John Boumphrey delivers the greatest comedy line of 2024. Robots drive up employment. He said this to CNBC while his company actively lays off the humans who build the AI that replaces the humans. The joke writes itself but Boumphrey delivers it with a straight face that would make a funeral director proud.
Amazon unveils a warehouse robot during mass tech layoffs. They coordinated this announcement with the precision of a man proposing at a funeral. The robot probably costs less than six months of a warehouse worker's salary and never needs bathroom breaks, which Amazon considers a competitive advantage. Boumphrey insists this creates jobs. He means jobs repairing the robots that replaced the humans who used to repair the things the robots now move.
The logic tracks perfectly in executive world. Fire a thousand programmers. Build a robot. Hire three robot mechanics. Employment technically increased by three. Boumphrey should run the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We could have negative unemployment by Thursday.
Tech giants continue AI layoffs while unveiling AI products. This represents vertical integration at its finest. They fire you then replace you with the technology you built then tell CNBC it created jobs. Somewhere an economist just achieved orgasm from the efficiency.
Retail traders read this headline and immediately bought Amazon calls because robots mean innovation and innovation means stonks go up. They ignore the part where Amazon just admitted machines do human jobs better and cheaper. These same traders work jobs that involve computers and patterns and repetitive tasks. They cannot connect dots that are literally touching.
Boumphrey's statement contains one accurate word: experience. Amazon's experience shows robots replace humans faster than humans can retrain for the jobs that robots haven't automated yet. But he's technically correct. Someone has to unbox the robots. That's one job. That person will be fired once they invent the robot-unboxing robot.
The only employment Amazon's robots have driven up is unemployment line positions.
Photo by Daniel Holland on Unsplash
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