Amazon employees are sounding the alarm on AI in an open letter addressed to CEO Andy Jassy and the company’s senior leadership team.
The letter was published last week with signatures from over 1,000 unnamed Amazon employees, from Whole Foods cashiers to IT support technicians. It’s a fraction of Amazon’s workforce, which amounts to about 1.53 million, according to the company’s third-quarter earnings release.
In it, employees claim the company is “casting aside its climate goals to build AI,” forcing them to use the tech while working towards cutting its workforce in favor of AI investments, and helping to build “a more militarized surveillance state with fewer protections for ordinary people.”
“We, the undersigned Amazon employees, have serious concerns about this aggressive rollout during the global rise of authoritarianism and our most important years to reverse the climate crisis,” the letter’s authors wrote. “We believe that the all-costs-justified, warp-speed approach to AI development will do staggering damage to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth.”
The letter pointed out that Amazon’s global carbon emissions have increased since 2019, despite its net-zero goal by 2040.
