В Amazon, яка робить великі інвестиції в генеративний ШІ, відбуваються зміни в культурі програмування. Інженери компанії нарікають на інтенсифікацію праці через впровадження штучного інтелекту.
Amazon, which is making major investments in generative AI, is undergoing a shift in programming culture. The company's engineers complain about the intensification of work due to the introduction of artificial intelligence.
According to The New York Times, in a recent letter to shareholders, CEO Andy Jassy wrote that generative AI is bringing big profits to companies that use it to “improve productivity and avoid costs.” He said it’s necessary to work faster because competitors will gain an advantage if Amazon doesn’t give customers what they want “as quickly as possible,” and he cited coding as an activity where AI will “change the norm.”
Three Amazon engineers said that over the past year, managers have increasingly pushed them to use AI in their work. The engineers said the company has increased its targets and become less lenient with deadlines. It has even encouraged them to develop new tools to improve AI performance at an upcoming hackathon, an internal coding competition. One Amazon engineer said that his team has been about half as large as last year, but is expected to produce about the same amount of code with AI.
Amazon said it conducts regular reviews to ensure teams are staffed appropriately and can increase their size if necessary. “We will continue to adapt how we incorporate Gen AI into our processes,” said Brad Glasser, an Amazon spokesman.
Not all employees have welcomed the change. At Amazon and other companies, managers say AI can free up workers from tedious tasks and allow them to do more interesting work. Last year, Jasi wrote that the company had saved “the equivalent of 4,500 years of developer work” by using AI to do the thankless job of updating old software.
Eliminating such tedious work could benefit a group of experienced programmers, says Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard University who closely follows research on the topic.
But for inexperienced programmers, the result of AI implementation can resemble the transition from artisanal to factory work in the 19th and 20th centuries. “For knowledge workers, everything feels like acceleration. There’s a sense that the employer can put more responsibilities on them,” Katz said.
Programming automation is especially important to Amazon engineers, who have watched their colleagues in other departments make a similar transition. For years, many Amazon warehouse workers walked miles every day to track inventory. But over the past decade, Amazon has increasingly relied on robotic warehouses, where pickers stand in one place and pick products from shelves delivered to them by robots, without having to walk.
Previously, organizational psychologist Amanda Jones, who specializes in remote work and work-life balance, said that despite the stereotype that work is becoming easier, in reality, work intensification has been going on for decades , which provokes burnout and layoffs.
