Discussion
From that enviable position, Amazon can afford to enshittify its services in order to sell the big AI lie. Killing 30,000 jobs is a small price to pay if it buys them a few months before a reckoning for its wild AI overspending, keeping the AI grift alive for just a little longer.
that
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Bain & Co say the sector needs to be grossing $2 trillion by 2030 in order to break even, which is more than the combined grosses of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple Nvidia and Meta:
Every investor who has put a nickel into that $700b capex is counting on bosses firing a *lot* of workers and replacing them with AI.
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Amazon is *also* counting on people buying a *lot* of AI from it after firing those workers. The company has sunk $120b into AI *this year alone*.
There's just one problem: AI can't do our jobs. Oh, sure, an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job, but that's the world's easiest sales-call. Your boss is relentlessly horny for firing you:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete
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But there's a *lot* of AI buyers' remorse. 95% of AI deployments have either produced no return on capital, or have been money-losing:
AI has "no significant impact on workers’ earnings, recorded hours, or wages":
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933
What's Amazon to do? How do they convince you to buy enough AI to justify that $180b in capital expenditure?
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Somehow, they have to convince you that an AI can do your workers' jobs. One way to sell that pitch is to fire a *ton* of Amazon workers and announce that their jobs have been given to a chatbot. This isn't a production strategy, it's a marketing strategy - it's Amazon deliberately taking an efficiency loss by firing workers in a desperate bid to convince you that you can fire *your* workers:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/05/ex-princes-of-labor/#hyper-criti-hype
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Amazon *does* use a lot of AI in its production, of course. AI is the "digital whip" that Amazon uses to allow itself to control drivers who (nominally) work for subcontractors. This lets Amazon force workers into unsafe labor practices that endanger them and the people they share the roads with, while offloading responsibility onto "independent delivery service" operators and the drivers themselves:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/traveling-salesman-solution/#pee-bottles
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Amazon leadership has announced that AI has or will shortly replace its coders as well. But chatbots can't do software engineering - sure, they can write code, but writing code is only a small part of software engineering. An engineer's job is to maintain a very deep and wide context window, one that considers how each piece of code interacts with the software that executes before it and after it, and with the systems that feed into it and accept its output.
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A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
