arm companies are already making billions.