Amazon's layoffs and leaked AI plans beg the question: Is the era of robot

At a press event last year, Amazon Robotics chief technologist Tye Brady told Fortune that the idea that there’s a battle of robots versus humans inside Amazon’s warehouse network is a “myth.”

“We build our machines to extend human capacity,” he said, sharing a vision of so-called collaborative robots that work alongside humans instead of fully replacing them.

Around six months later, during an onstage interview at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in London, Brady told me about Amazon’s first robot “with a sense of touch.” Called Vulcan, the robotic system can do much of the work performed by human staffers in two of the most common roles in Amazon warehouses—picking and stowing. For now, the Vulcan system is active only in a couple of facilities and just handles items positi