Andy Jash, CEO of Amazon, the world’s largest e-commerce company, said on the 17th that the use of artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to reduce the company’s workforce in the next few years.
In an email to employees on the same day, CEO Joshi said, “Generative AI and AI-based software agents will change the way we do business.”
He added, “Some jobs currently perform will require fewer people, and other types of jobs will require more people.”
CEO Joshi said, “It is difficult to know exactly what this will lead to over time,” but predicted, “The total number of white-collar workers will decrease as we gain efficiency through extensive AI use across the company in the next few years.”
In addition, he told employees, “Learn AI tools and experiment themselves,” and emphasized, “We need to find a way to do more with fewer people.” Amazon has been investing heavily in AI, including Alexa+ with Generative AI as its voice assistant and Alexa with shopping assistant, and AI tools for developers and businesses sold by Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. The company is also using AI tools for inventory placement, customer service, and product list.
Amazon is the second-largest private employer in the United States after Walmart, with 1.56 million employees as of the end of March. Most of them pack and deliver goods in warehouses, but about 350,000 of them are in management positions.
CEO Josh’s comments reflect concerns that have been raised that AI will replace human jobs amid the AI craze.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, a ChatGPT developer open AI competitor, recently warned that “AI could eliminate half of all new office jobs over the next five years and send unemployment soaring by up to 20%.
Duolingo, a foreign language learning service provider, said it would gradually stop hiring contract employees to perform tasks that AI could handle, while e-commerce company Shopify asked employees to explain why AI could not do the job when asked to fill in new workers.
Earlier, Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google AI organization DeepMind, said on the 4th that he was not overly concerned about the end of jobs and that he was more concerned about the loss of control over AI than about losing jobs to AI.
CEO Hassabis, the winner of last year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, said that AI will change labor but not eliminate jobs completely, and that technological development can create new types of jobs and increase productivity. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Hinton, a professor at the University of Toronto in Canada, who is called the “Godfather of AI,” was quoted as saying in a podcast broadcast on the 16th that “there is a risk that AI will occur if we become incredibly smart and realize that we (human beings) are not needed.”
According to CNBC, Professor Hinton, who was the Nobel Prize winner in Physics last year and played a pioneering role in the development of large language models (LLM) as Google’s vice president, said there are mixed concerns that AI will replace humans due to a technological rebellion and views that dismiss it as a science fiction novel.
“Both are extreme,” he said. “I often say that there is a 10-20% chance that AI will kill humans, which is just an intuition based on the idea that we still make AI and are very creative.”
He added, “There is hope that if people who are smart enough have enough resources and study enough, they will find ways to make AI not want to hurt us.”
JULIE KIM
US ASIA JOURNAL
