Amazon has confirmed plans to lay off 14,000 corporate workers, as part of a wave of cuts expected to hit tens of thousands of jobs. The Seattle-based retail giant, which is vying to reverse a pandemic hiring spree, is attempting to cut costs and slim down its huge operation. This summer, its CEO warned white-collar employees their jobs could be taken by artificial intelligence. Beth Galetti, a senior vice-president at Amazon, wrote in a memo to employees on Tuesday: "The reductions we're sharing today are a continuation of work to get even stronger by further reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we're investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers' current and future needs." On Monday, Reuters and the Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon was poised to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, as it tries to undo the vast recruitment drive it embarked on at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, which unleashed an extraordinary - but fleeting - surge in demand for online shopping.

Adrienne Williams and Milagros Miceli are researchers at the Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute. Timnit Gebru is the institute's founder and executive director. She was previously co-lead of the Ethical AI research team at Google. The public's understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) is largely shaped by pop culture -- by blockbuster movies like "The Terminator" and their doomsday scenarios of machines going rogue and destroying humanity. This kind of AI narrative is also what grabs the attention of news outlets: a Google engineer claiming that its chatbot was sentient was among the most discussed AI-related news in recent months, even reaching Stephen Colbert's millions of viewers.