[pryce]

If we are being honest, this isn't being installed to "improve the livelihood of warehouse workers", it is being installed in anticipation of improving the bottom line for Amazon's shareholders. There may be benefits or detriments to the workforce along the way; considerations like the "wellbeing of the workforce" are effectively given a weight of zero in these decisions.

People's values can and will diverge on whether the bottom-line driven approach described above amounts to an ethically defensible system, but we shouldn't be under illusions as to how decisions like this are made.

[dorgo]

Of course, nobody tries to only "improve the livelihood of warehouse workers".

Isn't the idea behind economy that if everybody tries to improve their bottom line then everybody wins (even if it was not intended)? And this story seems to support this idea.

[pryce]

> if everybody tries to improve their bottom line then everybody wins

This idea is given fairly often as a rationale that economies should be organised around capitalism, yes.

Whether the principle holds up in practice seems, to me, the kind of question that would be answered best by seeking a very wide range of data, rather than by attempting to draw conclusions from a handful of news articles.

Some areas of the economy that are often proposed as counterexamples to the above principle include healthcare and the environment, where critics claims that 'everybody trying to improve their bottom line' results in inefficiencies & unnecessary complexity, socialization of costs (eg pollution, morbidity & mortality), or in some cases direct harm.

[m3kw9]

Yes let’s make everything manual in an entire factory

[pryce]

Arguing that we should be honest with ourselves about what precisely motivates corporate decisions to automate in the society we live in is not remotely the same thing as arguing against automation itself; neither in this specific case nor in the more general case (of automation across wider society).