Amazon Employees sounded the alarm about artificial intelligence in an open letter to CEO Andy Jassy and the company’s senior leadership team.
this letter Released last week, it was signed by more than 1,000 unnamed Amazon employees, including Whole Foods cashiers and IT support technicians. That’s just a fraction of Amazon’s total workforce, which totals about 1.53 million people, according to the company’s third-quarter data. earnings release.
In it, employees claim the company is “building AI at the mercy of its climate goals,” forcing them to use the technology while working to cut the workforce in favor of AI investments and helping create “a more militarized surveillance state with fewer protections for ordinary people.”
“We, the undersigned Amazon employees, are gravely concerned about this aggressive rollout during the global rise of authoritarianism and in the years most important for us to reverse the climate crisis,” the letter’s authors wrote. “We believe that an all-costs, hyper-speed approach to AI development will cause alarming damage to democracy, our jobs, and our planet.”
The letter pointed out that Amazon’s global Increased carbon emissions Since 2019, despite net zero target By 2040.
Amazon tells wealth In a statement, the suggestion that the company had abandoned its climate commitments was “completely false and ignores the facts.”
“Amazon is already committed to powering our operations in a more sustainable way and investing in carbon-free energy. This includes supporting two advanced nuclear energy agreements and investing in more than 600 renewable energy projects around the world,” Amazon spokesman Brad Glasser said wealth In the statement, he added that the company is working to improve operational efficiencies, including in its data centers.
Amazon’s carbon emissions increase 6% Last year, that was partly due to the rapid construction of its data centers.
November, Amazon Announce Plans to invest up to $50 billion starting in 2026 to expand artificial intelligence and supercomputing infrastructure on AWS for U.S. government customers. The tech giant plans to spend nearly $150 billion on data centers over the next 15 years, Bloomberg reported in March 2024 Report.
in its third quarter Earnings Conference CallAmazon Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky told analysts that the company has spent $89.9 billion so far this year, mainly to strengthen its cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services. Olsavsky added that the investment is to support demand for Amazon’s artificial intelligence and core services, as well as technology infrastructure such as data centers.
Meanwhile, Amazon announced in October that it would lay off about 14,000 corporate employees, or about 4% of its workforce. 350,000 corporate employeesas part of a broader AI-driven restructuring. The total number of job cuts could be as high as 30,000, which would be the largest single layoff in the company’s history. Reutersreport The news comes one day before Amazon announced it.
“We need to remember that the world is changing rapidly. This generation of artificial intelligence is the most transformative technology we have seen since the Internet, enabling businesses to innovate faster than ever before,” Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people and experience, wrote in the memo.
Spokesperson Glasser mentioned wealth Galetti’s memo in response to the company’s AI-related layoffs.
Those who weren’t laid off were expected to produce more products in less time, were even faced with the task of building “wasteful” AI tools for projects that didn’t really need them, and saw massive investments being poured into AI with little support for their careers, employees wrote in an open letter.
The letter also warns of turning Amazon’s Ring doorbell camera company into a AI-first technology and reintroduce a Tool for police to request video footage According to its synopsis, it “will cede incredible power to increasingly authoritarian governments and companies willing to abandon any principles they claim to follow in the race for AI dominance.”
In the letter, the signatories ask the tech giant to detail a public plan to power all data centers with renewable energy, provide a seat at the organizational level for reviewing AI use and needs, and commit that the company’s AI will not be used for violence, surveillance or mass evictions.
“The Amazon employees who signed this letter believe in building a better world, not building bunkers to retreat to,” the authors wrote. “We hope the promised benefits of artificial intelligence will give everyone More freedom to play and rest, spend time with family and friends, be moved by nature, create, feel safe and be ourselves. “