Listen to the third episode of POLITICO Tech's multi-part podcast series on cybercrime below, and find the whole series here.

BALTIMORE — A robotic ballet plays out around the clock every day in a vast building on the outskirts of Baltimore, a city with a long history as a logistics hub in its own right.

Inside the complex, technically known as Amazon’s BWI2 Robotics Fulfillment Center, yellow, tower-like robots on wheels deliver everything from Pringles cans to P.G. Wodehouse novels and maneuver the floor with uncanny precision. Cameras identify those goods and zip them around the factory at lightning speed. There are humans, too, making sure the equipment hums smoothly and everything goes in the right box.

When economists think about the future, and how robots and automation are likely to shape not just business but our society and politics, they tend to think about buildings like this.

Amazon is America’s second-largest employer, one of the country’s most aggressive in both hiring and automation. The BWI2 facility opened in 2015, part of the company’s effort to ensure that its push to become the global “everything store” proceeded as smoothly, and cost-efficiently, as possible.

The conventional way to talk about this is that robots take human jobs, posing a major problem for the humans. Amazon, however, argues its robots help create jobs, by allowing the company to ceaselessly scale up to the point where it now employs more than a million Americans.

To make that point, the company invited me, along with POLITICO’s Daniel Lippmann and Brendan Bordelon, into the warehouse, where we watched the human workers playing their part in the complicated, interlocking fulfillment process that brings products from the “Buy Now” button to your door — and heard a lot about the company’s plans to continue hiring while investing even more in robotic innovation.

And if you’re wondering how fast this landscape is changing: Just a few days after the visit, Amazon touted the debut of its new “Sparrow” robotics line, which is capable of performing exactly the kind of item-handling and identification tasks that we watched humans doing in the Baltimore facility.

I wondered about the impact of this on those people’s jobs, so I followed up with Scott Dresser, Amazon’s Vice President of Robotics. Dresser is — perhaps unsurprisingly — optimistic that even advancements like Sparrow are more likely to keep bringing humans into Amazon facilities than to drive them out.

“We’ve never had a vision of a people-free fulfillment center because it’s just not practical,” Dresser told me last week. He acknowledged “the nature of what those people are doing tends to change,” meaning employees need to keep retraining, or “upskilling,” in industry parlance.

Speaking to Dresser and other Amazon employees at the plant, they described those upskilling programs as focused on getting fulfillment center employees more involved in maintaining and coordinating the robot systems that now handle much of the fulfillment process.

“You don't need a four-year degree to go be a robotic maintenance specialist,” Dresser said. “That’s part of how we design our systems — to be simple and easy to maintain, so they're relatively easy to train someone on within a matter of a few weeks to be proficient and maybe become an entry-level maintenance technician.”

If you pull way back, then, the picture looks a bit less like “robots replacing people,” and more like robots driving a constantly shifting set of work demands that are essentially shaped around the needs of the machinery.

So what does that mean for the economy? For that, I called the MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, who has studied automation and the role it plays in the workforce, and asked him if he thought that despite these efforts there might be a tipping point at which technology outpaces the average worker and leaves them in the dust with no amount of “upskilling” to be done. He didn’t exactly have an answer to that question, but pointed out that there are already signs of who might or might not benefit from the process.

“This discussion gets framed around ‘Will robots and AI destroy jobs, and lead to a jobless future,’ and I think that's the wrong framing,” Acemoglu said. “Industrial robots may have reduced U.S. employment by half a percent, which is not trivial, but nothing on that scale [of a “jobless future”] has happened — but if you look at the inequality implications, it's been massive.”

Acemoglu’s own extensive research on inequality and automation shows that more than half of the increase in inequality in the U.S. since 1980 is at least related to automation, largely stemming from downward wage pressure on jobs that might just as easily be done by a robot.

Amazon’s case is that its almost unrivaled scale, not only as a retailer but as a sprawling tech and logistics concern in its own right, can fight that pressure, as evidenced by not only its ongoing expansion but its relatively high wages and perks compared to most low-skill jobs. And so far, for Amazon itself, it has worked.

“At least until now, they have basically been correct,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “The question is, will it stay that way forever?”

Muro brought up another potential problem for Amazon’s world-scaling ambitions, that can’t necessarily be automated away: The vicissitudes of the economy and consumer demand.

“A fulfillment center is a different kind of equation [than traditional manufacturing],” he said. “Their scale is dependent on soaring consumer demand, and to the extent that that was in place for much of the last decade we did see both continued hiring and accelerated automation. The question is, do we expect consumption to continue at the high level of the last decade?”

Amazon has already experienced a small-scale version of this problem, as earlier this year it acknowledged overstaffing its facilities to meet sky-high pandemic-era demand. But when I put the question to Dresser of whether he thinks there’s a consumer-imposed ceiling on what his team of robotics wizards can do, he was confident again that they can stay one step ahead of the growth curve. In a way, Amazon clearly believes that robots can somehow overcome market changes.

“I don’t see that equation changing… as we introduce new robotics, we see new scenarios play out, and then have to introduce new roles as we introduce robotic systems that are working together alongside each other,” Dresser said. “I don’t know if that premise around a change in growth applies here.”

Our cousins at POLITICO Europe have a new package of stories out today, exploring the heel turn of a French tech titan turned major player in the shadowy new field of cybersurveillance.

The five stories explore how Eric Léandri, founder of the privacy-minded search engine Qwant that posits itself as France’s answer to the Google panopticon, entered a new line of work after being ousted from the company in 2020. Léandri now heads a company called “Altrnativ,” which specializes in the essentially the opposite of the privacy Qwant promised — piercing digital surveillance.

“A trove of internal Altrnativ documents seen by POLITICO reveals how Léandri’s company investigated the critics, rivals and employees of some of France's biggest brands,” writes POLITICO’s Elisa Braun. But wait, there’s more: “They also contain pitch decks branded with Altrnativ’s logo offering the company's services alongside cyberweapons and drones to authoritarian African governments in apparent cooperation with arms dealers based in Poland and the Middle East.”

Altrnativ, as the reports uncover, has used sophisticated data-tracking technology to assist in everything from corporate warfare to geopolitics. Read the entire package here.

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) is ending his time in Congress on a bit of a sordid note.

In a report released yesterday afternoon, the House Ethics Committee slapped the outgoing freshman with more than $15,000 in fines for “pumping” Let’s Go Brandon Coin, a “meme coin” that he owned $150,000 worth of back in December 2021. (For more on that slogan and its anti-Biden origins, read here.)

The report says Cawthorn was “seen in multiple photographs and videos in which he appeared to support or specifically encouraged individuals to purchase LGB Coin, including after the value of the LGB Coin that he held plummeted,” which led to the order to pay the aforementioned sum to a charity of his choice.

“Rep. Cawthorn thanks the Committee for their thorough investigation and is pleased to note that the Committee fully exonerated him of the false, malicious, and stupendously idiotic allegations of an improper relationship with staff members," a Cawthorn spokesperson said in a statement to POLITICO, referring to the non-crypto-related malfeasance of which he was accused, but investigators found no evidence.

• Taiwanese semiconductor giant TSMC is spending $40 billion to revamp a chip-making facility in Phoenix.
• A group of senators are flexing their muscles to get some answers on FTX.
• Elon Musk’s latest surprise: Teasing a Tesla robotaxi.
• A computer scientist focusing on image forensics takes on the AI art wave.
• AI is giving the otherwise moribund tech sector a pep in its economic step.

Stay in touch with the whole team: Ben Schreckinger ([email protected]); Derek Robertson ([email protected]); Steve Heuser ([email protected]); and Benton Ives ([email protected]). Follow us @DigitalFuture on Twitter.

Ben Schreckinger covers tech, finance and politics for POLITICO; he is an investor in cryptocurrency.

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