In particular, companies in the technology sector have invested heavily in AI in recent years, spurring technological advances that have made chatbots easier than ever to create code, images and text with limited instruction.
But as new tools gained traction, they sparked warnings from technology leaders of job losses, especially in entry-level office roles.
Last month, AI-Firm Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told news website Axios that the technology can wipe out half of the entry-level white-collar work.
Geoffrey Hinton has earned him the moniker “Godfather of AI” and reflected those warnings on his recent podcast.
“This is a very different kind of technology,” he says, in a pattern seen in previous technological leap, opposed to the argument that unemployment from AI will rise as technology creates new kinds of positions.
“If you can do all the ordinary human intellectual labor, what new work will it create? You will have to be very skilled to do the work that you cannot.”
Amazon directly employed over 1.5 million people worldwide at the end of last year.
Most of these staff are in the United States. It ranks there as the second largest employer after Walmart.
Many staff serve as the company's e-commerce warehouse, but around 350,000 people serve the company in office roles.
