Amazon's Robot Takeover

The Daily

11/03/25

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26m

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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.

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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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Previous Episode

Sunday Special: The Year in Gaming

November 2, 2025

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54m

This year has been a banner year for video games, with an abundance of surprise releases and unexpected hits.

On this week’s Sunday Special, Gilbert Cruz talks with two fellow gamers — Zachary Small, a culture reporter, and Jason Bailey, an editor on The Times’s culture desk — about the state of the industry, the biggest releases and the games they loved playing in 2025. They also share their predictions for Game of the Year.

On Today’s Episode

Zachary Small is a culture reporter for The Times.

Jason M. Bailey is an editor on the culture desk, and oversees The Times’s video game coverage.

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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November 4, 2025

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22m

Tens of millions of Americans depend on the food-stamp program known as SNAP. Without federal assistance, many of them do not know how they will provide for themselves or their families. “The Daily” visits one of the communities most reliant on food aid.

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Guest: Tony Romm, a reporter covering economic policy and the Trump administration for The New York Times, is based in Washington.

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