It has been nearly three years since OpenAI released ChatGPT series 3.5 in November 2022, officially kicking off the modern artificial intelligence revolution.
Since then, every tech company, from Microsoft to Apple to Alphabet to Tesla and beyond, has cumulatively invested hundreds of billions of dollars in order to be at the forefront of the revolution.
One of the things AI has promised to do is free humankind from banal, remedial work, automating processes that used to take hours, days, or longer.
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Alarmists say the revolution will cause an employment crisis, as the pool of available jobs shrinks.
AI evangelists will call that type of talk overblown. In their view, AI will free up the average worker’s time, making them more productive and creating countless other jobs.
There is evidence that college graduates are already feeling the crunch.
Nearly 6% of recent college graduates were unemployed during the first quarter of 2025, up significantly from the 4.5% that reported being unemployed a year ago.
The underemployment rate also rose to 41.2% from 40.6% in that time period, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The college majors with the highest percentages of underemployment were anthropology, physics, commercial art and graphic design, fine arts, sociology, and, perhaps surprisingly, computer engineering, according to a recent report in The Independent.
Ironically, coding is becoming one of the first casualties of the AI revolution.
Amazon coders are worried AI will do the same thing to their jobs that robotics did to Amazon warehouse jobs.
Image source: Shutterstock
Amazon coders hate what AI is doing to their jobs
Amazon (AMZN) CEO Andy Jassy has long touted the benefits of generative AI, not just for Amazon customers, but for Amazon coders as well.
“With what’s happening in AI right now, and the likelihood that every customer experience we’ve ever known will be reinvented, there has never been a more important time, in my opinion, to optimize to invent well,“ Jassy told shareholders last month about the company’s future.
Jassy believes that generative AI is going to change the company’s customer experience completely. To handle this, Amazon is building more than 1,000 GenAI applications across the company.
Amazon plans to revolutionize the customer experiences in shopping, coding, personal assistants, streaming, advertising, health care, reading, and home devices.
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Internally, the early AI workloads the company already deployed are focused on worker productivity and cost avoidance.
“This is saving companies a lot of money. Increasingly, you’ll see AI change the norms in coding, search, shopping, personal assistants, primary care, cancer and drug research, biology, robotics, space, financial services, neighborhood networks —everything,“ Jassy said.
However, a new report from the New York Times says some of the workers implementing this system hate the changes being made, as the company has pushed them to increase the use of AI in their work.
Engineers have raised output goals and have become less forgiving about missed deadlines. One Amazon engineer said in the piece that his team had been halved in the past year, but he was still required to produce about the same amount of code using AI.
The company told The Times that it regularly conducts reviews to make sure it isn’t overtaxing its workers.
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But the engineers say that AI in their workplace has had the same effect robotics in Amazon warehouses have had on those workers.
Robotics in Amazon warehouses have transformed the way people work there. A decade ago, workers had to walk countless miles per day to fulfil orders. Now, thanks to robotics, that type of work has been significantly reduced.
However, Amazon workers now have to deal with being too efficient, which vastly increases the amount of work they do, even if they don’t have to walk as much.
Amazon engineers are having the same feeling, according to the report. The number of menial tasks they have to complete has been reduced thanks to automated coding, but the overall amount of work they are doing has expanded.
Websites they were previously given weeks to build must now be built in a few days. While AI can generate a lot of code that used to have to be manually written, coders still have to check the generative work, which takes time.
“It’s more fun to write code than to read code,” said Simon Willison, an AI fan, longtime programmer and blogger, told the Times. “If you’re told you have to do a code review, it’s never a fun part of the job. When you’re working with these tools, it’s most of the job.”
Amazon is all in on AI
Amazon says it hears employees’ complaints and that it is always tweaking processes to make workflow easier for them.
However, it is also clear the company plans to make AI work, no matter what.
Earlier this year, the company said it plans to spend $100 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025, with most of that money being allocated to AI capabilities for Amazon Web Services.
