Amazon-Mitarbeiter warnen vor dem „alle Kosten gerechtfertigten“ Ansatz des Unternehmens bei der KI-Entwicklung | Laut Amazon Employees for Climate Justice haben über 1.000 Arbeitnehmer eine Petition unterzeichnet, in der sie „ernsthafte Bedenken“ hinsichtlich der „aggressiven Einführung“ von Tools für künstliche Intelligenz durch das Unternehmen geäußert haben

Some of the details from this report:

>Over 1,000 Amazon employees have anonymously signed an open letter warning that the company’s allegedly “all-costs-justified, warp-speed approach to AI development” could cause “staggering damage to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth,” an internal advocacy group announced on Wednesday.
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>Four members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice tell WIRED that they began asking workers to sign the letter last month. After reaching their initial goal, the group published on Wednesday the job titles of the Amazon employees who signed and disclosed that more than 2,400 supporters from other organizations, including Google and Apple, have also joined in.
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>Backers inside Amazon include high-ranking engineers, senior product leaders, marketing managers, and warehouse staff spanning many divisions of the company. A senior engineering manager with over 20 years at Amazon says they signed because they believe a manufactured “race” to build the best AI has empowered executives to trample workers and the environment.
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>“The current generation of AI has become almost like a drug that companies like Amazon obsess over, use as a cover to lay people off, and use the savings to pay for data centers for AI products no one is paying for,” says the employee, who like others in this story, asked to remain anonymous because they feared retaliation from their bosses.
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>The letter represents a rare instance of tech employee activism during a year rocked by President Donald Trump’s return to power. His administration has rolled back labor protections, climate policies, and AI regulations. The measures have left some workers feeling uneasy about speaking out about what they perceive as unethical conduct by their employers. Many are also concerned about job security as automation threatens entry-level software engineering and marketing roles.
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>A number of organizations around the world have tried to advocate for a slowdown in AI development. In 2023, hundreds of prominent scientists petitioned the biggest AI companies to pause work on the technology for six months and evaluate potentially catastrophic harms stemming from it. The campaigns have generated scant success, and companies continue to rapidly release new, increasingly powerful AI models.
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>But despite the challenging political environment, members of the climate justice group at Amazon say they felt they had to try to combat potential harms from AI. Their strategy, in part, is to focus less on longer-term worries about AI that is more capable than humans, in favor of putting more emphasis on consequences they argue must be confronted now. Members say they are not against AI—in fact, they are optimistic about the technology, but want companies to take a more thoughtful approach to how they deploy it.
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>Two of the Amazon employees say executives are minimizing problems with the company’s internal AI tools and glossing over how dissatisfied workers are with them.
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>Some engineers are under pressure to use AI to double their productivity or else risk losing their jobs, according to a software development engineer in Amazon’s cloud computing division. But the engineer says that Amazon’s tools for writing code and technical documentation aren’t good enough to reach such ambitious targets. Another employee calls the AI outputs “slop.”

One of the many problems with this race to the bottom by big tech is that if a system such as an AI-based one eliminates entry level jobs, then this destabilizes the entire organization over the long run.

We’ve already seen the consequences of the management consulting trend of eviscerating middle management for large companies in the 1980s and 1990s, and now we’re seeing the erosion of entry level positions as well.

Without entry level staff now, there are going to be fewer people who will be qualified to be intermediate or senior staff later on which raises questions of where exactly the subsequent generations of employees and leaders are going to be coming from.

I was on Amazon yesterday and clicked a link to view the historical price. For some reason this launched a Rufus session at which point I noped out and decided I didn’t need the thing that bad anyways

Well, they’re all getting laid off next round.

When the very people building the tech are the ones holding up the warning sign, it’s probably a good idea to listen. It’s like the engineers who built the bridge telling you not to drive the 50-ton truck over it yet. That „all-costs-justified“ approach rarely ends well for anyone but the people at the very top.

This is exactly what „move fast and break things“ looks like when the things are labor rights, privacy, and downstream social risk, not just buggy features. For a company like Amazon, an „all-costs-justified“ AI strategy basically means: we keep the upside, everyone else eats the tail risks. It’s the CDO-squared playbook applied to models and data instead of mortgages.

What I like here is that the pushback is internal. When your own engineers and ops people are saying „this rollout is reckless,“ that’s not activists storming the gates, that’s your risk function trying to do its job. If leadership treats that as a PR problem instead of a signal, you learn more about their true objective function than from any glossy AI ethics page.

Also interesting that it’s the same group that did climate organizing. Different topic, same pattern: Amazon optimizes hard for efficiency and growth, then externalizes whatever doesn’t fit the spreadsheet. If regulators don’t get ahead of this, we’re basically trusting that shareholder pressure will magically align with long-term societal safety, which… historically hasn’t gone great.