RadCasts

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

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

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In her latest novel, One Aladdin Two Lamps, the writer Jeanette Winterson takes inspiration from the legendary story of Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights. But she calls on the reader to look again at stories we think we know, unpick how fiction works, and have the courage to challenge and change the narrative.

The saxophonist and presenter Soweto Kinch will perform his new album, Soundtrack to the Apocalypse, with the London Symphony Orchestra (at the Barbican, London, on Friday 14th November), combining British jazz, hip-hop and orchestral music. This is the finale of his acclaimed trilogy of politically charged, genre-defying works that tell different stories of the past, present and future.

The former MP Rory Stewart spent nearly a decade in Britain’s most rural constituency, Penrith and Borders, and wrote a column for a local newspaper. In Middleland: Dispatches from the Borders he’s collected together these fragmentary moments from rural life and local politics to capture a wide-ranging portrait of life and stories from the Cumbrian countryside.

Producer: Katy Hickman Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez