Amazon.com Inc. has long used robots to help humans move merchandise around its warehouses. Now automation is transforming Amazon’s white-collar workforce, too.

It’s lazy to think that a manufacturing process is better just because it’s automated. While the effort going on right now at the Tesla factory in Fremont is anything but lazy, it brings into the spotlight one of the core problems with the simplistic “automation for automation’s sake” strategy: processes that aren’t stable to begin with cannot be made stable with robots.

Amazon has been accused of treating staff like robots as it emerged that ambulances had been called out 600 times to the online retailer’s U.K. warehouses in the past three years.

Japan’s Preferred Networks Inc. has only one publicly available product, a whimsical application that uses artificial intelligence to automate the coloring of manga cartoons.