Over 1,000 Amazon staff 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 inside 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 staff 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 and marketing managers, and warehouse workers spanning many divisions of the corporate. A senior engineering supervisor with over 20 years at Amazon says they signed as a result of they consider a manufactured “race” to construct one of the best AI has empowered executives to trample staff and the surroundings.
“The present technology of AI has turn out to be nearly like a drug that firms like Amazon obsess over, use as a canopy to put folks off, and use the financial savings to pay for information 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 large tech firms, is within the midst of investing billions of {dollars} to assemble new information facilities to coach and run generative AI methods. This contains instruments serving to staff write code and consumer-facing providers equivalent to Amazon’s procuring 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 continuous to get higher and higher,” he stated.
AI methods demand important energy, which has pressured utility firms to show to coal crops and different carbon-emitting sources of vitality to help the information heart increase. The open letter calls for that Amazon abandon carbon gasoline sources at its information facilities, bar its AI applied sciences from getting used to hold out surveillance and mass deportation, and cease forcing staff to make use of AI of their work. “We, the undersigned Amazon staff, have severe considerations about this aggressive rollout in the course of the international rise of authoritarianism and our most vital years to reverse the local weather disaster,” the letter states.
