Editor’s note: This column was written by Robert Trumbull, a Seattle-based author who writes about the ethics of tech.
It’s clear that Amazon and Microsoft are operating from the same playbook.
While surely a number of factors are at play here for both, it’s equally clear their recent layoffs are, at least in part, a direct consequence of their embrace of AI.
The layoffs this year were, Microsoft ultimately acknowledged, intimately related to its “capital investments” in this area. Amazon, for its part, has claimed its layoffs are not AI-driven yet, but it is reportedly making longer-term strategic decisions regarding staffing with the benefits of “advanced technology” in mind.
The current workforce reductions then appear to presage the ways in which Microsoft’s own AI products and its stake in OpenAI, taken together with Amazon’s adoption of AI and robotics, will quite simply enable employers across industries to employ and pay fewer human workers.
Thus, the question of Big Tech’s role in a broader displacement of workers due to the rise of AI is now coming up perhaps even earlier than we anticipated.
The question before us, then, is what exactly ought we to expect of these companies in this transition? What ought we to ask of them in this process, in terms of what would be right in their relationship to their community — here at home in the Seattle area specifically — insofar as it’s this same community that enabled them to become what they are in the first place?
Now, even apart from their corporate philanthropy activities, the contributions Microsoft and Amazon have made to the region up to now are no doubt considerable. As they have grown and flourished, so too have wages earned by employees made their way into innumerable schools, community organizations, and charities in the Seattle area, enabling them to thrive.
And it’s not just wages earned we ought to factor in here. As local people, culture, and compensation expert Matt Shaw of Headwall Solutions pointed out to me recently, Microsoft and Amazon’s success has also benefited many in our region who hold shares in the companies (a large number of which, naturally, would have been employees at some point). Stock market success for both, then, has equally contributed to securing admirable outcomes in the Seattle area.
Following this general line of thinking, one might be tempted to simply draw the conclusion that they are already contributing everything they ought to. By doing what’s best for business even when that involves painful workforce reductions, so the logic would go, it is actually serving many, many people in the larger web of entities connected to it.
This would be the essentially libertarian view one sees being advanced in discussions in Silicon Valley at the moment (that is, when the discussions aren’t just completely off the rails and about the Antichrist). On this view, everything works out best when a company acts completely independently in a free market. And to be sure, it would not be hard to find philosophical justifications for this view.
To take just one, particularly salient and well-known example, the American philosopher Robert Nozick offers an exposition of this position by developing what he calls an “entitlement theory.” Writing in the 70’s, Nozick argued that the only principle of economic justice that truly respects freedom is one in which “whoever makes something, having bought or contracted for all other held resources used in the process…is entitled to it.” It follows, then, that they are equally entitled in turn to whatever that something is worth.
The example he uses to illustrate this principle is that of a famous basketball player: if one player gets paid significantly more than their teammates because they are of much higher value, well then that is just what they are entitled to by virtue of their acquired skill, popularity, and so on. Something like a teamwide, socialist distribution of generated wealth would unnaturally trample on the star player’s entitlements. And while Nozick is talking about an individual’s earnings, it’s not much of a leap to extend this principle to a conglomeration of individuals organized in a business, which we call a corporation.
This view is the one, by all apparent evidence, Amazon embraces. After the city of Seattle tried to implement new taxes on large employers meeting a certain payroll threshold, Amazon later moved employees to the Eastside and designated Bellevue as part of its “Puget Sound HQ.”
But up until now, Microsoft has cultivated a slightly different position. Consider its “Microsoft Elevate Washington” initiative aimed at providing free access to AI tools and training to public schools and community and technical colleges. The program stems, according to Microsoft President Brad Smith, from a commitment to the company’s home base: “A big part of what we’re doing,” he has said, “is investing in our home.” This commitment to investing locally represents a tacit acknowledgement from Microsoft of just how much external entities and communities support and facilitate corporate success.
But at a moment when Microsoft is quite possibly more profitable than it has ever been, it may actually be quite fair to ask for, even to expect, more — the view Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell recently endorsed.
Notably, as the state has taken measures to increase taxes, Microsoft, through Smith himself, has pushed back, threatening between the lines to move elsewhere if that can decrease its tax burden. But it’s not just through Smith that Microsoft is fighting increased contributions to state coffers — it also donated more than $1 million to a political action committee aimed at killing precisely such measures. This push represents a marked departure from Microsoft’s general ethos under Bill Gates, who advocated for increased taxes for the wealthiest Washingtonians and businesses.
Thus, we have in hand some sense of what more Microsoft and Amazon could do (particularly as it relates to payroll and wealth taxes) and the knowledge that there is at least some precedent for a serious willingness to pitch in even more. This is the view that, by most measures, the majority of Washingtonians hold.
Viewed from this angle, the “investment” in the region referenced above — which seems to set Microsoft apart — begins to appear in a slightly different light. Because this investment will equally produce a return for Microsoft. Widespread AI education preps the next generation of Microsoft workers in Washington to contribute to the company’s success in precisely the ways it believes will serve it.
But if we take seriously the contention that the public sphere in the region has, in holding up its end of the “making the region hospitable to tech workers” bargain (most obviously through providing quality public education), enabled Microsoft and Amazon to achieve success over time, then we also ought to take seriously the idea they ought to contribute to broader collective efforts in which the real ROI is just the flourishing of the region and its communities full stop. It deserves serious consideration at a moment when the precise degree to which Washingtonians will continue to share in Big Tech’s success in the region is increasingly unclear.
