Over 1,000 Amazon workers have anonymously signed an open letter warning that the corporate’s allegedly “all-costs-justified, warp-speed strategy to AI improvement” may trigger “staggering harm to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth,” an inner advocacy group introduced on Wednesday.
4 members of Amazon Workers for Local weather Justice inform WIRED that they started asking staff to signal the letter final month. After reaching their preliminary purpose, the group revealed on Wednesday the job titles of the Amazon workers who signed and disclosed that greater than 2,400 supporters from different organizations, together with Google and Apple, have additionally joined in.
Backers inside Amazon embody high-ranking engineers, senior product leaders, advertising managers, and warehouse employees spanning many divisions of the corporate. A senior engineering supervisor with over 20 years at Amazon says they signed as a result of they imagine a manufactured “race” to construct one of the best AI has empowered executives to trample staff and the setting.
“The present era of AI has develop into virtually like a drug that corporations like Amazon obsess over, use as a canopy to put individuals off, and use the financial savings to pay for knowledge facilities for AI merchandise nobody is paying for,” says the worker, who like others on this story, requested to stay nameless as a result of they feared retaliation from their bosses.
Amazon, together with different massive tech corporations, is within the midst of investing billions of {dollars} to assemble new knowledge facilities to coach and run generative AI methods. This contains instruments serving to staff write code and consumer-facing providers comparable to Amazon’s purchasing chatbot, Rufus. It’s simple to see why Amazon is pursuing AI. Final month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy introduced that Rufus was on monitor to extend Amazon’s gross sales by $10 billion yearly. It “is constant to get higher and higher,” he stated.
AI methods demand vital energy, which has pressured utility corporations to show to coal vegetation and different carbon-emitting sources of vitality to assist the info heart growth. The open letter calls for that Amazon abandon carbon gas sources at its knowledge facilities, bar its AI applied sciences from getting used to hold out surveillance and mass deportation, and cease forcing workers to make use of AI of their work. “We, the undersigned Amazon workers, have severe considerations about this aggressive rollout through the world rise of authoritarianism and our most necessary years to reverse the local weather disaster,” the letter states.
