Ex-Amazon PM Martina Crane describes AI-driven worker displacement

Hi, my name is Martina Crane.

I'm a member of DSA's Tech Action Working Group and Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, but I'm speaking in my personal capacity today.

As a New Yorker who worked as Senior Technical Product Manager on AI products inside Amazon, I have first-hand experience with how AI technology is being developed and deployed inside of one of the world's largest tech companies, suspiciously absent from the subpoena list today.

Before ChatGPT made headlines, Amazon was already using AI for all manner of things, from pricing to monitoring workers to setting quotas that workers and advocates have criticized as unrealistic and have led to serious safety issues.

After the launch of ChatGPT, there was a top-down directive to make everything AI first or face executive scrutiny.

At first, it was about exploring the potential of the technology, but over time, it went from helping make Amazonians'work life better, easier, to making Amazonians do more work with fewer people.

The pursuit of life-improving innovation devolved into systems that treated workers less like people and more like machines.

Flashy proof of concept demos in the VP's office would promise the world, but in reality, the teams did not have a scalable way to make the technology work outside of that demo room.

If it wasn't in a controlled environment, models hallucinated, provided poor quality outputs, and yet Amazon moved forward with layoffs across the company anyway.

There was more work, fewer people, and a growing sense of being monitored.

pressure to use the technology that was oftentimes worse at doing our jobs than our co-workers who were laid off were.

Within a year of ChatGPT launching as a product manager, I was asked to shift my experience

from saving workers time to proving that they could do layoffs.

For every software engineer or scientist I needed to build my product, I was expected to be able to project $5 million in headcount savings.

When I wrote product documents about the risks of AI misalignment, hallucination, model collapse, worker burnout, worker injury, labor displacement, I felt those concerns fall on deaf ears.

In my experience, productivity, growth, and headcount reduction, in other words, profits, superseded the risks I was documenting.

I got into tech because I believe that innovation could help people build a future with fuller, healthier lives, usher in something brighter, more equitable.

Over time, I've watched the industry increasingly shift from expanding human possibility toward extracting from us and taking as much as possible from both people and the planet.

So I'll close with this.

Many of my peers often struggle with this internal battle that we thought we were building something brighter and now it's getting much darker.

So I encourage this council to work with the technologists who live in this city to build a regulation that will help build our future instead of fortunes for tech billionaires.

Thank you so much.

Make sure the button's red.

Can you hear me now?

Yes.