Technology

I can't read the original twitter link, but I'm not sure they handed it the job of a senior infrastructure engineer. The article says "routine", which to me is something you can hand off to a junior just fine. When they hit a snag, they obviously should stop and ask what to do, but even then, a human might want to avoid admitting ignorance and try to fix it themselves instead. They shouldn't have privileges to fuck up that badly.

So while it's on the AI for taking destructive steps, I do think there's a human error in the form of grossly irresponsible rights allotment. If this was a first-of-its-kind incident that shows otherwise stellar AI fucking up badly, I'd classify it as a pure AI problem, but their limits are hardly novel at this point. There have been previous incidents circulating the media. We've had memes about it. If you can't stay up to date on your tools and their shortcomings, you shouldn't be using them, because discovering a footgun becomes a question of "when", not "if".

That's why I consider this partially a human failing: If you're gonna use a tool, make sure that it operates within safe limits. The chainsaw doesn't know the difference between tree and bone, so it's on you to make sure it stays away from anyone's legs. So while "Chainsaw can saw legs if wielded improperly" is a problem that was accepted as a tradeoff for its utility, you can't really blame the chainsaw if you zip-tied the safety.

(Again, not to say Anthropic is blameless for letting its random generator generate randomly destructive shit. I just don't think that's the only point of failure here.)