In 2019, Amazon filed a patent for a, „Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with Inflatable Membrane“ The human delivery worker replacement drone includes a balloon component, which inflates during the last part of the vehicle’s journey to consumers – cutting down potentially disturbing noise from its propellors.

Lifted directly from an advertisement about the role of data in mineral mining, this animation of a globe could be seen as a short hand for Rio Tinto’s view of the planet; as a resource to be mined. Rio Tinto is one of the oldest and largest mining companies on the planet and responsible for vast mineral extraction used in many industries.

Rio Tinto relies on Amazon’s cloud hosting service AWS for its data management infrastructure – a core part of worker-less mine automation efforts. AWS is the largest cloud services provider in the world.