opinion: Protect the robot, sacrifice the human

The most common thing computers do is break, and being forthcoming and transparent about that reality while not making your platform sound like an incoherent pile of bricks teetering on a cliff above a playground is a delicate balancing act. AWS’s reliability is the stuff of legend, and on the rare occasion that it fails, they walk the messaging tightrope very well. So I was surprised to learn all you have to do to sweep away twenty years of excellence and make them sound like frothing insecure zealots is sprinkle a bit of “perhaps AWS is bad at AI” narrative on it. Then, they lose their minds.

  • jqubed@lemmy.world
    15·
    2 days ago

    Exactly

    This isn’t a coverup; it’s a massive insecurity that’s extremely cringey to witness. AWS would rather have the world believe their engineers are incompetent than admit their artificial intelligence made a mistake. That’s not just a messaging choice. That’s a company so desperate not to look behind in the AI race that they’d torch their own employees’ reputations to protect their robot’s feelings. What does it say about AWS’s strategic position that defending the AI’s reputation takes priority over protecting their humans? When did “don’t hurt the algorithm’s feelings” become corporate policy?

    […]

    Things break. Code has bugs. AI will make mistakes. This is the natural order of building complex systems, and anyone who’s been in this business longer than a funding cycle understands that. The problem isn’t that Kiro decided production was due for a surprise deletion. The problem is that when faced with their first major AI failure, AWS’s instinct wasn’t transparency or accountability. It was to protect the AI’s reputation at all costs.

    If your cloud provider would rather look incompetent than admit its AI is fallible, sit with that for a second. Not because this particular outage was the end of the world. It wasn’t. It’s Cost Explorer, for God’s sake; I spend meaningful chunks of my life with that service, and it being down for a few hours just means I’ll do something else for a bit. But we are at the exact moment where every cloud vendor is asking you to hand agentic AI the keys to your production environment. When the first real test case showed up, AWS’s communications instinct was to protect the robot and throw the human under the bus.