Discussion
That's the AI story, after all. It's not about making workers more productive or creative. The only way to recoup the $700 billion in capital expenditure to date (to say nothing of AI companies' rather fanciful coming capex commitments) is by displacing workers - a *lot* of workers.
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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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There's one thing AI struggles with beyond all else: maintain context. Each linear increase in context that you demand from AI results in an *exponential* increase in computational expense. AI has no object permanence. It doesn't know where it's been and it doesn't know where it's going. It can't remember how many fingers it's drawn, so it doesn't know when to stop. It can write a routine, but it can't engineer a system.
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When tech bosses dream of firing coders and replacing them with AI, they're fantasizing about getting rid of their highest-paid, most self-assured workers and transforming the insecure junior programmers leftover into AI babysitters whose job it is to evaluate and integrate that code at a speed that no one - much less a junior programmer - can meet if they are to do a careful and competent job:
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-ai-is-killing-jobs-in-the-tech-f39
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The jobs that *can* be replaced with AI are the jobs that companies already gave up on doing well. If you've already outsourced your customer service to an overseas call-center whose workers are not empowered to solve any of your customers' problems, why not fire those workers and replace them with chatbots? The chatbots also can't solve anyone's problems, and they're even cheaper than overseas call-center workers:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/06/unmerchantable-substitute-goods/#customer-disservice
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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote that he "is convinced" that firing workers will make the company "AI ready," but it's not clear what he means by that. Does he mean that the mass firings will save money while maintaining quality, or that mass firings will help Amazon recoup the $180,000,000,000 it spent on AI this year?
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Bosses *really* want AI to work, because they *really, really* want to fire you. As Allison Morrow writes for *CNN* bosses are firing workers *in anticipation* of the savings AI will produce...someday:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/28/business/what-amazons-mass-layoffs-are-really-about
All this can feel improbable. Would bosses really fire workers on the promise of eventual AI replacements, leaving themselves with big bills for AI and falling revenues as the absence of those workers is felt?
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The answer is a resounding *yes*. The AI industry has done such a good job of convincing bosses that AI can do their workers' jobs that each boss for whom AI fails assumes that *they've* done something wrong. This is a familiar dynamic in con-jobs.
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The people who get sucked into pyramid schemes think they are the only ones failing to sell any of the "merchandise" they shell out every month to buy, and that no one else has a garage full of unsold leggings or essential oils. They don't know that, to a first approximation, the MLM industry has *no* sales, and relies entirely on "entrepreneurs" lying to themselves and one another about the demand for their wares, paying out of their own pocket for goods that no one wants.
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The MLM industry doesn't just rely on this deception - they capitalize on it, by selling those self-flagellating "entrepreneurs" all kinds of expensive training courses that promise to help them overcome the personal defects that stop them from doing as well as all those desperate liars boasting about their incredible MLM sales success:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway
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The AI industry has its own version of those sales coaching courses - there's a whole secondary industry of management consultancies and business schools offering high-ticket "continuing education" courses to bosses who think that the only reason the AI they've purchased isn't saving them money is that they're doing AI wrong.
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Amazon *really* needs AI to work. Last week, Ed Zitron published an extensive analysis of leaked documents showing how much Amazon is making from AI companies who are buying cloud services from it. His conclusion? Take away AI and Amazon's cloud division is in steep decline:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/costs/
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What's more, those big-money AI customers - like Anthropic - are losing *tens of billions of dollars per year*, relying on investors to keep handing them money to incinerate. Amazon *needs* bosses to believe they can fire workers and replace them with AI, because that way, investors will keep giving Anthropic the money *it* needs to keep Amazon in the black.
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Amazon firing 30,000 workers in the run-up to Christmas is a great milestone in enshittification. America's K-shaped recovery means that nearly all of the consumption is coming from the wealthiest American households, and these households overwhelmingly subscribe to Prime. Prime-subscribing households *do not* comparison shop. After all, they've already prepaid for a year's shipping in advance. These households start and end nearly every shopping trip in the Amazon app.
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If Amazon fires 30,000 workers and tanks its logistics network and e-commerce systems, if it allows itself to drown in spam and scam reviews, if it misses its delivery windows and messes up its returns, that will be *our* problem, not Amazon's. In a world of commerce where Amazon's predatory pricing, lock-in, and serial acquisitions has left us with few alternatives, Amazon can truly be "too big to care":
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/05/way-past-its-prime-how-did-amazon-get-so-rubbish
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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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I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller *Enshittification*!
Catch me next in #Miami, #Burbank and #Libson!
Full schedule with dates and links at:
https://pluralistic.net/tour
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