Honestly, all this fuss! As I write, the BBC Panorama based on the secretly filmed experiences of Adam Littler is about to go out. He got an agency job as an Amazon "picker" – the people who actually take the items ordered off the shelves and on to the next stage of the shipping process – in the firm's Swansea warehouse. Everyone's getting their knickers in a twist about the fact that he walks nearly 11 miles in one 10-and-a-half-hour night shift to collect 110 orders an hour (or one every 33 seconds) while his hand-held scanner counts down the time for him and beeps if he's taking too long and may fail to meet his target. By the end, he – a fit, 23-year-old – is hobbling and bandy-legged with fatigue.

People, listen, we have got to toughen up. These are halcyon days. No, not ones named after the sleeping pill you might take to get over the cumulative stresses of, say, holding down a job that continuously harries you towards barely achievable targets while you're effectively plugged into a constant surveillance system (even if you discount the claims of other workers, denied by Amazon, that it also tracks them via GPS tags in clothing, times toilet breaks and operates a "three strikes and release" policy on those who miss their targets). No, these are your actual, classical-via-Shakespeare halcyon days: serene and beautiful things we will recollect with misty-eyed nostalgia in years to come when hell has risen all around us.

For inside the scaly carapace of Amazon lurks another, smaller beast. More vicious, more potent, but biding its time. As with Ridley Scott's aliens, so with online retail leviathans. The lurking, many-tentacled monster is Amazon's Mechanical Turk. This enables people ("Requesters") looking to outsource small personal or corporate tasks that can't be done by computers, and that would be too inefficiently time-consuming to perform themselves or to employ extra staff (what with their bleatings about sick pay, holiday allowance and blah-di-everlasting-blah). Requesters post descriptions of their needs ("Human Intelligence Tasks"), and how much they are willing to pay, to a waiting army of workers dispersed across the world, who will, for an average of $2, or £1.25ish, to meet them. This would mean that, to make minimum wage (depending on which country you and your labour laws are in), you would have to complete just over five tasks an hour (and not be stiffed on payment by any of the Requesters). In one of those (un)happy confluences of colloquialism and subtext, accepting one of mturk.com's jobs is known as "taking the hit".

In short, this – and its smaller, but often more nimbly sophisticated and potentially effective competitors such as Fancy Hands and Task Rabbit – is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with the whimpering of hundreds of thousands of digital serfs unwillingly but desperately racing each other to the bottom in an unregulated labour market, while their – by which I mean, our – overlords' individual or corporate coffers swell, and the handful of aggregator kings who cream off a percentage of every transaction look down contentedly, masters of all they effortlessly survey.

Now that's a panorama we should fear.