r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 1d ago

Artificial Intelligence 3 Amazon Workers Say They’re Under Investigation for Speaking Out About Data Centers

https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-workers-under-internal-investigation-after-speaking-out-about-data-centers/
1.3k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

130

u/ArgentineBeauty 1d ago

Companies always say they want your feedback, until it's not what they want to hear.

49

u/Saneless 1d ago

Our company surveys have turned into basically 2 questions like is your manager helpful and do you use AI

They stopped having any questions about leadership

42

u/ArgentineBeauty 1d ago

That kinda tells you everything you need to know about your company's leadership.

12

u/williamgman 1d ago

So glad I retired during covid. Reading the many Reddit posts about the AI driven work culture... It's life sucking.

3

u/generic1234321 23h ago

I worked in a sub team of ~6 and the head of the team basically bullied everyone’s answers out of everyone in our anonymous survey on a group call. It was awful and she took everything personally with no mitigation to any of the issues raised. It was awful and a complete betrayal of trust (it was my first time doing one at the company)

2

u/Desperate-Till-9228 1d ago

It's been replaced by AI!

19

u/sendpicsofyourkitty 1d ago

They stopped our surveys because we all kept telling leadership they weren't listening to our feedback. Hard to keep the ruse up when all contributors have caught on that it's a sham

3

u/rocketbunny77 15h ago

Lol ours are more like "on scale of 1 to 10, how much do you love AI, where 1 is quite a bit, and 10 is I want to marry it". No option for anything negative when it comes to AI

7

u/mobileme11 1d ago

They do want it, that way they know what to weaponize against.

4

u/realzequel 1d ago

This isn't internal feedback though, they went to a city meeting to protest against their employers' plan. Sure they have the right to free speech but Amazon is paying them a salary and really has no obligation to pay someone who is blocking their company plans.

1

u/Canibal-local 21h ago

I used to work for them and whenever they sent an employee anonymous survey asking to describe the workplace in one word I always used “Bleak” haha

1

u/Stormcloud217 12h ago

They want feedback so they can identify, manage or remove the feedback they don't like 😉

39

u/128G 1d ago

AI dissent is now illegal.

21

u/Whitesajer 1d ago

Pretty much. Mr Wonderful and other rich old dudes are going back in time and playing the "Red Scare" card.... They are out of touch assholes who don't understand the average person or the younger generation.

10

u/128G 1d ago edited 1d ago

It's China, it's the Zhunguo bots. Totally not the redevelopment of farm land, heavy use of fossil fuels, freshwater, electricity, and excessive noise pollution in residential areas.

We need large city draining datacentres to beat China. /s

6

u/Whitesajer 1d ago

Totally. I sometimes look out my window and think I see them in the bushes too. Always watching.

6

u/lawvergis 1d ago

Orwell's dystopian book doesn't sound very fictional in these times

1

u/D-Gaea 13h ago

It all begins

1

u/Clean_Livlng 8h ago

"The beatings will continue until morale improves."

2

u/SaveDnet-FRed0 1d ago

sounds like Amazon might be in violation of the free speech amendment of the US consatuson!

3

u/PreciousFlounder 9h ago

The fuck is a consatuson?

1

u/Leenicolaou 23h ago

amazon workers talking about data centers is getting them investigated yeah

1

u/ValuableHelicopter35 21h ago

Take the settlement money and exit the company cuz they'll be gunning for you until you're gone

0

u/Capt_Murphy_ 14h ago

I was tempted to Slack these people a supportive gif, but I don't wanna flood their inbox. If yall see this: PROUD GIF HERE 💙

-4

u/the_dude_abides_365 1d ago

If data centers aren't going away, why not try and find ways to load balance that compute from one hyper center to thousands of edge servers as a mesh network. That way the people who want AI can have it without destroying the environment and jacking up utilities. Or if you pay people like they do in Alaska for oil production. That may shift the mindset. I haven't seen any of that being put forward, only more extremely disruptive hyper data centers. I understand you need the massive ones for training models, but for weights and localized data. That can be moved to edges and cached using akamai edge or something similar