A place where Wish Lists comes true, the Amazon fulfillment center is chiefly guided by intelligence that’s artificial. And that will only become truer with each passing year. From Marcus Wohlsen’s Wired article which peeks inside Bezos’ humming Phoenix warehouse:

“Through the engineering of its fulfillment centers, Amazon has built the world’s most nimble infrastructure for the transfer of things, a logistics platform that dramatically amplifies any one person’s ability to move matter to anyone else. As Amazon expands that capacity to include its own trucks and someday flying drones, the physical reach it can offer other businesses extends even further. Much in the way cloud services and the data centers that house them have become the foundation of doing business online, Amazon’s fulfillment centers have the potential to become the networked hubs of the consumer economy, the biggest of big boxes that free up businesses to focus on making things rather than moving them.

An Overarching Brain

Entering the fulfillment center in Phoenix feels like venturing into a realm where the machines, not the humans, are in charge. Also known by the codename PHX6, the place radiates a non-human intelligence, an overarching brain dictating the most minute movements of everyone within its reach.

At 1.2 million square feet, PHX6 consists of two fulfillment operations working as mirror images of one another, a redundancy that lets the FC scale up or down in response to rising and falling demand. A central mezzanine provides panoramic views of both sides of the warehouse, the back walls obscured in the distance. An impossible-to-trace web of conveyor belts and rollers shuttle the ubiquitous yellow totes–the basic logistical units of an Amazon FC–from one point to another, filled with goods destined for warehouse shelves or for customers.

Also known by the codename PHX6, the place radiates a non-human intelligence, an overarching brain dictating the most minute movements of everyone within its reach.”