Amazon Job Replacement Failures Expose AI Lies

[GreatGazoo]

The biggest AI story of the last month has been how badly industry leader Amazon got screwed up by setting quotas for AI job replacement. The incidents and the spreading reports about them are raising serious question about "job replacing AI" as a concept. Paraphrasing Nobel price winner Daron Acemoglu:

Too much of current rhetoric treats agency as the missing ingredient that suddenly converts models into workers. But the hard part is switching across subproblems without losing context, making low-frequency judgments when the environment changes, recovering from errors, and understanding which protocol governs which part of the workflow.

Humans do this constantly, often without noticing! Firms only get real labor substitution when that orchestration becomes robust enough to operate inside production, not just inside a demo.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/christosmakridis_three-things-in-ai-to-watch-according-to-activity-7460365749023498240-ynCO

IOW human employees ARE more than the sum of their tasks and AI just isn't any good at real world on-the-fly problem solving. It can automate tasks but Wall Street wanted to hear that AI could replace human workers, eg. cut headcount, payroll, taxes and benefits so that's the way AI was sold.

Amazon found out the hard way (and the expensive way) that AI is a cheap parlor trick. It isn't intelligent. It's an automated generator of something like those vague and sychophantic horoscopes that you want to believe because they are saying something nice and deep sounding about you. The difference is people treat horoscopes as fun and thought-provoking, not as a job-replacement "Industrial Revolution 2.0" multi-trillion $$ sea change.

Amazon and Bezos himself, are known for their longterm thinking. The 4D chess and all. Hard to argue with the success of Amazon. So that makes all the more myth-shattering that even the mighty and cautious Amazon got badly burned. Amazon was the biggest winner of the transition to online sales. The "shopping cart", push marketing, gift wrapping, free shipping. All the stuff that everyone else adopted was because Amazon made it work. Amazon has a stellar track record. They have had no "Windows 11" or "Metaverse is the future" level missteps.

This should be an "Emperor Has No Clothes" moment but it is hard to tell. The business community is buzzing about this. The rest of the county isn't. Kids are giving up college dreams prematurely.

Job replacement, like everything else AI says, was just telling people what they wanted to hear.

- - - - - - - - -

Companies Fired Workers For AI. Now They Want Them Back - Forbes, 3/21/2026
https://www.forbes.com/sites/terdawn-deboe/2026/05/21/companies-fired-workers-for-ai-now-they-want-them-back/

Amazon finds out AI programming isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
https://www.computerworld.com/article/4145573/amazon-finds-out-ai-programming-isnt-all-its-cracked-up-to-be.html

Amazon Lost 6.3M Orders After AI Coding Tool Went Rogue - Now They're Hitting the Brakes (3/17/2026, Dev)
https://dev.to/tyson_cung/amazon-lost-63m-orders-after-ai-coding-tool-went-rogue-now-theyre-hitting-the-brakes-2h7p

Amazon’s AI Retail Flop: Lessons from the Just Walk Out Debacle
How Overhyped Tech Led to Store Closures and What Developers Can Learn to Avoid Similar Pitfalls
https://medium.com/coding-nexus/amazons-ai-retail-flop-lessons-from-the-just-walk-out-debacle-ca8b0382798b

[mwmisses4289]

1. Oh, look, those of us who said AI is a crock of shit are proven right.

Geez...there are so many things I want say in a super sarcastic voice right now, but most of it would probably get me banned!

[Warpy]

2. AI has been oversold to the point ot being a gigantic scam

with the tech and crypto bros not only extorting vast sums of taxpayer dollars to build infrastructure that won't make a damned bit of difference but also draining the larger economy to throw after it.

By now, it has to be running largely on chump power, every financial genius out there mortgaging everything because he thinks there is still time to cash in on the big score.

And the non tech billionaires? They really think AI is going to mean they won't need other people any more and we'll stop fucking up the scenery.

Thank you for posting this. AI is an amazing analytical tool, able to spot minor pattern changes that under utilize human brains and put them to sleep. It will not, however, live up to the hype.

[GreatGazoo]

3. In marketing one rule is 'Under promise, over deliver'

AI is doing just the opposite. Yes, a powerful tool for the right tasks but being sold as "sentient" and "intelligent".

One analyst pointed out, 'there was no budget for AI so those selling AI targeted payroll'. It made the imaginary numbers work better, for a while.

[not fooled]

4. Yep, grossly overrated and of limited utility

Good at some things, mainly extracting information from large datasets and performing iterative tasks.

Sucks at tasks involving complex reasoning. I've posted before about using Google Images to search for information about auction items. The AI-generated text explaining what the picture shows frequently makes major errors, including era and function of an item. Now I just see whether there are visual matches.

Also, most of the time when I use an AI chatbot to ask a question when I'm visiting a website, the answer is useless. I then conclude the chat by entering "f___ AI." That's the only satisfaction I usually get.

[EdmondDantes_]

5. To be fair, this is conclusion taking AI as it is today as a finished product

That's a little silly. The first time a human played a chess AI, the human won. Now no human can beat the AI. The first flight was a few seconds and now we have trans ocean flight.

Of course AI today is being oversold because that's what we do. It may never match the hype. Doesn't mean that the AI is garbage people are right either.

[GreatGazoo]

8. yes to both of those

AI isn't there yet but it isn't vaporware.

But this is Amazon getting it wrong. Jumping the gun or pushing beyond present capabilities and paying the price of those mistakes. So one line of thinking posits that if Amazon got it this wrong in a high profile and billion dollar way, then how many other companies, (smaller, less tech heavy companies), are also getting burned on the hype right now?

If AI doesn't reduce headcounts and payrolls right now then there is no budget for it right now. And the jobpocalypse is delayed.

[meadowlander]

9. Not just companies but governments as well.

New Zealand just this week announced it plans to lay off 9000 public servants citing AI as the reason.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/595847/replacing-public-servants-with-ai-could-come-with-hidden-costs-critics-warn

[Progressive dog]

6. AI is nowhere near replacing jobs

that require thought. My guess is it never will be.

[OC375]

7. Companies will do it anyway.

[meadowlander]

10. And average people will be expected to just get used to everything being delivered worse than it used to be.

What choice do we have when we've allowed private monopolies to swallow up most of the essentials of life?

[GreatGazoo]

11. The Forbes article looks at a bunch of companies that laid people off, went through

"enshittification" for 12 to 18 months and then started hiring people back. Course correction has begun.

Inclusive of this current issue, I think the bigger challenge for all is to envision a near future where AI benefits everyone.

[Progressive dog]

12. Until it costs them

more than humans, which won't take long.