Threat To Jobs, Democracy: Why Over 1,000 Amazon Employees Are Pushing Back Against Its AI Policy
Staff from across tech giants like Meta, Google, Apple and Microsoft have backed the letter and engineers, product managers and warehouse workers from Amazon are among the signatories.
In what is being seen as one of the largest internal protest at a tech firm, more than 1,000 employees have signed an open letter warning against the impact of the company's strong AI push.
The letter, reviewed by The Guardian, points out AI's triple threat to employment, democracy and climate.
Staff from across tech giants like Meta, Google, Apple and Microsoft have backed the letter and engineers, product managers and warehouse workers from Amazon are among the signatories.
The letter comes in the backdrop of layoffs made by Amazon as part of its AI expansion plan through scaling up the use of artificial intelligence tools across operations; in turn, prompting questions around crucial topics like job security, workplace surveillance and environmental impact.
The layoff announcements in recent period have been seen through the prism of multibillion-dollar commitments for new AI-linked data centres in the US along with rapid AI automations. This is something which has compounded fears of further job cuts, on top of an already mounting pressures related to higher productivity quotas.
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A senior software engineer was quoted by The Guardian as saying that employees are feeling the pressure to use AI tools for coding and writing, and underscored that management now expects "twice as much work because of AI tools".
Another worker highlighted that the use of AI tools is being used as a justification for random productivity quotas despite the tools not bridging the gap.
The worker-led initiative also calls upon Amazon to ensure that its data centres run on clean energy so as not to deteriorate the climate situation further.
Moreover, it also demands restricting AI products that could encourage and enable "violence, surveillance and mass deportation", and creation of worker-led bodies to oversee how AI is deployed internally.
The protest at one of the world’s largest technology companies has become a symbol of growing internal distress among workers along with their resistance to generative AI is reshaping workflows and power dynamics.
