“Where will the work go when the machines take over?” It is a question that has echoed through pamphlets and manifestos since the dawn of industrialisation, yet never has it felt so urgent. On 5 June 2025, The Guardian reported that Amazon is actively testing humanoid robots to deliver packages, with the aim of integrating them into its fleet of Rivian electric vans. These robots, trained in a bespoke “humanoid park” in San Francisco, already navigate obstacle courses and practise simple delivery routines. Field trials in real-world environments are slated to follow, with humanoid automatons “springing out” of vans to ferry parcels to doorsteps, potentially alongside—or in place of—human drivers.
At first glance, the scheme appears another marquee feat of corporate futurism: sleek machines, powered by AI, stepping out from self-driving vehicles to complete the “last mile” of delivery. Yet beneath the sheen lies a far darker reality. The rapid advance of robotics in logistics does not simply promise greater efficiency; it embodies a wholesale transfer of human labour into redundancy. Amazon’s own history is instructive. Its warehouses have long employed robots to sort and transport goods, reducing labour costs under the guise of “assisting” staff. But between 2022 and 2024, employment in its most highly automated centres fell by over 10 per cent, even as package volumes surged. Automation may relieve workers of gruelling tasks, but it also removes the workers themselves.
Imagine a near future in which every suburban street hosts a steady procession of Rivian vans from which humanoid robots unquestioningly emerge, delivering parcels with mechanical precision. Workers who once climbed into a driver’s seat and walked door to door could find themselves left behind, dismissed as “surplus humanity.” Amazon’s plan to test different robotic platforms—from Agility Robotics’ prototypes to China’s Unitree models—reflects a broader strategy: to explore multiple avenues for hollowing out the workforce. When robots no longer tire, require no benefits and demand neither holiday pay nor pensions, what incentive remains to keep human couriers on the payroll?
The implications extend beyond gig-economy couriers. Delivery drivers represent just one node in the vast network of jobs vulnerable to mechanisation. Pickers in warehouses, forklift operators, customer-service call handlers, even white-collar roles reliant on data entry or simple decision-making, all stand to be rendered obsolete as AI improves. The question of “where will the jobs come from?” is not answered by pointing to new tech-support roles or maintenance positions for robots; those will be few, highly skilled and geographically concentrated, leaving millions of former workers without viable employment. It is, as Scottish roboticist Subramanian Ramamoorthy warns, one thing to train robots in controlled environments; quite another to ensure they perform reliably amid unpredictable real-world variables—pets, children, inclement weather. Yet when that threshold is crossed, the human face of delivery may vanish for good.
It’s not going to be long before these $16,000 robots. Or should we call them “humanoid agents,” as the marketing prefers—will be able to do your job too. At that price point, they’re much cheaper than a year’s salary in many sectors. And what CEO is going to turn down a worker that never calls in sick, never takes a break, doesn’t eat, doesn’t piss, and—crucially—can’t unionise? They don’t need holidays, they don’t need rights, and they certainly won’t walk out on strike. The dream of capital isn’t just efficiency. It’s total control. And if you think your job is safe because it’s “creative” or “emotional” or “strategic,” remember: they used to say the same thing about driving, writing code, even making art.
Much of the rhetoric from Trump’s White House is about bringing factory jobs “back home”—restoring dignity to the heartlands through a new industrial renaissance. But these aren’t jobs for Ohio or Michigan. They’re not jobs for anyone. The factories being promised are more likely to be staffed by robots than people, and not even American-made ones at that. The real fight isn’t for working-class employment. It’s to make sure that the humanoid agents doing the replacing aren’t Chinese. That’s what’s at stake in the arms race between Amazon’s robotics labs and companies like Unitree. It’s not about economic justice or dignity. It’s about control over the supply chain of automation. Behind the flag-waving and blue-collar photo ops lies a different agenda: not protecting jobs, but ensuring that the robots doing the job destruction wear stars and stripes.
Consider the scale. Amazon already employs some 1.55 million people globally, with around 275,000 drivers in the US alone. If even a fraction of those roles are supplanted by humanoid automatons, the social consequences will be seismic. Entire communities. Those on whom the gig economy, and precarious part-time jobs depend, will confront sudden income loss. Under a system that fetishises profit and productivity, the notion of “creating new roles” is often little more than a thin justification for displacement. The machines, once deployed, do not demand collective bargaining, sick leave or living wages; they operate purely at the behest of capital.
There’s a fundamental contradiction at the core of the Silicon Valley fantasy: if you automate away the entire workforce, who’s left to buy the products? The same workers being replaced by robots are also the consumers who prop up the system. Those who click the ads, pay the subscriptions, order the parcels, stream the films, and keep the wheels of digital capitalism turning. The tech elite dreams of a frictionless world. One that is automated, optimised, disburdened of human inefficiency. But seems blind to the obvious: a society of surplus humanity cannot sustain the very markets these companies depend on. You can’t have trillion-dollar valuations built on recurring monthly revenue if nobody has a job.
What emerges is a grotesque feedback loop. The more people are cut out of the economy, the more the system cannibalises itself. At the top, a handful of billionaires hoard capital and build bunkers. In the middle, an ever-thinning managerial class clings to relevance. And at the bottom, billions rendered economically useless, watching as machines take their roles and platforms sell them back their own alienation. The fantasy ends not with utopia, but with a dead marketplace. Just robot sellers and algorithmic buyers in an echo chamber of surplus production. In the end, it’s not just labour they’ve automated out of existence. It’s society.
This is where William I. Robinson’s concept of surplus humanity becomes central. In The Global Police State and Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity, Robinson argues that capitalism, as it evolves, produces not just unemployment but entire populations deemed economically irrelevant. As global production becomes ever more automated and profit-driven, vast swathes of humanity are no longer required. Not because their needs have been met, but because their labour is no longer necessary to generate value. These people are not just unemployed; they are structurally surplus. The automation of delivery. Long seen as one of the few remaining footholds for low-skill labour. Is another notch in this trajectory.
Even the truck driver. Once a rugged icon of American self-reliance, mythologised in country songs and Marlboro ads, is now on borrowed time. Long-haul routes are being trialled by autonomous rigs from California to Texas, with sleeping drivers as little more than insurance policies. The romance of the open road is being rewritten in code. And closer to home, the taxi driver faces a similar fate. Companies like Waymo and Uber are already rolling out AI-driven cab fleets in controlled urban zones, boasting lower fares, no breaks, and twenty-four-hour reliability. But what happens to the man who’s spent thirty years learning the rhythm of the city, knowing when to dodge traffic, when to talk and when to shut up? What happens to the migrant who saved enough to buy his own cab, the gig worker juggling rides between school runs? They are all being erased. Not by accident, but by design. In the name of optimisation, the human element is being written out of the story.
And what then? When the few remaining service jobs are stripped away, when robots can replace the Uber driver, the shelf-stacker, the Amazon courier. What remains for those without capital? Even coding, once seen as a golden ticket to the digital future, is now under threat from generative AI systems that can spit out functional software in seconds. Middle management, too—those PowerPoint-polishing, spreadsheet-shuffling layers of bureaucracy—are already being thinned by automation. What will be left? A handful of tech overlords, their robot slaves, and then the rest of us: surplus humanity, kept around as spectators, data points, or caretakers of the machines. Universal basic income is floated as a salve, but even in its most generous form, it cannot replace what’s been stolen: not just wages, but meaning, agency, solidarity. And as long as technological development remains shackled to capital accumulation, we are not being liberated by automation. We are being made its servants. Slaves to the robots, owned by the few who own everything.
Yet these same robots could scarcely exist without the exploitation of labour in the global south: data-labourers scraping and labelling images, technicians building components under poor conditions, engineers paid a pittance to refine algorithms. The spectacle of a humanoid robot navigating a San Francisco obstacle course is built on the invisible toil of millions. Thus, the question of displaced delivery drivers must be situated within a broader critique of capitalism’s drive to commodify both human life and the planet. As robots extend their reach, turning every doorstep into an automated waypoint, our collective inheritance of solidarity, shared purpose and mutual aid is called into question.
Ultimately, if humanoid robots succeed in delivering the majority of Amazon’s parcels, it will signify more than a logistical revolution. It will mark another chapter in what Robinson names as the making of surplus humanity—a terrifying inversion in which efficiency and technological progress coincide with mass disposability. These aren’t just jobs lost; they’re futures foreclosed. If we accept this logic, then the future will belong to robots and their owners, while the rest of us drift into managed irrelevance. The only alternative is to reassert democratic control over technology itself, to fight for a world in which automation liberates rather than discards. Because the question isn’t whether robots will take over. It’s who they’ll leave behind.
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