The bottom line is this: We humans have to adapt to the machines as much as the machines have to adapt to us. Our careers depend on it.

Amazon runs simulations to figure out how to keep their human workers comfortable when loading robots with packages. This includes their range of movement from an ergonomics standpoint and their safety. Or such questions as how best for a human to grab a parcel, scan it, place it, and reach over to hit the button that sends the robot on its way. “There's an art to making it feel seamless between what the robot is doing and what the humans are doing,” says Brad Porter, VP of robotics at Amazon.

It’s the kind of dynamic environment that’s perfect for the development of Amazon’s next iteration of its system. The company is working on a new modular robot called Xanthus with different attachments, say to hold containers instead of using a conveyor belt. This machine will in a sense bridge the divide between fulfillment centers, where humans are loading products into boxes by hand, and sorting centers, where they’re mostly working with those assembled boxes.

Amazon's new modular Xanthus robot can be outfitted with attachments that allow it to carry different kinds of cargo.

“You can see how combined with maybe the addition of a sensor platform, you could have an autonomous drive that's driving totes around,” says Porter. But you can also take that same thin sled and replace the tote-carrying unit with a conveyor top and deploy it in the sorting center.

Herein lies Amazon’s huge advantage: It’s got the funds and the talent to develop robots in-house, tailoring each to solve problems specific to Amazon. Other warehouses are starting to go robotic, but they’re working with other companies’ machines. For instance, Boston Dynamics—maker of the hypnotically impressive SpotMini and Atlas—will soon offer a box-lifting robot called Handle. But it’s a generalist machine, not developed exclusively for one client.

Amazon, on the other hand, can iterate on a robot until it's perfectly adapted for a specific task. “They're building it for themselves, and they're building it for their environment and circumstances,” says John Santagate, research director of service robotics at IDC, which does market research. “It's hard to build any one product that suits all of it.”

And every worker they hire into a machine-facing role is doing something no other human has ever done before—lower-level workers in this facility have been promoted to help oversee the massive system whirring around them, as well as the humans intimately integrated with it. “The fully automated or highly automated fulfillment center isn't a North Star we're trying to hit,” says Porter. “Do we see additional levels of automation, at higher and higher levels? Yeah, I think that will increase as the capabilities of our systems increase.”

Here’s the big question, though. Is this kind of automation bound to replace human jobs entirely, or replace parts of those jobs? “Most of the research seems to suggest that the direction that automation is moving in is the displacement of skills, not jobs,” says R. David Edelman, formerly President Obama's special assistant on the digital economy, and now the director of MIT’s Project on Technology, Economy, and National Security. “That suggests those individuals can, by Amazon, be reskilled or leverage other skills they already have in the same job.”