What will the robot jobs apocalypse look like? Ask Amazon warehouse workers

Think a robot can’t do your job? ‘It will happen, but I don’t know when,’ says one expert. How robots are already upending blue-collar work, career advancement, worker rights, and job satisfaction.

[Photo: Vanitjan/Adobe Stock]

Across the top floors of an Amazon warehouse in Garner, North Carolina, about 10 miles south of Raleigh, the robots are already crowding out human workers. 

A sprawling robotic system in the middle of one floor specializes in stowing items, which involves picking up a pack of paper towels or a Stanley tumbler and making space for it in a storage bin—a complex task for a robot. The humans who work among them are left to mill about the perimeter of the floor. Few human workers are welcome on another floor populated by robots, aside from the technicians who maintain them. 

At this warehouse, known as RDU1, the workers have grown accustomed to robots buzzing around them. There are hallways designated for robots, usually marked by red tape. If there is green tape—known by the workers as the “green mile”—humans are free to roam the halls. 

“People joke around and talk to them,” says Italo Medelius, an Amazon worker and organizer with Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment. “They’re like our coworkers. A lot of people describe it as ‘We’re literally working in the future.’” 

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Pavithra Mohan is a staff writer for Fast Company’s Work Life section, where she covers labor and workplace issues, often through the lens of race and gender inequities.. She has reported extensively on workplace discrimination in the tech industry and beyond, from the disproportionate impact of layoffs on pregnant tech workers to the growing rejection of NDAs that silence workplace mistreatment and the complicated bureaucracy of taking discrimination claims to the EEOC More

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