This article is misleading and wrong in some of its ideas. Every company wants to employ as little expensive and unreliable-relative-to-a-machine human labor as possible. Trying to cut down costs is in fact not short-sighted or somehow "wrong", it's efficient and great (as long as you're not treating people unethically or polluting the environment, etc.). Amazon is simply growing tremendously quickly...it's not that they're trying to create jobs.

In the past 200 years there's been a tremendous increase in leisure for most people (except perhaps ironically for the best paid but that's a lot by choice), and also there has to date been no end to human desire. It used to take 80% of the labor force just to create food, now it's around 4%. It used to be 150 years ago the average American had 1 pair of paints and 2 shirts. Today the average American has 20 pairs of blue jeans.

What's creating new jobs is not that a company is trying to create jobs but that human desires keep expanding.