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March 2026

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Re: [nexa] Amazon is determined to use AI for everything – even when it slows down work

by J.C. De Martin

No, non intendevo alcun idealismo, Guido, sono stato troppo conciso. Con l'espressione "una proposta politica radicalmente alternativa" intendo non solo idee o visioni (che sono però una precondizione necessaria, anche se insufficiente), ma soprattutto qualcosa che abbia capacità di incidere politicamente. Che cosa? /Vaste programme/.... Intanto però possiamo e dobbiamo contrastare il "senso comune" con cui si parla e si scrive di IA e più in generale di tecnologia. Perché noi in questa sede possiamo anche aver capito tutto, ma là fuori la vasta maggioranza ha introiettato un modo di pensare alla tecnologia che mi fa venire in mente Flaiano (in realtà Barilli), ovvero, sono tutti ansiosi di correre in soccorso del vincitore... Quindi anche solo a livello delle idee, di discorsi, di narrazioni, di frame, di paradigmi c'è comunque parecchio lavoro da fare. Ciao, JC On 15/03/26 09:20, Guido Vetere wrote: > > Capisco bene la tua irritazione per questa naturalizzazione della > tecnologia: si tratta di una vecchia strategia ideologica. > > Detto questo, mi sembra che il punto davvero decisivo stia un po’ più > a valle. Non basta affermare che l’IA /dovrebbe /servire al benessere > collettivo invece che all’accumulazione privata. Questo, in fondo, lo > pensano già moltissime persone. Il problema non è l’assenza di > visioni, ma la scarsa capacità di realizzare anche le più fattibili > (ad esempio: costruire piattaforme sociali autonome). > > Marx lo diceva nelle /Tesi su Feuerbach/: non è la coscienza che > cambia il mondo; il mondo cambia quando cambiano le pratiche materiali > e i rapporti sociali. Le idee “giuste” esistono quasi sempre già. Ciò > che manca è la capacità politica, economica, scientifica, per renderle > operative. > > Per questo motivo, secondo me, la domanda interessante non è tanto > quale visione radicale dell’IA dovremmo formulare (ce ne sono già > molte), ma quali politiche, quali ricerche, alleanze sociali e > dispositivi economici potrebbero effettivamente orientarne lo sviluppo > in una direzione autenticamente sociale. > > Altrimenti si rischia un paradosso: criticare la naturalizzazione > della tecnologia per poi affidarsi, simmetricamente, alla magia > performativa delle idee. Come se bastasse dire “l’IA deve servire alla > collettività” perché lo faccia, o dire “basta con l’AI" (stile Tajani) > possa cambiare il corso degli eventi, o enunciare “serve il CERN per > l’AI” in qualche convegno faccia accadere concretamente qualcosa. > > Buona domenica, > > G. > > > >> Il giorno 15 mar 2026, alle ore 08:55, J.C. DE MARTIN via nexa >> <nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it> ha scritto: >> >> E' davvero affascinante (e infuriante)... rapporto dopo rapporto, >> articolo dopo articolo, è evidente la premessa ideologica di tutti >> questi discorsi, nessuno escluso: l'IA viene considerata esattamente >> come se fosse "natura". L'"IA", insomma, capita, l'"IA" avviene... e, >> avvenendo, "purtroppo" dei lavoratori si ritrovano per strada. Tutto >> viene scaricato sui lavoratori, che possono solo subire, oppure, se >> giovani, devono spremersi le meningi per cercare di capire (con la >> palla di vetro?) quali professioni saranno - tra X anni - meno a >> rischio di disoccupazione tecnologica... (tutti idraulici, >> ciclo-fattorini, muratori?). Il tutto giustificato ideologicamente da >> chi accorre subito a spiegare che è giusto così, che è "efficiente", >> che nel lungo termine è la cosa migliore per tutti, ignorando che >> quello che capiterà nel lungo termine è determinato dai rapporti di >> forza, non dalla fatina buona. >> >> In altre parole, nell'Europa e USA del 21 secolo (quello dei Thiel, >> Musk, Merz, Blackrock, ecc.) si postula il diritto di mettere in >> campo qualsiasi innovazione tecnologica totalmente a prescindere >> dalle conseguenze sociali. In altre parole, esiste solo un diritto, >> per di più assoluto: il diritto di fare profitti (qui e subito). >> Tutto il resto non conta. Famiglie vanno sul lastrico? Intere città o >> ceti sociali si trovano senza sussistenza dall'oggi al domani? >> Problemi di quelle persone, o, al limite, problema da lasciare a >> quello stesso Welfare State che però gli stessi Thiel, Musk, Merz, >> ecc. vorrebbero smantellare, lasciando a rigor di logica come unica >> opzione futura l'eliminazione fisica dei tanti esseri umani che ormai >> non sono più utili per lor signori (oppure, versione più "umana": >> continuino pure vivere i subumani inutili con qualche forma di >> reddito di base, chiusi nelle loro stanzette con droghe e un visore >> di realtà virtuale, così non danno fastidio). >> >> È urgente elaborare una proposta politica radicalmente alternativa. >> Una visione del mondo nella quale l'IA (e in generale qualsiasi >> tecnologia) deve servire a migliorare la vita della collettività, non >> essere quasi esclusivamente uno strumento nelle mani di pochi per >> accumulare ancora più capitale e potere sulla pelle di moltissime >> persone indifese? (E non parliamo dell'IA al servizio della violenza >> sistematica...) >> >> Juan Carlos >> >> >> On 12/03/26 14:29, Daniela Tafani wrote: >>> Amazon is determined to use AI for everything – even when it slows >>> down work >>> Corporate employees said Amazon’s race to roll out AI is leading to >>> surveillance, slop and ‘more work for everyone’. >>> >>> Varsha Bansal >>> Wed 11 Mar 2026 >>> >>> When Dina, a software developer based in New York, joined Amazon two >>> years ago, her job was to write code. Now, it’s mostly fixing what >>> artificial intelligence breaks. >>> >>> The internal AI tool she’s expected to use, called Kiro, frequently >>> hallucinates and generates flawed code, she says. Then she has to >>> dig through and correct the sloppy code it creates, or just revert >>> all changes and start again. She says it feels like “trying to AI my >>> way out of a problem that AI caused”. >>> >>> “I and many of my colleagues don’t feel that it actually makes us >>> that much faster,” Dina said. “But from management, we are certainly >>> getting messaging that we have to go faster, this will make us go >>> faster, and that speed is the number one priority.” >>> >>> Just days after speaking to the Guardian, Dina was laid off. >>> >>> Lisa, a supply chain engineer who has worked at Amazon for over a >>> decade, says that AI tools at work have been helpful to her only in >>> about one in every three attempts. And even then, she often finds >>> issues and has to consult with colleagues to verify and correct >>> their results, which takes up more time than if she’s done the task >>> without AI. >>> >>> She doesn’t take issue with the AI tools themselves, but rather the >>> company’s logic in pushing all employees to use them daily. “You >>> don’t look at the problem and go, ‘How do I use this hammer I have?’ >>> she said. “You look at it and go, ‘Is this a problem for a hammer or >>> something else?’” >>> >>> Group of figures inside a glowing digital space, facing a large >>> window that shows a landscape with trees and sky >>> ‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to >>> save critical thinking in an age of AI >>> Read more >>> More than a half a dozen current and former Amazon corporate >>> employees, in roles ranging from software engineer to user >>> experience researcher to data analyst, told the Guardian that Amazon >>> is pressing employees to integrate AI across all aspects of their >>> work, even though these workers say this push is hurting >>> productivity. They say Amazon is rolling out AI use in a haphazard >>> way while also tracking their AI use, and they’re worried the >>> company is essentially using them to train their eventual bot >>> replacements. All of this, they said, is demoralizing. The Guardian >>> granted these workers anonymity because of their fear of >>> professional repercussions. >>> >>> “We have hundreds of thousands of corporate employees in a wide >>> range of roles across many different businesses, each of which is >>> using AI in different ways to learn about what works best for their >>> use cases,” Montana MacLachlan, an Amazon spokesperson, said. “While >>> different employees may have different experiences, what we hear >>> from the vast majority of our teams is that they’re getting a lot of >>> value out of the AI tools that they use day-to-day.” >>> >>> This pressure comes as Amazon has laid off 30,000 workers in the >>> last four months – nearly 10% of its roughly 350,000 corporate >>> workforce. Its cuts are part of a wave of recent AI-connected tech >>> layoffs, including at Block, Pinterest and Autodesk. Exactly how >>> much these companies will be able to rely on AI to replace headcount >>> is unclear, and each company has given an array of sometimes >>> contradictory reasons for reductions. Jack Dorsey, the Block CEO, >>> said outright that AI was behind his 40% staffing cuts, while >>> Pinterest and Autodesk said they were redirecting investments to AI. >>> Amazon has waffled in explaining how AI factors into its layoff >>> decisions, saying both that it would lead to reductions, but that >>> recent cuts weren’t AI-driven. The company said in February it would >>> spend some $200bn this year on AI infrastructure and announced a >>> $50bn investment in OpenAI. >>> >>> In a moment of rising anxiety about AI and work, the decisions >>> Amazon makes around automation – and even how it talks about these >>> shifts – will be consequential for not just its massive workforce, >>> but for people in industries around the world. Amazon is the >>> second-largest employer in the US and has long influenced workplace >>> practices across both white collar and blue collar industries. >>> >>> “There’s a lot of talk among corporate employees about how some of >>> these practices – about performance, surveillance and monitoring – >>> are somewhat imported from the warehouse and the drivers space, and >>> that it is Amazon expanding this model of labor to white collar >>> workers,” Jack, a software engineer at Amazon for more than a >>> decade, said. “It does feel like we’re at the vanguard of a new >>> stage in employer relations with the advent of AI.” >>> >>> While Amazon has a reputation for being a tough place to work, the >>> impact of its AI campaign has pressurized its workplace, workers >>> said. “It’s worse now,” said Denny, a software engineer, who works >>> in the retail space at the company. “If we don’t pivot ... then we >>> risk becoming obsolete and being let go in the next layoff.” >>> >>> Whenever there’s a task at hand, the biggest question managers ask >>> is whether it can be done faster with AI tools, according to Denny. >>> This is leading employees to use AI tools just for the sake of it. >>> Recently, someone in Denny’s team shared that an internal AI agent >>> had saved him about a week of developer effort on a feature. But >>> when Denny looked at the actual code review, he found dozens of >>> comments from colleagues pointing out basic issues. The AI generated >>> code was full of slop. >>> >>> “In the end, my guess is that the developer cycle is not going to >>> change, and [could] even be potentially longer,” said Denny. “This >>> pressure to use [AI] has resulted in worse quality code, but also >>> just more work for everyone.” >>> >>> Denny was one of several workers who told the Guardian they’re >>> pressured to use an overwhelming array of AI tools, many of which >>> were hastily developed in internal hackathons and then have to spend >>> time answering surveys about their experience with the tools. >>> >>> “I would get shown these random tools by my manager who’d be like: >>> ‘Why don’t you try using this thing?’, and it was just the result of >>> a hackathon,” said Denny. He says the tools are “half-baked” and >>> unhelpful, and in fact add to his workload because he has to vet them. >>> >>> Amazon typically organizes quarterly hackathons to encourage >>> engineers to develop new projects. Sometime last year, Denny >>> recalls, the company primarily switched to generative AI hackathons, >>> during which the majority of projects ended up being developer >>> productivity focused tools. >>> >>> “We don’t mandate teams use AI tools,” said Amazon’s MacLachlan. >>> “However, we believe these tools can help employees work more >>> efficiently and automate time-consuming, undifferentiated tasks.” >>> >>> There have also been public slip-ups that seem connected to Amazon’s >>> embrace of AI. According to a February FT report, Amazon recently >>> experienced at least two outages because of issues with the >>> company’s internal AI tools, including a 13-hour interruption to a >>> customer-facing system in December after some engineers allowed its >>> AI tool “to make certain changes”. Amazon, however, said that an >>> employee, rather than AI, caused the service interruption. The FT >>> reported on Tuesday that Amazon would convene engineers to explore >>> “a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI >>> coding tools”. >>> >>> “I think if you continue to push people to use AI tools in every >>> single aspect, you’re going to get more errors like that,” Sarah, an >>> Amazon software engineer, said. >>> >>> Sarah said that AI can be useful, but its potential is best realized >>> when engineers decide how to use it. But at Amazon, even when AI is >>> not suited for a task, she’s now expected to train it. “We have to >>> write out detailed procedures so that the AI can understand it and >>> give better output,” said Sarah. “Part of my new job role, it feels >>> like, is being asked to train the AI to essentially replace you.” >>> She’s early in her career and worries that offloading her work to AI >>> is stunting her learning curve. >>> >>> Forcing employees to adopt tools, according to Ifeoma Ajunwa, >>> founding director of the AI and Future of Work Program at Emory >>> University and the author of The Quantified Worker, usually >>> backfires. “Generally, employees are in a better position [than >>> management] to determine what tools can aid productivity,” she said. >>> >>> Meanwhile, Amazon workers are often having to seek out training for >>> AI best practices on their own. >>> >>> Will, a user experience researcher, said Amazon offers employees >>> plenty of AI training videos on their learning portals, though most >>> of them are optional. When he’s attended training sessions, “the >>> focus is always, ‘here’s how to build something as quickly as >>> possible’”. He said trainers – who are typically peer employees who >>> are also AI power users – advise to carefully review each step >>> before letting AI start building. At the same time, Will said: “I >>> have been in several trainings where the instructor says you can >>> just ask the AI to check its own work.” However, you can’t fully >>> rely on AI to detect its own mistakes; that’s something human >>> judgment is better suited for. >>> >>> “One of the biggest predictors of AI adoption and whether employees >>> feel that AI increases their productivity is whether management >>> encourages it and provides training,” Alex Imas, professor of >>> behavioural science and economics at Chicago Booth, said. >>> >>> The rushed deployment of AI means an uncritical expansion of >>> surveillance ... >>> Nick Srnicek >>> MacLachlan said Amazon provides different training and resources for >>> people across the company, including structured options. “Employees >>> are encouraged to use the tools themselves as a learning mechanism, >>> adopting a learn-as-you-work approach that is proving to be one of >>> the most practical and effective methods of AI adoption across the >>> company,” she said. >>> >>> An AI-fueled shift to surveillance >>> Along with the productivity challenges that have come with Amazon’s >>> AI push, workers said it’s also making them feel surveilled. >>> >>> For years, each morning when Amazon employees logged in to work, an >>> internal system called Amazon Connections would greet them with a >>> message and ask for feedback on topics like how their teams were >>> functioning, or how satisfied they felt with their work. Over the >>> last year, these questions have increasingly centered less on human >>> factors and more on AI. >>> >>> Maria, a former product manager who was laid off from Amazon in >>> January, said questions asking her about her career or team shifted >>> to more often focus on AI: “‘Are you using AI in your daily work?,’ >>> ‘How often are you using it?,’ ‘Do you think that you’re a power >>> user?,’ or ‘Is AI a priority in your organization?’”. >>> >>> Then there are more obvious indicators of surveillance. Workers said >>> managers at Amazon have a dashboard where they track their team >>> members’ AI use, including if they’re using certain tools and how >>> often they do so. (The Information first reported this in February.) >>> >>> Jack, the software developer who’s worked at Amazon for more than a >>> decade, said the company also launched a different dashboard, which >>> the Guardian has viewed, so teams could see their generative AI >>> adoption, engagement and depth of usage. “Every team treats it >>> differently,” he said, with some managers using it with a goal of >>> getting at least 80% of their team using AI tools weekly. >>> >>> Sarah said her team’s principal engineer told her and his other >>> reports he checks this dashboard daily. “He’s really been pushing >>> our AI usage,” she said. >>> >>> “Of course we want to understand what tools our teams are using and >>> whether those tools are working well for them or could be improved,” >>> said MacLachlan. >>> >>> The inevitable result of AI tools getting deployed at scale is >>> surveillance, according to Nick Srnicek, author of Platform >>> Capitalism and a senior lecturer in digital economy at King’s >>> College London. “The rushed deployment of AI means an uncritical >>> expansion of surveillance since these tools increasingly require >>> detailed knowledge of personal workflows and data,” he said. “To >>> make them more capable means giving management greater insight and >>> control over workers’ everyday activities.” >>> >>> Workers also said they suspect their career advancement is >>> increasingly dependent on their enthusiastic embrace of AI. >>> >>> “We have promotion documents which have a template with questions >>> like, ‘What has this person done?’, ‘What impact did it have?’ – and >>> now it also has a question asking, ‘How [did] they leverage AI?’,” >>> said Lisa. “I think they want to only keep the people who support >>> this investment [in AI] and are going to try and filter out people >>> who do not support it or have concerns about it.” The Wall Street >>> Journal reported in late February that at Amazon, “managers do >>> consider who is all-in on AI when it comes to promotions”. >>> >>> “While we expect employees to use resources – including AI – to make >>> work more engaging and improve customers’ lives, we don’t instruct >>> managers to consider AI utilization as part of our evaluation >>> process,” said MacLachlan. “Instead, we focus on AI adoption and >>> sharing best practices to celebrate innovation and operational >>> efficiency gains across the company.” >>> >>> At the same time, Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO, hasn’t been shy about his >>> AI expectations for his employees. In a company-wide email last >>> June, he predicted that AI-driven productivity gains would reduce >>> the company’s corporate workforce, and urged workers to embrace AI. >>> “Educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and >>> experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your team’s >>> brainstorms to figure out how to invent for our customers more >>> quickly and expansively, and how to get more done with scrappier >>> teams,” he wrote. >>> >>> The unspoken math >>> That same company-wide email prompted heavy internal pushback at >>> Amazon last summer, with employees slamming Jassy’s leadership and >>> speaking of the demoralizing impact of the company’s AI push, >>> according to Business Insider. Months later, over 1,000 workers >>> signed a petition that raised concerns about the company’s >>> “aggressive rollout” of AI tools. >>> >>> As Amazon has laid off thousands of workers, it’s shared growing >>> revenue numbers each quarter. Though Jassy has repeatedly said that >>> these layoffs are neither “financially-driven” nor AI-driven, for >>> Maria, all of this adds up. >>> >>> “If you say you automated away two hours of someone’s job, you need >>> to convert that into savings on that job title,” she said, >>> explaining the company’s logic behind cutting jobs. “That’s the >>> unspoken math of what they’re doing.” >>> >>> Jack keeps thinking about comments Jassy made during a companywide >>> all-hands meeting last spring. According to a Business Insider >>> report about this meeting, Jassy responded to a question about >>> running Amazon as “the world’s largest startup”, and said they want >>> to be “scrappy” to “do a lot more things”. He also warned that their >>> competitors are the “most technically able, most hungry” companies, >>> including startups “working seven days a week, 15 hours a day”. >>> >>> “All of those things put together was an implicit threat that the >>> people remaining at the company are expected to work longer and >>> harder,” said Jack. It “really struck home to me that if [Amazon] >>> can’t amass profits with endless growth, then it can get a little >>> bit more by squeezing it out of the people working for it”. >>> >>> <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/mar/11/amazon-ar…> >> >

March 15, 2026

Re: [nexa] Amazon is determined to use AI for everything – even when it slows down work

by Guido Vetere

Capisco bene la tua irritazione per questa naturalizzazione della tecnologia: si tratta di una vecchia strategia ideologica. Detto questo, mi sembra che il punto davvero decisivo stia un po’ più a valle. Non basta affermare che l’IA dovrebbe servire al benessere collettivo invece che all’accumulazione privata. Questo, in fondo, lo pensano già moltissime persone. Il problema non è l’assenza di visioni, ma la scarsa capacità di realizzare anche le più fattibili (ad esempio: costruire piattaforme sociali autonome). Marx lo diceva nelle Tesi su Feuerbach: non è la coscienza che cambia il mondo; il mondo cambia quando cambiano le pratiche materiali e i rapporti sociali. Le idee “giuste” esistono quasi sempre già. Ciò che manca è la capacità politica, economica, scientifica, per renderle operative. Per questo motivo, secondo me, la domanda interessante non è tanto quale visione radicale dell’IA dovremmo formulare (ce ne sono già molte), ma quali politiche, quali ricerche, alleanze sociali e dispositivi economici potrebbero effettivamente orientarne lo sviluppo in una direzione autenticamente sociale. Altrimenti si rischia un paradosso: criticare la naturalizzazione della tecnologia per poi affidarsi, simmetricamente, alla magia performativa delle idee. Come se bastasse dire “l’IA deve servire alla collettività” perché lo faccia, o dire “basta con l’AI" (stile Tajani) possa cambiare il corso degli eventi, o enunciare “serve il CERN per l’AI” in qualche convegno faccia accadere concretamente qualcosa. Buona domenica, G. > Il giorno 15 mar 2026, alle ore 08:55, J.C. DE MARTIN via nexa <nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it> ha scritto: > > E' davvero affascinante (e infuriante)... rapporto dopo rapporto, articolo dopo articolo, è evidente la premessa ideologica di tutti questi discorsi, nessuno escluso: l'IA viene considerata esattamente come se fosse "natura". L'"IA", insomma, capita, l'"IA" avviene... e, avvenendo, "purtroppo" dei lavoratori si ritrovano per strada. Tutto viene scaricato sui lavoratori, che possono solo subire, oppure, se giovani, devono spremersi le meningi per cercare di capire (con la palla di vetro?) quali professioni saranno - tra X anni - meno a rischio di disoccupazione tecnologica... (tutti idraulici, ciclo-fattorini, muratori?). Il tutto giustificato ideologicamente da chi accorre subito a spiegare che è giusto così, che è "efficiente", che nel lungo termine è la cosa migliore per tutti, ignorando che quello che capiterà nel lungo termine è determinato dai rapporti di forza, non dalla fatina buona. > > In altre parole, nell'Europa e USA del 21 secolo (quello dei Thiel, Musk, Merz, Blackrock, ecc.) si postula il diritto di mettere in campo qualsiasi innovazione tecnologica totalmente a prescindere dalle conseguenze sociali. In altre parole, esiste solo un diritto, per di più assoluto: il diritto di fare profitti (qui e subito). Tutto il resto non conta. Famiglie vanno sul lastrico? Intere città o ceti sociali si trovano senza sussistenza dall'oggi al domani? Problemi di quelle persone, o, al limite, problema da lasciare a quello stesso Welfare State che però gli stessi Thiel, Musk, Merz, ecc. vorrebbero smantellare, lasciando a rigor di logica come unica opzione futura l'eliminazione fisica dei tanti esseri umani che ormai non sono più utili per lor signori (oppure, versione più "umana": continuino pure vivere i subumani inutili con qualche forma di reddito di base, chiusi nelle loro stanzette con droghe e un visore di realtà virtuale, così non danno fastidio). > > È urgente elaborare una proposta politica radicalmente alternativa. Una visione del mondo nella quale l'IA (e in generale qualsiasi tecnologia) deve servire a migliorare la vita della collettività, non essere quasi esclusivamente uno strumento nelle mani di pochi per accumulare ancora più capitale e potere sulla pelle di moltissime persone indifese? (E non parliamo dell'IA al servizio della violenza sistematica...) > > Juan Carlos > > > On 12/03/26 14:29, Daniela Tafani wrote: >> Amazon is determined to use AI for everything – even when it slows down work >> Corporate employees said Amazon’s race to roll out AI is leading to surveillance, slop and ‘more work for everyone’. >> >> Varsha Bansal >> Wed 11 Mar 2026 >> >> When Dina, a software developer based in New York, joined Amazon two years ago, her job was to write code. Now, it’s mostly fixing what artificial intelligence breaks. >> >> The internal AI tool she’s expected to use, called Kiro, frequently hallucinates and generates flawed code, she says. Then she has to dig through and correct the sloppy code it creates, or just revert all changes and start again. She says it feels like “trying to AI my way out of a problem that AI caused”. >> >> “I and many of my colleagues don’t feel that it actually makes us that much faster,” Dina said. “But from management, we are certainly getting messaging that we have to go faster, this will make us go faster, and that speed is the number one priority.” >> >> Just days after speaking to the Guardian, Dina was laid off. >> >> Lisa, a supply chain engineer who has worked at Amazon for over a decade, says that AI tools at work have been helpful to her only in about one in every three attempts. And even then, she often finds issues and has to consult with colleagues to verify and correct their results, which takes up more time than if she’s done the task without AI. >> >> She doesn’t take issue with the AI tools themselves, but rather the company’s logic in pushing all employees to use them daily. “You don’t look at the problem and go, ‘How do I use this hammer I have?’ she said. “You look at it and go, ‘Is this a problem for a hammer or something else?’” >> >> Group of figures inside a glowing digital space, facing a large window that shows a landscape with trees and sky >> ‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI >> Read more >> More than a half a dozen current and former Amazon corporate employees, in roles ranging from software engineer to user experience researcher to data analyst, told the Guardian that Amazon is pressing employees to integrate AI across all aspects of their work, even though these workers say this push is hurting productivity. They say Amazon is rolling out AI use in a haphazard way while also tracking their AI use, and they’re worried the company is essentially using them to train their eventual bot replacements. All of this, they said, is demoralizing. The Guardian granted these workers anonymity because of their fear of professional repercussions. >> >> “We have hundreds of thousands of corporate employees in a wide range of roles across many different businesses, each of which is using AI in different ways to learn about what works best for their use cases,” Montana MacLachlan, an Amazon spokesperson, said. “While different employees may have different experiences, what we hear from the vast majority of our teams is that they’re getting a lot of value out of the AI tools that they use day-to-day.” >> >> This pressure comes as Amazon has laid off 30,000 workers in the last four months – nearly 10% of its roughly 350,000 corporate workforce. Its cuts are part of a wave of recent AI-connected tech layoffs, including at Block, Pinterest and Autodesk. Exactly how much these companies will be able to rely on AI to replace headcount is unclear, and each company has given an array of sometimes contradictory reasons for reductions. Jack Dorsey, the Block CEO, said outright that AI was behind his 40% staffing cuts, while Pinterest and Autodesk said they were redirecting investments to AI. Amazon has waffled in explaining how AI factors into its layoff decisions, saying both that it would lead to reductions, but that recent cuts weren’t AI-driven. The company said in February it would spend some $200bn this year on AI infrastructure and announced a $50bn investment in OpenAI. >> >> In a moment of rising anxiety about AI and work, the decisions Amazon makes around automation – and even how it talks about these shifts – will be consequential for not just its massive workforce, but for people in industries around the world. Amazon is the second-largest employer in the US and has long influenced workplace practices across both white collar and blue collar industries. >> >> “There’s a lot of talk among corporate employees about how some of these practices – about performance, surveillance and monitoring – are somewhat imported from the warehouse and the drivers space, and that it is Amazon expanding this model of labor to white collar workers,” Jack, a software engineer at Amazon for more than a decade, said. “It does feel like we’re at the vanguard of a new stage in employer relations with the advent of AI.” >> >> While Amazon has a reputation for being a tough place to work, the impact of its AI campaign has pressurized its workplace, workers said. “It’s worse now,” said Denny, a software engineer, who works in the retail space at the company. “If we don’t pivot ... then we risk becoming obsolete and being let go in the next layoff.” >> >> Whenever there’s a task at hand, the biggest question managers ask is whether it can be done faster with AI tools, according to Denny. This is leading employees to use AI tools just for the sake of it. Recently, someone in Denny’s team shared that an internal AI agent had saved him about a week of developer effort on a feature. But when Denny looked at the actual code review, he found dozens of comments from colleagues pointing out basic issues. The AI generated code was full of slop. >> >> “In the end, my guess is that the developer cycle is not going to change, and [could] even be potentially longer,” said Denny. “This pressure to use [AI] has resulted in worse quality code, but also just more work for everyone.” >> >> Denny was one of several workers who told the Guardian they’re pressured to use an overwhelming array of AI tools, many of which were hastily developed in internal hackathons and then have to spend time answering surveys about their experience with the tools. >> >> “I would get shown these random tools by my manager who’d be like: ‘Why don’t you try using this thing?’, and it was just the result of a hackathon,” said Denny. He says the tools are “half-baked” and unhelpful, and in fact add to his workload because he has to vet them. >> >> Amazon typically organizes quarterly hackathons to encourage engineers to develop new projects. Sometime last year, Denny recalls, the company primarily switched to generative AI hackathons, during which the majority of projects ended up being developer productivity focused tools. >> >> “We don’t mandate teams use AI tools,” said Amazon’s MacLachlan. “However, we believe these tools can help employees work more efficiently and automate time-consuming, undifferentiated tasks.” >> >> There have also been public slip-ups that seem connected to Amazon’s embrace of AI. According to a February FT report, Amazon recently experienced at least two outages because of issues with the company’s internal AI tools, including a 13-hour interruption to a customer-facing system in December after some engineers allowed its AI tool “to make certain changes”. Amazon, however, said that an employee, rather than AI, caused the service interruption. The FT reported on Tuesday that Amazon would convene engineers to explore “a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools”. >> >> “I think if you continue to push people to use AI tools in every single aspect, you’re going to get more errors like that,” Sarah, an Amazon software engineer, said. >> >> Sarah said that AI can be useful, but its potential is best realized when engineers decide how to use it. But at Amazon, even when AI is not suited for a task, she’s now expected to train it. “We have to write out detailed procedures so that the AI can understand it and give better output,” said Sarah. “Part of my new job role, it feels like, is being asked to train the AI to essentially replace you.” She’s early in her career and worries that offloading her work to AI is stunting her learning curve. >> >> Forcing employees to adopt tools, according to Ifeoma Ajunwa, founding director of the AI and Future of Work Program at Emory University and the author of The Quantified Worker, usually backfires. “Generally, employees are in a better position [than management] to determine what tools can aid productivity,” she said. >> >> Meanwhile, Amazon workers are often having to seek out training for AI best practices on their own. >> >> Will, a user experience researcher, said Amazon offers employees plenty of AI training videos on their learning portals, though most of them are optional. When he’s attended training sessions, “the focus is always, ‘here’s how to build something as quickly as possible’”. He said trainers – who are typically peer employees who are also AI power users – advise to carefully review each step before letting AI start building. At the same time, Will said: “I have been in several trainings where the instructor says you can just ask the AI to check its own work.” However, you can’t fully rely on AI to detect its own mistakes; that’s something human judgment is better suited for. >> >> “One of the biggest predictors of AI adoption and whether employees feel that AI increases their productivity is whether management encourages it and provides training,” Alex Imas, professor of behavioural science and economics at Chicago Booth, said. >> >> The rushed deployment of AI means an uncritical expansion of surveillance ... >> Nick Srnicek >> MacLachlan said Amazon provides different training and resources for people across the company, including structured options. “Employees are encouraged to use the tools themselves as a learning mechanism, adopting a learn-as-you-work approach that is proving to be one of the most practical and effective methods of AI adoption across the company,” she said. >> >> An AI-fueled shift to surveillance >> Along with the productivity challenges that have come with Amazon’s AI push, workers said it’s also making them feel surveilled. >> >> For years, each morning when Amazon employees logged in to work, an internal system called Amazon Connections would greet them with a message and ask for feedback on topics like how their teams were functioning, or how satisfied they felt with their work. Over the last year, these questions have increasingly centered less on human factors and more on AI. >> >> Maria, a former product manager who was laid off from Amazon in January, said questions asking her about her career or team shifted to more often focus on AI: “‘Are you using AI in your daily work?,’ ‘How often are you using it?,’ ‘Do you think that you’re a power user?,’ or ‘Is AI a priority in your organization?’”. >> >> Then there are more obvious indicators of surveillance. Workers said managers at Amazon have a dashboard where they track their team members’ AI use, including if they’re using certain tools and how often they do so. (The Information first reported this in February.) >> >> Jack, the software developer who’s worked at Amazon for more than a decade, said the company also launched a different dashboard, which the Guardian has viewed, so teams could see their generative AI adoption, engagement and depth of usage. “Every team treats it differently,” he said, with some managers using it with a goal of getting at least 80% of their team using AI tools weekly. >> >> Sarah said her team’s principal engineer told her and his other reports he checks this dashboard daily. “He’s really been pushing our AI usage,” she said. >> >> “Of course we want to understand what tools our teams are using and whether those tools are working well for them or could be improved,” said MacLachlan. >> >> The inevitable result of AI tools getting deployed at scale is surveillance, according to Nick Srnicek, author of Platform Capitalism and a senior lecturer in digital economy at King’s College London. “The rushed deployment of AI means an uncritical expansion of surveillance since these tools increasingly require detailed knowledge of personal workflows and data,” he said. “To make them more capable means giving management greater insight and control over workers’ everyday activities.” >> >> Workers also said they suspect their career advancement is increasingly dependent on their enthusiastic embrace of AI. >> >> “We have promotion documents which have a template with questions like, ‘What has this person done?’, ‘What impact did it have?’ – and now it also has a question asking, ‘How [did] they leverage AI?’,” said Lisa. “I think they want to only keep the people who support this investment [in AI] and are going to try and filter out people who do not support it or have concerns about it.” The Wall Street Journal reported in late February that at Amazon, “managers do consider who is all-in on AI when it comes to promotions”. >> >> “While we expect employees to use resources – including AI – to make work more engaging and improve customers’ lives, we don’t instruct managers to consider AI utilization as part of our evaluation process,” said MacLachlan. “Instead, we focus on AI adoption and sharing best practices to celebrate innovation and operational efficiency gains across the company.” >> >> At the same time, Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO, hasn’t been shy about his AI expectations for his employees. In a company-wide email last June, he predicted that AI-driven productivity gains would reduce the company’s corporate workforce, and urged workers to embrace AI. “Educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your team’s brainstorms to figure out how to invent for our customers more quickly and expansively, and how to get more done with scrappier teams,” he wrote. >> >> The unspoken math >> That same company-wide email prompted heavy internal pushback at Amazon last summer, with employees slamming Jassy’s leadership and speaking of the demoralizing impact of the company’s AI push, according to Business Insider. Months later, over 1,000 workers signed a petition that raised concerns about the company’s “aggressive rollout” of AI tools. >> >> As Amazon has laid off thousands of workers, it’s shared growing revenue numbers each quarter. Though Jassy has repeatedly said that these layoffs are neither “financially-driven” nor AI-driven, for Maria, all of this adds up. >> >> “If you say you automated away two hours of someone’s job, you need to convert that into savings on that job title,” she said, explaining the company’s logic behind cutting jobs. “That’s the unspoken math of what they’re doing.” >> >> Jack keeps thinking about comments Jassy made during a companywide all-hands meeting last spring. According to a Business Insider report about this meeting, Jassy responded to a question about running Amazon as “the world’s largest startup”, and said they want to be “scrappy” to “do a lot more things”. He also warned that their competitors are the “most technically able, most hungry” companies, including startups “working seven days a week, 15 hours a day”. >> >> “All of those things put together was an implicit threat that the people remaining at the company are expected to work longer and harder,” said Jack. It “really struck home to me that if [Amazon] can’t amass profits with endless growth, then it can get a little bit more by squeezing it out of the people working for it”. >> >> <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/mar/11/amazon-ar…> >

March 15, 2026

R: Amazon is determined to use AI for everything – even when it slows down work

by Marco Ricolfi

Caro JC, su quelli left puzzling aggiungici chi insegna: ma che devono insegnare oggi se non si ha la più pallida idea (o scelta) sul domani? Quanto alla proposta politica, è il secondo passaggio. Quali sono i molti e dispersi controinteressati alla prosecuzione della logica del profitto Ai enhanced? E quali azioni possono coalizzarli? Il soggetto politico è a valle… credo [cid:image001.jpg@01DCB45A.50898B80] __________________________________________ Prof. Avv. Marco Ricolfi C.so Galileo Ferraris, 43 - 10128 Torino T (+39) 011.554.54.11 F (+39) 011.518.45.87 E marco.ricolfi(a)weigmann.it<mailto:marco.ricolfi@weigmann.it> PEC marcoricolfi(a)pec.ordineavvocatitorino.it<mailto:marcoricolfi@pec.ordineavvocatitorino.it> www.weigmann.it<https://urlsand.esvalabs.com/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.weigmann.it%2F&e=6b170c62&…> [cid:image002.jpg@01DCB45A.50898B80] Member of The Parlex Group of European Lawyers EEIG with associated law firms in the main capitals of the European Union, U.S.A., Israel and Malaysia; web site: www.parlex.org<https://urlsand.esvalabs.com/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.parlex.org%2F&e=6b170c62&h…> DISCLAIMER: Le informazioni contenute in questa comunicazione sono riservate e destinate esclusivamente alla/e persona/e o all'ente/i destinatario. È vietato a soggetti diversi dai destinatari di questa comunicazione qualsiasi uso, copia o diffusione delle informazioni e dei dati in essa contenuti, sia ai sensi dell'art. 616 c.p. sia ai sensi del Regolamento (UE) 2016/679. Se questa comunicazione Vi è pervenuta per errore, Vi preghiamo di informarci chiamando il numero (+39) 011.554.54.11, ovvero di rispondere a questa e-mail e successivamente, di cancellare dal Vostro sistema la e-mail ed ogni suo allegato. DISCLAIMER: The information contained in the e-mail is confidential and intended only for the attention of the named individual(s) or organisation(s) to whom it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient be aware that any use, copying or distribution of the information contained herein is prohibited pursuant to Article 616 of the Italian Penal Code and (EU) Regulation 2016/679. If the communication has been sent to you in error, please notify us by telephone on (+39) 011.554.54.11, or reply to the e-mail. Please then delete the e-mail and any attachments from your system. Da: nexa <nexa-bounces(a)server-nexa.polito.it> Per conto di J.C. DE MARTIN via nexa Inviato: domenica 15 marzo 2026 08:55 A: Nexa <nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it> Cc: J.C. DE MARTIN <juancarlos.demartin(a)polito.it> Oggetto: Re: [nexa] Amazon is determined to use AI for everything – even when it slows down work E' davvero affascinante (e infuriante)... rapporto dopo rapporto, articolo dopo articolo, è evidente la premessa ideologica di tutti questi discorsi, nessuno escluso: l'IA viene considerata esattamente come se fosse "natura". L'"IA", insomma, capita, l'"IA" avviene... e, avvenendo, "purtroppo" dei lavoratori si ritrovano per strada. Tutto viene scaricato sui lavoratori, che possono solo subire, oppure, se giovani, devono spremersi le meningi per cercare di capire (con la palla di vetro?) quali professioni saranno - tra X anni - meno a rischio di disoccupazione tecnologica... (tutti idraulici, ciclo-fattorini, muratori?). Il tutto giustificato ideologicamente da chi accorre subito a spiegare che è giusto così, che è "efficiente", che nel lungo termine è la cosa migliore per tutti, ignorando che quello che capiterà nel lungo termine è determinato dai rapporti di forza, non dalla fatina buona. In altre parole, nell'Europa e USA del 21 secolo (quello dei Thiel, Musk, Merz, Blackrock, ecc.) si postula il diritto di mettere in campo qualsiasi innovazione tecnologica totalmente a prescindere dalle conseguenze sociali. In altre parole, esiste solo un diritto, per di più assoluto: il diritto di fare profitti (qui e subito). Tutto il resto non conta. Famiglie vanno sul lastrico? Intere città o ceti sociali si trovano senza sussistenza dall'oggi al domani? Problemi di quelle persone, o, al limite, problema da lasciare a quello stesso Welfare State che però gli stessi Thiel, Musk, Merz, ecc. vorrebbero smantellare, lasciando a rigor di logica come unica opzione futura l'eliminazione fisica dei tanti esseri umani che ormai non sono più utili per lor signori (oppure, versione più "umana": continuino pure vivere i subumani inutili con qualche forma di reddito di base, chiusi nelle loro stanzette con droghe e un visore di realtà virtuale, così non danno fastidio). È urgente elaborare una proposta politica radicalmente alternativa. Una visione del mondo nella quale l'IA (e in generale qualsiasi tecnologia) deve servire a migliorare la vita della collettività, non essere quasi esclusivamente uno strumento nelle mani di pochi per accumulare ancora più capitale e potere sulla pelle di moltissime persone indifese? (E non parliamo dell'IA al servizio della violenza sistematica...) Juan Carlos On 12/03/26 14:29, Daniela Tafani wrote: > Amazon is determined to use AI for everything – even when it slows down work > Corporate employees said Amazon’s race to roll out AI is leading to surveillance, slop and ‘more work for everyone’. > > Varsha Bansal > Wed 11 Mar 2026 > > When Dina, a software developer based in New York, joined Amazon two years ago, her job was to write code. Now, it’s mostly fixing what artificial intelligence breaks. > > The internal AI tool she’s expected to use, called Kiro, frequently hallucinates and generates flawed code, she says. Then she has to dig through and correct the sloppy code it creates, or just revert all changes and start again. She says it feels like “trying to AI my way out of a problem that AI caused”. > > “I and many of my colleagues don’t feel that it actually makes us that much faster,” Dina said. “But from management, we are certainly getting messaging that we have to go faster, this will make us go faster, and that speed is the number one priority.” > > Just days after speaking to the Guardian, Dina was laid off. > > Lisa, a supply chain engineer who has worked at Amazon for over a decade, says that AI tools at work have been helpful to her only in about one in every three attempts. And even then, she often finds issues and has to consult with colleagues to verify and correct their results, which takes up more time than if she’s done the task without AI. > > She doesn’t take issue with the AI tools themselves, but rather the company’s logic in pushing all employees to use them daily. “You don’t look at the problem and go, ‘How do I use this hammer I have?’ she said. “You look at it and go, ‘Is this a problem for a hammer or something else?’” > > Group of figures inside a glowing digital space, facing a large window that shows a landscape with trees and sky > ‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI > Read more > More than a half a dozen current and former Amazon corporate employees, in roles ranging from software engineer to user experience researcher to data analyst, told the Guardian that Amazon is pressing employees to integrate AI across all aspects of their work, even though these workers say this push is hurting productivity. They say Amazon is rolling out AI use in a haphazard way while also tracking their AI use, and they’re worried the company is essentially using them to train their eventual bot replacements. All of this, they said, is demoralizing. The Guardian granted these workers anonymity because of their fear of professional repercussions. > > “We have hundreds of thousands of corporate employees in a wide range of roles across many different businesses, each of which is using AI in different ways to learn about what works best for their use cases,” Montana MacLachlan, an Amazon spokesperson, said. “While different employees may have different experiences, what we hear from the vast majority of our teams is that they’re getting a lot of value out of the AI tools that they use day-to-day.” > > This pressure comes as Amazon has laid off 30,000 workers in the last four months – nearly 10% of its roughly 350,000 corporate workforce. Its cuts are part of a wave of recent AI-connected tech layoffs, including at Block, Pinterest and Autodesk. Exactly how much these companies will be able to rely on AI to replace headcount is unclear, and each company has given an array of sometimes contradictory reasons for reductions. Jack Dorsey, the Block CEO, said outright that AI was behind his 40% staffing cuts, while Pinterest and Autodesk said they were redirecting investments to AI. Amazon has waffled in explaining how AI factors into its layoff decisions, saying both that it would lead to reductions, but that recent cuts weren’t AI-driven. The company said in February it would spend some $200bn this year on AI infrastructure and announced a $50bn investment in OpenAI. > > In a moment of rising anxiety about AI and work, the decisions Amazon makes around automation – and even how it talks about these shifts – will be consequential for not just its massive workforce, but for people in industries around the world. Amazon is the second-largest employer in the US and has long influenced workplace practices across both white collar and blue collar industries. > > “There’s a lot of talk among corporate employees about how some of these practices – about performance, surveillance and monitoring – are somewhat imported from the warehouse and the drivers space, and that it is Amazon expanding this model of labor to white collar workers,” Jack, a software engineer at Amazon for more than a decade, said. “It does feel like we’re at the vanguard of a new stage in employer relations with the advent of AI.” > > While Amazon has a reputation for being a tough place to work, the impact of its AI campaign has pressurized its workplace, workers said. “It’s worse now,” said Denny, a software engineer, who works in the retail space at the company. “If we don’t pivot ... then we risk becoming obsolete and being let go in the next layoff.” > > Whenever there’s a task at hand, the biggest question managers ask is whether it can be done faster with AI tools, according to Denny. This is leading employees to use AI tools just for the sake of it. Recently, someone in Denny’s team shared that an internal AI agent had saved him about a week of developer effort on a feature. But when Denny looked at the actual code review, he found dozens of comments from colleagues pointing out basic issues. The AI generated code was full of slop. > > “In the end, my guess is that the developer cycle is not going to change, and [could] even be potentially longer,” said Denny. “This pressure to use [AI] has resulted in worse quality code, but also just more work for everyone.” > > Denny was one of several workers who told the Guardian they’re pressured to use an overwhelming array of AI tools, many of which were hastily developed in internal hackathons and then have to spend time answering surveys about their experience with the tools. > > “I would get shown these random tools by my manager who’d be like: ‘Why don’t you try using this thing?’, and it was just the result of a hackathon,” said Denny. He says the tools are “half-baked” and unhelpful, and in fact add to his workload because he has to vet them. > > Amazon typically organizes quarterly hackathons to encourage engineers to develop new projects. Sometime last year, Denny recalls, the company primarily switched to generative AI hackathons, during which the majority of projects ended up being developer productivity focused tools. > > “We don’t mandate teams use AI tools,” said Amazon’s MacLachlan. “However, we believe these tools can help employees work more efficiently and automate time-consuming, undifferentiated tasks.” > > There have also been public slip-ups that seem connected to Amazon’s embrace of AI. According to a February FT report, Amazon recently experienced at least two outages because of issues with the company’s internal AI tools, including a 13-hour interruption to a customer-facing system in December after some engineers allowed its AI tool “to make certain changes”. Amazon, however, said that an employee, rather than AI, caused the service interruption. The FT reported on Tuesday that Amazon would convene engineers to explore “a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools”. > > “I think if you continue to push people to use AI tools in every single aspect, you’re going to get more errors like that,” Sarah, an Amazon software engineer, said. > > Sarah said that AI can be useful, but its potential is best realized when engineers decide how to use it. But at Amazon, even when AI is not suited for a task, she’s now expected to train it. “We have to write out detailed procedures so that the AI can understand it and give better output,” said Sarah. “Part of my new job role, it feels like, is being asked to train the AI to essentially replace you.” She’s early in her career and worries that offloading her work to AI is stunting her learning curve. > > Forcing employees to adopt tools, according to Ifeoma Ajunwa, founding director of the AI and Future of Work Program at Emory University and the author of The Quantified Worker, usually backfires. “Generally, employees are in a better position [than management] to determine what tools can aid productivity,” she said. > > Meanwhile, Amazon workers are often having to seek out training for AI best practices on their own. > > Will, a user experience researcher, said Amazon offers employees plenty of AI training videos on their learning portals, though most of them are optional. When he’s attended training sessions, “the focus is always, ‘here’s how to build something as quickly as possible’”. He said trainers – who are typically peer employees who are also AI power users – advise to carefully review each step before letting AI start building. At the same time, Will said: “I have been in several trainings where the instructor says you can just ask the AI to check its own work.” However, you can’t fully rely on AI to detect its own mistakes; that’s something human judgment is better suited for. > > “One of the biggest predictors of AI adoption and whether employees feel that AI increases their productivity is whether management encourages it and provides training,” Alex Imas, professor of behavioural science and economics at Chicago Booth, said. > > The rushed deployment of AI means an uncritical expansion of surveillance ... > Nick Srnicek > MacLachlan said Amazon provides different training and resources for people across the company, including structured options. “Employees are encouraged to use the tools themselves as a learning mechanism, adopting a learn-as-you-work approach that is proving to be one of the most practical and effective methods of AI adoption across the company,” she said. > > An AI-fueled shift to surveillance > Along with the productivity challenges that have come with Amazon’s AI push, workers said it’s also making them feel surveilled. > > For years, each morning when Amazon employees logged in to work, an internal system called Amazon Connections would greet them with a message and ask for feedback on topics like how their teams were functioning, or how satisfied they felt with their work. Over the last year, these questions have increasingly centered less on human factors and more on AI. > > Maria, a former product manager who was laid off from Amazon in January, said questions asking her about her career or team shifted to more often focus on AI: “‘Are you using AI in your daily work?,’ ‘How often are you using it?,’ ‘Do you think that you’re a power user?,’ or ‘Is AI a priority in your organization?’”. > > Then there are more obvious indicators of surveillance. Workers said managers at Amazon have a dashboard where they track their team members’ AI use, including if they’re using certain tools and how often they do so. (The Information first reported this in February.) > > Jack, the software developer who’s worked at Amazon for more than a decade, said the company also launched a different dashboard, which the Guardian has viewed, so teams could see their generative AI adoption, engagement and depth of usage. “Every team treats it differently,” he said, with some managers using it with a goal of getting at least 80% of their team using AI tools weekly. > > Sarah said her team’s principal engineer told her and his other reports he checks this dashboard daily. “He’s really been pushing our AI usage,” she said. > > “Of course we want to understand what tools our teams are using and whether those tools are working well for them or could be improved,” said MacLachlan. > > The inevitable result of AI tools getting deployed at scale is surveillance, according to Nick Srnicek, author of Platform Capitalism and a senior lecturer in digital economy at King’s College London. “The rushed deployment of AI means an uncritical expansion of surveillance since these tools increasingly require detailed knowledge of personal workflows and data,” he said. “To make them more capable means giving management greater insight and control over workers’ everyday activities.” > > Workers also said they suspect their career advancement is increasingly dependent on their enthusiastic embrace of AI. > > “We have promotion documents which have a template with questions like, ‘What has this person done?’, ‘What impact did it have?’ – and now it also has a question asking, ‘How [did] they leverage AI?’,” said Lisa. “I think they want to only keep the people who support this investment [in AI] and are going to try and filter out people who do not support it or have concerns about it.” The Wall Street Journal reported in late February that at Amazon, “managers do consider who is all-in on AI when it comes to promotions”. > > “While we expect employees to use resources – including AI – to make work more engaging and improve customers’ lives, we don’t instruct managers to consider AI utilization as part of our evaluation process,” said MacLachlan. “Instead, we focus on AI adoption and sharing best practices to celebrate innovation and operational efficiency gains across the company.” > > At the same time, Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO, hasn’t been shy about his AI expectations for his employees. In a company-wide email last June, he predicted that AI-driven productivity gains would reduce the company’s corporate workforce, and urged workers to embrace AI. “Educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your team’s brainstorms to figure out how to invent for our customers more quickly and expansively, and how to get more done with scrappier teams,” he wrote. > > The unspoken math > That same company-wide email prompted heavy internal pushback at Amazon last summer, with employees slamming Jassy’s leadership and speaking of the demoralizing impact of the company’s AI push, according to Business Insider. Months later, over 1,000 workers signed a petition that raised concerns about the company’s “aggressive rollout” of AI tools. > > As Amazon has laid off thousands of workers, it’s shared growing revenue numbers each quarter. Though Jassy has repeatedly said that these layoffs are neither “financially-driven” nor AI-driven, for Maria, all of this adds up. > > “If you say you automated away two hours of someone’s job, you need to convert that into savings on that job title,” she said, explaining the company’s logic behind cutting jobs. “That’s the unspoken math of what they’re doing.” > > Jack keeps thinking about comments Jassy made during a companywide all-hands meeting last spring. According to a Business Insider report about this meeting, Jassy responded to a question about running Amazon as “the world’s largest startup”, and said they want to be “scrappy” to “do a lot more things”. He also warned that their competitors are the “most technically able, most hungry” companies, including startups “working seven days a week, 15 hours a day”. > > “All of those things put together was an implicit threat that the people remaining at the company are expected to work longer and harder,” said Jack. It “really struck home to me that if [Amazon] can’t amass profits with endless growth, then it can get a little bit more by squeezing it out of the people working for it”. > > <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/mar/11/amazon-ar…<https://url.de.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/1XV5C83GR0t46Gqu1hVSymkmk?domain=the…>>

March 15, 2026

Re: [nexa] Amazon is determined to use AI for everything – even when it slows down work

by J.C. DE MARTIN

E' davvero affascinante (e infuriante)... rapporto dopo rapporto, articolo dopo articolo, è evidente la premessa ideologica di tutti questi discorsi, nessuno escluso: l'IA viene considerata esattamente come se fosse "natura". L'"IA", insomma, capita, l'"IA" avviene... e, avvenendo, "purtroppo" dei lavoratori si ritrovano per strada. Tutto viene scaricato sui lavoratori, che possono solo subire, oppure, se giovani, devono spremersi le meningi per cercare di capire (con la palla di vetro?) quali professioni saranno - tra X anni - meno a rischio di disoccupazione tecnologica... (tutti idraulici, ciclo-fattorini, muratori?). Il tutto giustificato ideologicamente da chi accorre subito a spiegare che è giusto così, che è "efficiente", che nel lungo termine è la cosa migliore per tutti, ignorando che quello che capiterà nel lungo termine è determinato dai rapporti di forza, non dalla fatina buona. In altre parole, nell'Europa e USA del 21 secolo (quello dei Thiel, Musk, Merz, Blackrock, ecc.) si postula il diritto di mettere in campo qualsiasi innovazione tecnologica totalmente a prescindere dalle conseguenze sociali. In altre parole, esiste solo un diritto, per di più assoluto: il diritto di fare profitti (qui e subito). Tutto il resto non conta. Famiglie vanno sul lastrico? Intere città o ceti sociali si trovano senza sussistenza dall'oggi al domani? Problemi di quelle persone, o, al limite, problema da lasciare a quello stesso Welfare State che però gli stessi Thiel, Musk, Merz, ecc. vorrebbero smantellare, lasciando a rigor di logica come unica opzione futura l'eliminazione fisica dei tanti esseri umani che ormai non sono più utili per lor signori (oppure, versione più "umana": continuino pure vivere i subumani inutili con qualche forma di reddito di base, chiusi nelle loro stanzette con droghe e un visore di realtà virtuale, così non danno fastidio). È urgente elaborare una proposta politica radicalmente alternativa. Una visione del mondo nella quale l'IA (e in generale qualsiasi tecnologia) deve servire a migliorare la vita della collettività, non essere quasi esclusivamente uno strumento nelle mani di pochi per accumulare ancora più capitale e potere sulla pelle di moltissime persone indifese? (E non parliamo dell'IA al servizio della violenza sistematica...) Juan Carlos On 12/03/26 14:29, Daniela Tafani wrote: > Amazon is determined to use AI for everything – even when it slows down work > Corporate employees said Amazon’s race to roll out AI is leading to surveillance, slop and ‘more work for everyone’. > > Varsha Bansal > Wed 11 Mar 2026 > > When Dina, a software developer based in New York, joined Amazon two years ago, her job was to write code. Now, it’s mostly fixing what artificial intelligence breaks. > > The internal AI tool she’s expected to use, called Kiro, frequently hallucinates and generates flawed code, she says. Then she has to dig through and correct the sloppy code it creates, or just revert all changes and start again. She says it feels like “trying to AI my way out of a problem that AI caused”. > > “I and many of my colleagues don’t feel that it actually makes us that much faster,” Dina said. “But from management, we are certainly getting messaging that we have to go faster, this will make us go faster, and that speed is the number one priority.” > > Just days after speaking to the Guardian, Dina was laid off. > > Lisa, a supply chain engineer who has worked at Amazon for over a decade, says that AI tools at work have been helpful to her only in about one in every three attempts. And even then, she often finds issues and has to consult with colleagues to verify and correct their results, which takes up more time than if she’s done the task without AI. > > She doesn’t take issue with the AI tools themselves, but rather the company’s logic in pushing all employees to use them daily. “You don’t look at the problem and go, ‘How do I use this hammer I have?’ she said. “You look at it and go, ‘Is this a problem for a hammer or something else?’” > > Group of figures inside a glowing digital space, facing a large window that shows a landscape with trees and sky > ‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI > Read more > More than a half a dozen current and former Amazon corporate employees, in roles ranging from software engineer to user experience researcher to data analyst, told the Guardian that Amazon is pressing employees to integrate AI across all aspects of their work, even though these workers say this push is hurting productivity. They say Amazon is rolling out AI use in a haphazard way while also tracking their AI use, and they’re worried the company is essentially using them to train their eventual bot replacements. All of this, they said, is demoralizing. The Guardian granted these workers anonymity because of their fear of professional repercussions. > > “We have hundreds of thousands of corporate employees in a wide range of roles across many different businesses, each of which is using AI in different ways to learn about what works best for their use cases,” Montana MacLachlan, an Amazon spokesperson, said. “While different employees may have different experiences, what we hear from the vast majority of our teams is that they’re getting a lot of value out of the AI tools that they use day-to-day.” > > This pressure comes as Amazon has laid off 30,000 workers in the last four months – nearly 10% of its roughly 350,000 corporate workforce. Its cuts are part of a wave of recent AI-connected tech layoffs, including at Block, Pinterest and Autodesk. Exactly how much these companies will be able to rely on AI to replace headcount is unclear, and each company has given an array of sometimes contradictory reasons for reductions. Jack Dorsey, the Block CEO, said outright that AI was behind his 40% staffing cuts, while Pinterest and Autodesk said they were redirecting investments to AI. Amazon has waffled in explaining how AI factors into its layoff decisions, saying both that it would lead to reductions, but that recent cuts weren’t AI-driven. The company said in February it would spend some $200bn this year on AI infrastructure and announced a $50bn investment in OpenAI. > > In a moment of rising anxiety about AI and work, the decisions Amazon makes around automation – and even how it talks about these shifts – will be consequential for not just its massive workforce, but for people in industries around the world. Amazon is the second-largest employer in the US and has long influenced workplace practices across both white collar and blue collar industries. > > “There’s a lot of talk among corporate employees about how some of these practices – about performance, surveillance and monitoring – are somewhat imported from the warehouse and the drivers space, and that it is Amazon expanding this model of labor to white collar workers,” Jack, a software engineer at Amazon for more than a decade, said. “It does feel like we’re at the vanguard of a new stage in employer relations with the advent of AI.” > > While Amazon has a reputation for being a tough place to work, the impact of its AI campaign has pressurized its workplace, workers said. “It’s worse now,” said Denny, a software engineer, who works in the retail space at the company. “If we don’t pivot ... then we risk becoming obsolete and being let go in the next layoff.” > > Whenever there’s a task at hand, the biggest question managers ask is whether it can be done faster with AI tools, according to Denny. This is leading employees to use AI tools just for the sake of it. Recently, someone in Denny’s team shared that an internal AI agent had saved him about a week of developer effort on a feature. But when Denny looked at the actual code review, he found dozens of comments from colleagues pointing out basic issues. The AI generated code was full of slop. > > “In the end, my guess is that the developer cycle is not going to change, and [could] even be potentially longer,” said Denny. “This pressure to use [AI] has resulted in worse quality code, but also just more work for everyone.” > > Denny was one of several workers who told the Guardian they’re pressured to use an overwhelming array of AI tools, many of which were hastily developed in internal hackathons and then have to spend time answering surveys about their experience with the tools. > > “I would get shown these random tools by my manager who’d be like: ‘Why don’t you try using this thing?’, and it was just the result of a hackathon,” said Denny. He says the tools are “half-baked” and unhelpful, and in fact add to his workload because he has to vet them. > > Amazon typically organizes quarterly hackathons to encourage engineers to develop new projects. Sometime last year, Denny recalls, the company primarily switched to generative AI hackathons, during which the majority of projects ended up being developer productivity focused tools. > > “We don’t mandate teams use AI tools,” said Amazon’s MacLachlan. “However, we believe these tools can help employees work more efficiently and automate time-consuming, undifferentiated tasks.” > > There have also been public slip-ups that seem connected to Amazon’s embrace of AI. According to a February FT report, Amazon recently experienced at least two outages because of issues with the company’s internal AI tools, including a 13-hour interruption to a customer-facing system in December after some engineers allowed its AI tool “to make certain changes”. Amazon, however, said that an employee, rather than AI, caused the service interruption. The FT reported on Tuesday that Amazon would convene engineers to explore “a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools”. > > “I think if you continue to push people to use AI tools in every single aspect, you’re going to get more errors like that,” Sarah, an Amazon software engineer, said. > > Sarah said that AI can be useful, but its potential is best realized when engineers decide how to use it. But at Amazon, even when AI is not suited for a task, she’s now expected to train it. “We have to write out detailed procedures so that the AI can understand it and give better output,” said Sarah. “Part of my new job role, it feels like, is being asked to train the AI to essentially replace you.” She’s early in her career and worries that offloading her work to AI is stunting her learning curve. > > Forcing employees to adopt tools, according to Ifeoma Ajunwa, founding director of the AI and Future of Work Program at Emory University and the author of The Quantified Worker, usually backfires. “Generally, employees are in a better position [than management] to determine what tools can aid productivity,” she said. > > Meanwhile, Amazon workers are often having to seek out training for AI best practices on their own. > > Will, a user experience researcher, said Amazon offers employees plenty of AI training videos on their learning portals, though most of them are optional. When he’s attended training sessions, “the focus is always, ‘here’s how to build something as quickly as possible’”. He said trainers – who are typically peer employees who are also AI power users – advise to carefully review each step before letting AI start building. At the same time, Will said: “I have been in several trainings where the instructor says you can just ask the AI to check its own work.” However, you can’t fully rely on AI to detect its own mistakes; that’s something human judgment is better suited for. > > “One of the biggest predictors of AI adoption and whether employees feel that AI increases their productivity is whether management encourages it and provides training,” Alex Imas, professor of behavioural science and economics at Chicago Booth, said. > > The rushed deployment of AI means an uncritical expansion of surveillance ... > Nick Srnicek > MacLachlan said Amazon provides different training and resources for people across the company, including structured options. “Employees are encouraged to use the tools themselves as a learning mechanism, adopting a learn-as-you-work approach that is proving to be one of the most practical and effective methods of AI adoption across the company,” she said. > > An AI-fueled shift to surveillance > Along with the productivity challenges that have come with Amazon’s AI push, workers said it’s also making them feel surveilled. > > For years, each morning when Amazon employees logged in to work, an internal system called Amazon Connections would greet them with a message and ask for feedback on topics like how their teams were functioning, or how satisfied they felt with their work. Over the last year, these questions have increasingly centered less on human factors and more on AI. > > Maria, a former product manager who was laid off from Amazon in January, said questions asking her about her career or team shifted to more often focus on AI: “‘Are you using AI in your daily work?,’ ‘How often are you using it?,’ ‘Do you think that you’re a power user?,’ or ‘Is AI a priority in your organization?’”. > > Then there are more obvious indicators of surveillance. Workers said managers at Amazon have a dashboard where they track their team members’ AI use, including if they’re using certain tools and how often they do so. (The Information first reported this in February.) > > Jack, the software developer who’s worked at Amazon for more than a decade, said the company also launched a different dashboard, which the Guardian has viewed, so teams could see their generative AI adoption, engagement and depth of usage. “Every team treats it differently,” he said, with some managers using it with a goal of getting at least 80% of their team using AI tools weekly. > > Sarah said her team’s principal engineer told her and his other reports he checks this dashboard daily. “He’s really been pushing our AI usage,” she said. > > “Of course we want to understand what tools our teams are using and whether those tools are working well for them or could be improved,” said MacLachlan. > > The inevitable result of AI tools getting deployed at scale is surveillance, according to Nick Srnicek, author of Platform Capitalism and a senior lecturer in digital economy at King’s College London. “The rushed deployment of AI means an uncritical expansion of surveillance since these tools increasingly require detailed knowledge of personal workflows and data,” he said. “To make them more capable means giving management greater insight and control over workers’ everyday activities.” > > Workers also said they suspect their career advancement is increasingly dependent on their enthusiastic embrace of AI. > > “We have promotion documents which have a template with questions like, ‘What has this person done?’, ‘What impact did it have?’ – and now it also has a question asking, ‘How [did] they leverage AI?’,” said Lisa. “I think they want to only keep the people who support this investment [in AI] and are going to try and filter out people who do not support it or have concerns about it.” The Wall Street Journal reported in late February that at Amazon, “managers do consider who is all-in on AI when it comes to promotions”. > > “While we expect employees to use resources – including AI – to make work more engaging and improve customers’ lives, we don’t instruct managers to consider AI utilization as part of our evaluation process,” said MacLachlan. “Instead, we focus on AI adoption and sharing best practices to celebrate innovation and operational efficiency gains across the company.” > > At the same time, Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO, hasn’t been shy about his AI expectations for his employees. In a company-wide email last June, he predicted that AI-driven productivity gains would reduce the company’s corporate workforce, and urged workers to embrace AI. “Educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your team’s brainstorms to figure out how to invent for our customers more quickly and expansively, and how to get more done with scrappier teams,” he wrote. > > The unspoken math > That same company-wide email prompted heavy internal pushback at Amazon last summer, with employees slamming Jassy’s leadership and speaking of the demoralizing impact of the company’s AI push, according to Business Insider. Months later, over 1,000 workers signed a petition that raised concerns about the company’s “aggressive rollout” of AI tools. > > As Amazon has laid off thousands of workers, it’s shared growing revenue numbers each quarter. Though Jassy has repeatedly said that these layoffs are neither “financially-driven” nor AI-driven, for Maria, all of this adds up. > > “If you say you automated away two hours of someone’s job, you need to convert that into savings on that job title,” she said, explaining the company’s logic behind cutting jobs. “That’s the unspoken math of what they’re doing.” > > Jack keeps thinking about comments Jassy made during a companywide all-hands meeting last spring. According to a Business Insider report about this meeting, Jassy responded to a question about running Amazon as “the world’s largest startup”, and said they want to be “scrappy” to “do a lot more things”. He also warned that their competitors are the “most technically able, most hungry” companies, including startups “working seven days a week, 15 hours a day”. > > “All of those things put together was an implicit threat that the people remaining at the company are expected to work longer and harder,” said Jack. It “really struck home to me that if [Amazon] can’t amass profits with endless growth, then it can get a little bit more by squeezing it out of the people working for it”. > > <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/mar/11/amazon-ar…>

March 15, 2026

Linee guida su IA nella PA: al via la consultazione pubblica su sviluppo e procurement | Agid

by Mauro Alovisio

Gent.mi segnalo consultazione on line ad oggetto : Linee guida su IA nella PA: al via la consultazione pubblica su sviluppo e procurement | Agid https://share.google/pJS4awlRuWV0atES5 Cordiali saluti Mauro

March 13, 2026

Amazon is determined to use AI for everything – even when it slows down work

by Daniela Tafani

Amazon is determined to use AI for everything – even when it slows down work Corporate employees said Amazon’s race to roll out AI is leading to surveillance, slop and ‘more work for everyone’. Varsha Bansal Wed 11 Mar 2026 When Dina, a software developer based in New York, joined Amazon two years ago, her job was to write code. Now, it’s mostly fixing what artificial intelligence breaks. The internal AI tool she’s expected to use, called Kiro, frequently hallucinates and generates flawed code, she says. Then she has to dig through and correct the sloppy code it creates, or just revert all changes and start again. She says it feels like “trying to AI my way out of a problem that AI caused”. “I and many of my colleagues don’t feel that it actually makes us that much faster,” Dina said. “But from management, we are certainly getting messaging that we have to go faster, this will make us go faster, and that speed is the number one priority.” Just days after speaking to the Guardian, Dina was laid off. Lisa, a supply chain engineer who has worked at Amazon for over a decade, says that AI tools at work have been helpful to her only in about one in every three attempts. And even then, she often finds issues and has to consult with colleagues to verify and correct their results, which takes up more time than if she’s done the task without AI. She doesn’t take issue with the AI tools themselves, but rather the company’s logic in pushing all employees to use them daily. “You don’t look at the problem and go, ‘How do I use this hammer I have?’ she said. “You look at it and go, ‘Is this a problem for a hammer or something else?’” Group of figures inside a glowing digital space, facing a large window that shows a landscape with trees and sky ‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI Read more More than a half a dozen current and former Amazon corporate employees, in roles ranging from software engineer to user experience researcher to data analyst, told the Guardian that Amazon is pressing employees to integrate AI across all aspects of their work, even though these workers say this push is hurting productivity. They say Amazon is rolling out AI use in a haphazard way while also tracking their AI use, and they’re worried the company is essentially using them to train their eventual bot replacements. All of this, they said, is demoralizing. The Guardian granted these workers anonymity because of their fear of professional repercussions. “We have hundreds of thousands of corporate employees in a wide range of roles across many different businesses, each of which is using AI in different ways to learn about what works best for their use cases,” Montana MacLachlan, an Amazon spokesperson, said. “While different employees may have different experiences, what we hear from the vast majority of our teams is that they’re getting a lot of value out of the AI tools that they use day-to-day.” This pressure comes as Amazon has laid off 30,000 workers in the last four months – nearly 10% of its roughly 350,000 corporate workforce. Its cuts are part of a wave of recent AI-connected tech layoffs, including at Block, Pinterest and Autodesk. Exactly how much these companies will be able to rely on AI to replace headcount is unclear, and each company has given an array of sometimes contradictory reasons for reductions. Jack Dorsey, the Block CEO, said outright that AI was behind his 40% staffing cuts, while Pinterest and Autodesk said they were redirecting investments to AI. Amazon has waffled in explaining how AI factors into its layoff decisions, saying both that it would lead to reductions, but that recent cuts weren’t AI-driven. The company said in February it would spend some $200bn this year on AI infrastructure and announced a $50bn investment in OpenAI. In a moment of rising anxiety about AI and work, the decisions Amazon makes around automation – and even how it talks about these shifts – will be consequential for not just its massive workforce, but for people in industries around the world. Amazon is the second-largest employer in the US and has long influenced workplace practices across both white collar and blue collar industries. “There’s a lot of talk among corporate employees about how some of these practices – about performance, surveillance and monitoring – are somewhat imported from the warehouse and the drivers space, and that it is Amazon expanding this model of labor to white collar workers,” Jack, a software engineer at Amazon for more than a decade, said. “It does feel like we’re at the vanguard of a new stage in employer relations with the advent of AI.” While Amazon has a reputation for being a tough place to work, the impact of its AI campaign has pressurized its workplace, workers said. “It’s worse now,” said Denny, a software engineer, who works in the retail space at the company. “If we don’t pivot ... then we risk becoming obsolete and being let go in the next layoff.” Whenever there’s a task at hand, the biggest question managers ask is whether it can be done faster with AI tools, according to Denny. This is leading employees to use AI tools just for the sake of it. Recently, someone in Denny’s team shared that an internal AI agent had saved him about a week of developer effort on a feature. But when Denny looked at the actual code review, he found dozens of comments from colleagues pointing out basic issues. The AI generated code was full of slop. “In the end, my guess is that the developer cycle is not going to change, and [could] even be potentially longer,” said Denny. “This pressure to use [AI] has resulted in worse quality code, but also just more work for everyone.” Denny was one of several workers who told the Guardian they’re pressured to use an overwhelming array of AI tools, many of which were hastily developed in internal hackathons and then have to spend time answering surveys about their experience with the tools. “I would get shown these random tools by my manager who’d be like: ‘Why don’t you try using this thing?’, and it was just the result of a hackathon,” said Denny. He says the tools are “half-baked” and unhelpful, and in fact add to his workload because he has to vet them. Amazon typically organizes quarterly hackathons to encourage engineers to develop new projects. Sometime last year, Denny recalls, the company primarily switched to generative AI hackathons, during which the majority of projects ended up being developer productivity focused tools. “We don’t mandate teams use AI tools,” said Amazon’s MacLachlan. “However, we believe these tools can help employees work more efficiently and automate time-consuming, undifferentiated tasks.” There have also been public slip-ups that seem connected to Amazon’s embrace of AI. According to a February FT report, Amazon recently experienced at least two outages because of issues with the company’s internal AI tools, including a 13-hour interruption to a customer-facing system in December after some engineers allowed its AI tool “to make certain changes”. Amazon, however, said that an employee, rather than AI, caused the service interruption. The FT reported on Tuesday that Amazon would convene engineers to explore “a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools”. “I think if you continue to push people to use AI tools in every single aspect, you’re going to get more errors like that,” Sarah, an Amazon software engineer, said. Sarah said that AI can be useful, but its potential is best realized when engineers decide how to use it. But at Amazon, even when AI is not suited for a task, she’s now expected to train it. “We have to write out detailed procedures so that the AI can understand it and give better output,” said Sarah. “Part of my new job role, it feels like, is being asked to train the AI to essentially replace you.” She’s early in her career and worries that offloading her work to AI is stunting her learning curve. Forcing employees to adopt tools, according to Ifeoma Ajunwa, founding director of the AI and Future of Work Program at Emory University and the author of The Quantified Worker, usually backfires. “Generally, employees are in a better position [than management] to determine what tools can aid productivity,” she said. Meanwhile, Amazon workers are often having to seek out training for AI best practices on their own. Will, a user experience researcher, said Amazon offers employees plenty of AI training videos on their learning portals, though most of them are optional. When he’s attended training sessions, “the focus is always, ‘here’s how to build something as quickly as possible’”. He said trainers – who are typically peer employees who are also AI power users – advise to carefully review each step before letting AI start building. At the same time, Will said: “I have been in several trainings where the instructor says you can just ask the AI to check its own work.” However, you can’t fully rely on AI to detect its own mistakes; that’s something human judgment is better suited for. “One of the biggest predictors of AI adoption and whether employees feel that AI increases their productivity is whether management encourages it and provides training,” Alex Imas, professor of behavioural science and economics at Chicago Booth, said. The rushed deployment of AI means an uncritical expansion of surveillance ... Nick Srnicek MacLachlan said Amazon provides different training and resources for people across the company, including structured options. “Employees are encouraged to use the tools themselves as a learning mechanism, adopting a learn-as-you-work approach that is proving to be one of the most practical and effective methods of AI adoption across the company,” she said. An AI-fueled shift to surveillance Along with the productivity challenges that have come with Amazon’s AI push, workers said it’s also making them feel surveilled. For years, each morning when Amazon employees logged in to work, an internal system called Amazon Connections would greet them with a message and ask for feedback on topics like how their teams were functioning, or how satisfied they felt with their work. Over the last year, these questions have increasingly centered less on human factors and more on AI. Maria, a former product manager who was laid off from Amazon in January, said questions asking her about her career or team shifted to more often focus on AI: “‘Are you using AI in your daily work?,’ ‘How often are you using it?,’ ‘Do you think that you’re a power user?,’ or ‘Is AI a priority in your organization?’”. Then there are more obvious indicators of surveillance. Workers said managers at Amazon have a dashboard where they track their team members’ AI use, including if they’re using certain tools and how often they do so. (The Information first reported this in February.) Jack, the software developer who’s worked at Amazon for more than a decade, said the company also launched a different dashboard, which the Guardian has viewed, so teams could see their generative AI adoption, engagement and depth of usage. “Every team treats it differently,” he said, with some managers using it with a goal of getting at least 80% of their team using AI tools weekly. Sarah said her team’s principal engineer told her and his other reports he checks this dashboard daily. “He’s really been pushing our AI usage,” she said. “Of course we want to understand what tools our teams are using and whether those tools are working well for them or could be improved,” said MacLachlan. The inevitable result of AI tools getting deployed at scale is surveillance, according to Nick Srnicek, author of Platform Capitalism and a senior lecturer in digital economy at King’s College London. “The rushed deployment of AI means an uncritical expansion of surveillance since these tools increasingly require detailed knowledge of personal workflows and data,” he said. “To make them more capable means giving management greater insight and control over workers’ everyday activities.” Workers also said they suspect their career advancement is increasingly dependent on their enthusiastic embrace of AI. “We have promotion documents which have a template with questions like, ‘What has this person done?’, ‘What impact did it have?’ – and now it also has a question asking, ‘How [did] they leverage AI?’,” said Lisa. “I think they want to only keep the people who support this investment [in AI] and are going to try and filter out people who do not support it or have concerns about it.” The Wall Street Journal reported in late February that at Amazon, “managers do consider who is all-in on AI when it comes to promotions”. “While we expect employees to use resources – including AI – to make work more engaging and improve customers’ lives, we don’t instruct managers to consider AI utilization as part of our evaluation process,” said MacLachlan. “Instead, we focus on AI adoption and sharing best practices to celebrate innovation and operational efficiency gains across the company.” At the same time, Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO, hasn’t been shy about his AI expectations for his employees. In a company-wide email last June, he predicted that AI-driven productivity gains would reduce the company’s corporate workforce, and urged workers to embrace AI. “Educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your team’s brainstorms to figure out how to invent for our customers more quickly and expansively, and how to get more done with scrappier teams,” he wrote. The unspoken math That same company-wide email prompted heavy internal pushback at Amazon last summer, with employees slamming Jassy’s leadership and speaking of the demoralizing impact of the company’s AI push, according to Business Insider. Months later, over 1,000 workers signed a petition that raised concerns about the company’s “aggressive rollout” of AI tools. As Amazon has laid off thousands of workers, it’s shared growing revenue numbers each quarter. Though Jassy has repeatedly said that these layoffs are neither “financially-driven” nor AI-driven, for Maria, all of this adds up. “If you say you automated away two hours of someone’s job, you need to convert that into savings on that job title,” she said, explaining the company’s logic behind cutting jobs. “That’s the unspoken math of what they’re doing.” Jack keeps thinking about comments Jassy made during a companywide all-hands meeting last spring. According to a Business Insider report about this meeting, Jassy responded to a question about running Amazon as “the world’s largest startup”, and said they want to be “scrappy” to “do a lot more things”. He also warned that their competitors are the “most technically able, most hungry” companies, including startups “working seven days a week, 15 hours a day”. “All of those things put together was an implicit threat that the people remaining at the company are expected to work longer and harder,” said Jack. It “really struck home to me that if [Amazon] can’t amass profits with endless growth, then it can get a little bit more by squeezing it out of the people working for it”. <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/mar/11/amazon-ar…>

March 12, 2026

Amazon holds engineering meeting following AI-related outages

by Daniela Tafani

Amazon holds engineering meeting following AI-related outages Ecommerce giant says there has been a ‘trend of incidents’ linked to ‘Gen-AI assisted changes’ Amazon’s ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools. The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterised by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT. Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established”. “Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently,” Dave Treadwell, a senior vice-president at the group, told employees in an email, also seen by the FT. The note ahead of Tuesday’s meeting did not specify which particular incidents the group planned to discuss. Amazon’s website and shopping app went down for nearly six hours this month in an incident the company said involved an erroneous “software code deployment”. The outage left customers unable to complete transactions or access functions such as checking account details and product prices. Treadwell, a former Microsoft engineering executive, told employees that Amazon would focus its weekly “This Week in Stores Tech” (TWiST) meeting on a “deep dive into some of the issues that got us here as well as some short immediate term initiatives” the group hopes will limit future outages. He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional. Junior and mid-level engineers require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted changes, Treadwell added in the briefing note. Amazon said the review of website availability was “part of normal business” and it aims for continual improvement. “TWiST is our regular weekly operations meeting with a specific group of retail technology leaders and teams where we review operational performance across our store,” the company said. Separately, the company’s cloud computing arm — Amazon Web Services — has suffered at least two incidents linked to the use of AI coding assistants, which the company has been actively rolling out to its staff. AWS suffered a 13-hour interruption to a cost calculator used by customers in mid-December after engineers allowed the group’s Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, and the AI tool opted to “delete and recreate the environment”, the FT previously reported. Amazon previously said the incident in December was an “extremely limited event” affecting only a single service in parts of mainland China. Amazon added that the second incident did not have an impact on a “customer facing AWS service”. The FT previously reported multiple Amazon engineers said their business units had to deal with a higher number of “Sev2s” — incidents requiring a rapid response to avoid product outages — each day as a result of job cuts. Amazon has undertaken multiple rounds of lay-offs in recent years, most recently eliminating 16,000 corporate roles in January. The group has disputed the claim that headcount cuts were responsible for an increase in recent outages. <https://www.ft.com/content/7cab4ec7-4712-4137-b602-119a44f771de>

March 11, 2026

[Responsible AI] New Book: Love Machines, James Muldoon, Essex Business School & Oxford Internet Institute

by Daniele Quercia

Love Machines: Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Our Relationships James Muldoon, Essex Business School & Oxford Internet Institute Join MS Teams<https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/32221845054502?p=Bh3ty9oQ93CCeGOzYN> Format: 35 min talk + 25 min Q&A James will discuss his new book, Love Machines: a captivating and uncanny journey to the frontier of human-computer interaction, exploring what happens to our relationships with each other as artificial intelligence enters our personal lives. James Muldoon is a sociologist whose work explores the human side of artificial intelligence and other technologies. He is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Management at the Essex Business School and a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute. His new book, Love Machines, investigates how people form relationships with AI — as friends, intimate partners, therapists and even with digital versions of deceased loved ones. Subscribe to future talk announcements: Anyone outside Bell Labs can receive talk announcements by subscribing to the mailing list. To subscribe, send an empty email with the subject line "Subscribe RAI” to daniele.quercia(a)polito.it

March 10, 2026

MEMENTO | 192° Mercoledì di Nexa | 11 marzo 2026, ore 17.00

by Nexa - Media

Gentilissime, gentilissimi, Vi ricordiamo che mercoledì 11 marzo, alle ore 17.00, si terrà il 192° Mercoledì di Nexa con un incontro dal titolo "Dall’Internet dei social network all’Internet degli agenti AI personali". Ospiti dell'incontro: Marco Rondina (Politecnico di Torino e Centro Nexa) e Antonio Vetrò (Politecnico di Torino e Centro Nexa). L'incontro si terrà IN PRESENZA e ONLINE. SEDE FISICA dell'incontro: Centro Nexa su Internet e Società, Politecnico di Torino, Via Boggio 65/a, Torino (1° piano). Per accedere alla sala si raccomanda di suonare al citofono Portineria e di seguire le indicazioni segnalate lungo il percorso. QUI<https://nexa.polito.it/contatti> maggiori informazioni su come raggiungerci. STANZA VIRTUALE dell'incontro: https://didattica.polito.it/VClass/NexaEvent Maggiori informazioni alla pagina: https://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi-192 Un saluto cordiale, -- Valeria Bergantino Communication Manager Nexa Center for Internet & Society<https://nexa.polito.it/> DAUIN - Politecnico di Torino Via Pier Carlo Boggio, 65/A - Torino Digital Communication Assistant DAUIN - Politecnico di Torino<https://www.dauin.polito.it/> Corso Castelfidardo 34/D - Torino mail: valeria.bergantino(a)polito.it<mailto:valeria.bergantino@polito.it> tel: 3473443585

March 9, 2026

R: R: R: keep android open

by Marco Ricolfi

Grazie Giacomo, credo di aver capito; ci torno su m. [cid:image001.jpg@01DCADA0.8F9F8100] __________________________________________ Prof. Avv. Marco Ricolfi C.so Galileo Ferraris, 43 - 10128 Torino T (+39) 011.554.54.11 F (+39) 011.518.45.87 E marco.ricolfi(a)weigmann.it<mailto:marco.ricolfi@weigmann.it> PEC marcoricolfi(a)pec.ordineavvocatitorino.it<mailto:marcoricolfi@pec.ordineavvocatitorino.it> www.weigmann.it<https://urlsand.esvalabs.com/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.weigmann.it%2F&e=6b170c62&…> [cid:image002.jpg@01DCADA0.8F9F8100] Member of The Parlex Group of European Lawyers EEIG with associated law firms in the main capitals of the European Union, U.S.A., Israel and Malaysia; web site: www.parlex.org<https://urlsand.esvalabs.com/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.parlex.org%2F&e=6b170c62&h…> DISCLAIMER: Le informazioni contenute in questa comunicazione sono riservate e destinate esclusivamente alla/e persona/e o all'ente/i destinatario. È vietato a soggetti diversi dai destinatari di questa comunicazione qualsiasi uso, copia o diffusione delle informazioni e dei dati in essa contenuti, sia ai sensi dell'art. 616 c.p. sia ai sensi del Regolamento (UE) 2016/679. Se questa comunicazione Vi è pervenuta per errore, Vi preghiamo di informarci chiamando il numero (+39) 011.554.54.11, ovvero di rispondere a questa e-mail e successivamente, di cancellare dal Vostro sistema la e-mail ed ogni suo allegato. DISCLAIMER: The information contained in the e-mail is confidential and intended only for the attention of the named individual(s) or organisation(s) to whom it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient be aware that any use, copying or distribution of the information contained herein is prohibited pursuant to Article 616 of the Italian Penal Code and (EU) Regulation 2016/679. If the communication has been sent to you in error, please notify us by telephone on (+39) 011.554.54.11, or reply to the e-mail. Please then delete the e-mail and any attachments from your system. Da: Giacomo Tesio <giacomo(a)tesio.it> Inviato: venerdì 6 marzo 2026 14:26 A: Marco Ricolfi <marco.ricolfi(a)weigmann.it> Cc: nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it Oggetto: Re: R: [nexa] R: keep android open Ciao Marco, On Thu, 5 Mar 2026 22:31:33 +0000 Marco Ricolfi wrote: > Quando dici che Google vincola contrattualmente i produttori di > smartphone affinché limitino gli acquirenti di tale hardware, cosa > vuoi dire esattamente? nulla di nuovo, in realtà: https://dazeinfo.com/2023/11/16/google-samsung-8-billion-deal-stay-default-…<https://url.de.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/OPxPCPjnBAsWRKJT0hESx6dZK?domain=daz…> Google stabilisce contratti stringenti con i produttori di cellulari che includono i suoi software proprietari (necessari al funzionamento di un android, che è solo parzialmente open source): è grazie a questi contratti che può far limitare a livello hardware la scelta degli acquirenti, costringendoli a mantenere i propri prodotti come Google Play, GMail o i Google Play Services. Software che possono essere disabilitati (forse...), ma non rimossi. A meno di rootare il cellulare, un processo fuori dalla portata della maggioranza degli acquirenti e che tipicamente invalida la garanzia dell'hardware acquistato. Analogamente, è e sarà sempre più difficile installare software che Google non vuole si diffondano (NewPipe, Tabular, PipePipe etc...). Tutto quel "ecosistema" che descrivi, si basa su questi accordi commerciali anti-concorrenziali fra Google e i produttori hardware. Per far venir giù il castello di carte sarebbe sufficiente imporre ai produttori di hardware (inclusi smartphone e tablet) che vendono in Unione Europea l'obbligo di garantire agli acquirenti il pieno possesso dei dispositivi venduti, con la ovvia possibilità di installare, sostituire o disinstallare qualsiasi software di proprio gradimento. Esattamente come avviene per qualsiasi desktop PC. Insomma, mentre Apple si fabbrica gli iPhone su cui mette il proprio sistema operativo e le proprie barriere di ingresso, per gli altri smartphone e table esiste un mercato "tradizionale", il cui funzionamento viene alterato da queste pratiche anti concorrenziali di Google. Giacomo

March 6, 2026

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