Shorts
What happened
The founder of JD.com, one of China's biggest online shopping companies, stood up and told his 700,000 delivery drivers that robots will replace them — not maybe, not eventually, but 'sooner or later.' He's already signed deals with 120 schools to retrain those workers to repair and maintain the robots taking their jobs.
Why it matters
The context behind the story.
This is one of the most blunt public admissions we've seen from a CEO about automation replacing workers at massive scale. Seven hundred thousand people is roughly the population of a mid-sized American city. And the retraining plan — teaching drivers to fix the robots replacing them — is either compassionate or deeply ironic, depending on how you look at it.
Takeaway
When a billionaire tells 700,000 employees the robots are coming, it's time to pay attention.
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