In this scenario, 15$/H would just be their current price point for the following tier of bottom of the chain not-yet-automated tasks.
This is also how I see the robot job apocalypse playing out and why we need political change that can handle both the wealth generation and rapid job churn / requirements for job training that AI and robotics will bring. Either pay more or have the wealth disbursed. The alternative is, as has always been, concentrate the wealth in the owners of capital. But this times it’s different. Current wealth generation by capital is unprecedented. And technology allows control and capture of that wealth in an unprecedented manner. At the same time regulatory and political structures have done nothing to deal the with the negative costs associated with the process. What is the point of having an economic machine the likes of which history has never seen if it all just ends up on a ditigal legder for a few dozen people while automated factories are running in the dark and requiring resources stripping the planet of resources needed for you know like ecosystems and such. Not sustainable. So. Yeah. Amazing move for Amazon. Where does everyone else fit in the picture.
And economists have always been saying "no its not".
I understand that robots+AI will eventually be superior to humans (their evolution rate is faster than ours, extrapolating...) . The question is how many life times away is that. Moore's law ended, maybe AI will asymptote too?
May be with less humans for $15/hour and machines, their average per unit hour cost is still $7.25.
However, this does affect 350,000 employees today, and that is a lot of employees.
Also the fact that they have automated many of their lower paid jobs away is really irrelevant - they did that anyway even when their wage was lower. They could have kept automating jobs away and paid them very low wages. The fact that they aren't is definitely a good thing.
This does produce temporary dislocation. Once all the elevators were automated, elevator operators were all out of a job. [1] But I don't think that's an argument against automation. I think it's an argument for a strong safety net and generous retraining programs.
[1] Yes, this was once a job. There are even a few left: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/insider/manual-elevators-...
Look at other sorts of pro-worker laws, like safety. If Amazon were lobbying for increased OSHA oversight of warehouses because they didn't want to compete with companies who treated worker bodies as disposable, would that be bad? I don't think so.