Over the past two decades, no company has done more to shape the American workplace than Amazon. In its ascent to become the nation’s second-largest employer, it has developed an aggressive corporate culture and pioneered using technology to hire, monitor and manage workers.

Now, interviews and a cache of internal strategy documents reveal that Amazon executives believe their company is on the cusp of their next big workplace shift: replacing more than half a million jobs with robots.

Karen Weise takes us inside Amazon’s push toward automation and the implications for the company and potentially for the broader economy.

Guest: Karen Weise, a technology correspondent for The New York Times, based in Seattle.

Background reading:

• Amazon plans to replace more than half a million jobs with robots.
• Meet Sparrow, Cardinal and Proteus, the robots powering Amazon’s automation.

Photo: Emily Kask for The New York Times

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