Amazon’s layoffs and leaked AI plans beg the question: Is the era of robot-driven unemployment upon us?

At a press event last year, Amazon Robotics chief technologist Tye Brady told Fortune that the idea that there’s a battle of robots versus humans inside Amazon’s warehouse network is a “myth.”

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“We build our machines to extend human capacity,” he said, sharing a vision of so-called collaborative robots that work alongside humans instead of fully replacing them.

Around six months later, during an onstage interview at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in London, Brady told me about Amazon’s first robot “with a sense of touch.” Called Vulcan, the robotic system can do much of the work performed by human staffers in two of the most common roles in Amazon warehouses—picking and stowing. For now, the Vulcan system is active only in a couple of facilities and just handles items positioned on the top and bottom shelves of Amazon’s fourshelf mobile shelving units, while humans pick and stow the rest.

During that conversation, I probed Brady about the robot-human dynamic. Amazon is not just any employer; it’s the second-biggest corporate employer in the U.S., and one whose operational efficiencies many corporations would love to emulate. So I asked him whether a hypothetical Amazon warehouse with 1,000 employees today might employ fewer than 1,000 employees in the years to come as Vulcan’s scope of work, accompanied by complementary Amazon robotic systems, grows. No, he insisted. Instead, such a hypothetical warehouse “could have a thousand [employees] or more.”

Not less? I pushed. “Not less,” he said, describing a virtuous flywheel of more robots leading to more orders processed, leading to more sales per employee for a given facility, but still more edge cases or errors requiring human intervention—in addition to roles for humans fixing and managing the robots themselves, which pay better than the average role.

So what then to make of a New York Times investigation into Amazon’s robotics ambitions, which cited internal plans to eventually automate around 75% of operations? The memos suggested that the company’s fleet of robots might eliminate the need to hire for some 600,000 future jobs. (An Amazon spokesperson told the Times that the internal plans viewed by the reporter reflected only the viewpoint of one team inside the company.)

To be sure, not creating additional jobs is different from cutting warehouse employees whom the company already has hired—but there’s no denying that this would be a big workforce realignment. The article quickly shot around the web, with many social media posts railing against the company’s apparent motive of reducing the need to create jobs for people.

Such fears are not unfounded; indeed, they are becoming the dominating anxiety of our era. Figuring out whether there will be enough human jobs to go around in the future, as AI and robotics proliferate, is a conundrum business leaders can no longer ignore.

Amazon warehouses, on average, do employ fewer people per facility than they have at any point in the past 16 years, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis (though at least some of that is owing to the company’s expansion of smaller “last-mile” facilities that naturally employ fewer people).

Amid these concerns over the future of blue-collar workers in Amazon’s warehouses came the news of a major round of layoffs—of white-collar workers. The company cut roughly 14,000 jobs, about 4% of its corporate workforce. The restructuring’s aim was “reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets,” according to a company memo—but many took it as a sign that the company’s AI-related job losses have begun. (That’s not an unreasonable leap after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in June that as a result of using AI more internally, “we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains.”) Multiple news publications have reported that a second round of significant layoffs will hit Amazon’s corporate workforce in January, following the peak holiday shopping season.

> 14,000

Corporate jobs cut by Amazon in October, representing 4% of its corporate workforce

> $2.5 billion

Amazon’s commitment to worker education and skills training

Source: Amazon

The big bets referenced in the most recent layoff announcement include the tens of billions of dollars Amazon is spending annually on data centers and other infrastructure necessary to fuel AI’s computing needs for the company’s internal use as well as that of its enterprise customers. But it’s likely an oversimplification to attribute this round of layoffs—and other recent staff reductions at companies including Microsoft, IBM, and UPS—entirely or even mostly to AI replacing human workers. While AI tools that promise increased productivity have been available to corporate workers at Amazon and other tech companies, human replacement has yet to materialize at scale.

There’s no denying, however, that a significant reshaping of wor