No, the value comes from human labor even within your example. Remember that Amazon isn’t just some collection of autonomous servers, there’s warehouses with thousands of workers, many engineers in different locations maintaining the servers, amazon factories where workers are creating branded commodities, vast logistics networks transporting goods with lots of drivers, etc. All of these workers are having surplus value extracted from their labor and is what ultimately generates profit for the company, with the ‘machinery’ acting as an enabler and amplifier of this extraction.
Even within strictly non-value producing businesses such as rent seeking ones (Amazon partly does this too through seller fees) or those that do flipping, the way they make profit is not by creating value and extracting surplus from human labor, but through redistribution of value that was created precisely like that but in some other firm. In other words, they still heavily depend on human labor, as without it they don’t have anything to “redistribute from”.
AWS is primarily a collection of autonomous servers. They’re what generate profit for that business. The thin layer of human beings occasionally touching the hardware are not somehow responsible for the bazillion operations between those interactions. If robotics get a little better then Amazon could manage the same servers with one-tenth as many people, and that does not mean those workers are creating ten times as much value. They just fix robots that do stuff to the computers that make all of the money.
Automating away ninety percent of a workforce is not increasing the value of human labor.
No, the value comes from human labor even within your example. Remember that Amazon isn’t just some collection of autonomous servers, there’s warehouses with thousands of workers, many engineers in different locations maintaining the servers, amazon factories where workers are creating branded commodities, vast logistics networks transporting goods with lots of drivers, etc. All of these workers are having surplus value extracted from their labor and is what ultimately generates profit for the company, with the ‘machinery’ acting as an enabler and amplifier of this extraction.
Even within strictly non-value producing businesses such as rent seeking ones (Amazon partly does this too through seller fees) or those that do flipping, the way they make profit is not by creating value and extracting surplus from human labor, but through redistribution of value that was created precisely like that but in some other firm. In other words, they still heavily depend on human labor, as without it they don’t have anything to “redistribute from”.
Nothing has fundamentally changed tbh
AWS is primarily a collection of autonomous servers. They’re what generate profit for that business. The thin layer of human beings occasionally touching the hardware are not somehow responsible for the bazillion operations between those interactions. If robotics get a little better then Amazon could manage the same servers with one-tenth as many people, and that does not mean those workers are creating ten times as much value. They just fix robots that do stuff to the computers that make all of the money.
Automating away ninety percent of a workforce is not increasing the value of human labor.