Amazon Uses the AI Hype to Justify Rising Workloads

“I was recently laid off from Amazon after five years. Did artificial intelligence replace me? Not literally. No bot is performing my job today. But the money and influence behind the AI industry make it easy to ride the hype and tighten control over our work and our society,” one former employee told The Hill.

The AI tools engineers use every day are nowhere near ready to fully replace specialists. They know this because they were the ones who had to “look after” these systems day after day. Even those who can handle multiple AI agents at once and train them on specialized datasets describe only modest efficiency gains. Just as often, they spend hours or days fixing the systems’ mistakes.

The truth is that Amazon’s managers are demanding far more from employees. The company has always been known for its fast pace, but colleagues who have been there for a decade admit that teams are now expected to deliver more with fewer people. “Major incidents” are becoming more frequent—for example, the AWS outage that paralyzed a significant portion of the internet in October—as teams face constant pressure to “do more with less.” Persistent rumors of layoffs breed a corrosive fear, eroding the sense of challenge and satisfaction the job once offered. That fear makes it easier to impose unrealistic productivity norms.

Amazon is not only mandating the internal use of AI—it is also racing to build new data centers, as AWS sells the computing power that drives many other companies’ models. Palantir, for instance, runs its mass-deportation software for ICE on Amazon Web Services. In this sense, the layoffs can be seen both as an attempt to free up resources for new data centers and as a sales pitch, signaling to corporate clients that they too can carry out sweeping staff cuts—provided they adopt AWS’s AI services.

In this, Amazon resembles the sellers of shovels during the gold rush. It is in the company’s interest to insist, again and again, that there is plenty of gold waiting to be found.

Of course, wealthy executives seeking to deploy new technologies to boost profits and tighten control over workers is hardly a revelation. But the scale of collaboration between tech CEOs and the state—whether dismantling the NLRB, using AI for surveillance, or pushing aggressive deregulation—has become genuinely unprecedented, eroding the position of ordinary people and workers alike.

Beyond the pressure on employees, the mass layoffs, and the unsettling alliance between Big Tech and government, there are other costs to the rapid expansion of energy-intensive infrastructure across the country. This boom coincides with the final window in which irreversible climate shifts can still be averted. The data centers Amazon is racing to build require new gas plants and the preservation of coal facilities once slated for retirement. Without regulation, this means higher utility bills and shrinking water supplies for everyone in a future where stable work is increasingly rare.

It is becoming ever clearer that hard work no longer protects anyone from being laid off. And good intentions will not persuade Amazon or other tech giants to return to the more environmentally responsible course they once vowed to follow. Employees face profound cognitive dissonance when executives promise a future of creativity and prosperity powered by AI and “guaranteed basic income,” while fiercely resisting the taxes needed to fund even the most modest social protections.

The industry’s current trajectory is unmistakably dystopian. Yet as long as these companies still employ people with intellect and moral resolve, we can hold on to what evolution equipped us to do best: work together. Collective effort can shift the direction of travel and ensure that machine learning serves society rather than the select few.

The possibilities remain vast, but finding real “gold” will require a different path.