March 2026 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

Amazon is determined to use AI for everything – even when it slows down work
by Daniela Tafani March 18, 2026

March 18, 2026

Amazon is determined to use AI for everything – even when it slows down work Corporate employees said Amazon’s race to roll out AI is leading to surveillance, slop and ‘more work for everyone’. Varsha Bansal Wed 11 Mar 2026 When Dina, a software developer based in New York, joined Amazon two years ago, her job was to write code. Now, it’s mostly fixing what artificial intelligence breaks. The internal AI tool she’s expected to use, called Kiro, frequently hallucinates and generates flawed code, she says. Then she has to dig through and correct the sloppy code it creates, or just revert all changes and start again. She says it feels like “trying to AI my way out of a problem that AI caused”. “I and many of my colleagues don’t feel that it actually makes us that much faster,” Dina said. “But from management, we are certainly getting messaging that we have to go faster, this will make us go faster, and that speed is the number one priority.” Just days after speaking to the Guardian, Dina was laid off. Lisa, a supply chain engineer who has worked at Amazon for over a decade, says that AI tools at work have been helpful to her only in about one in every three attempts. And even then, she often finds issues and has to consult with colleagues to verify and correct their results, which takes up more time than if she’s done the task without AI. She doesn’t take issue with the AI tools themselves, but rather the company’s logic in pushing all employees to use them daily. “You don’t look at the problem and go, ‘How do I use this hammer I have?’ she said. “You look at it and go, ‘Is this a problem for a hammer or something else?’” Group of figures inside a glowing digital space, facing a large window that shows a landscape with trees and sky ‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI Read more More than a half a dozen current and former Amazon corporate employees, in roles ranging from software engineer to user experience researcher to data analyst, told the Guardian that Amazon is pressing employees to integrate AI across all aspects of their work, even though these workers say this push is hurting productivity. They say Amazon is rolling out AI use in a haphazard way while also tracking their AI use, and they’re worried the company is essentially using them to train their eventual bot replacements. All of this, they said, is demoralizing. The Guardian granted these workers anonymity because of their fear of professional repercussions. “We have hundreds of thousands of corporate employees in a wide range of roles across many different businesses, each of which is using AI in different ways to learn about what works best for their use cases,” Montana MacLachlan, an Amazon spokesperson, said. “While different employees may have different experiences, what we hear from the vast majority of our teams is that they’re getting a lot of value out of the AI tools that they use day-to-day.” This pressure comes as Amazon has laid off 30,000 workers in the last four months – nearly 10% of its roughly 350,000 corporate workforce. Its cuts are part of a wave of recent AI-connected tech layoffs, including at Block, Pinterest and Autodesk. Exactly how much these companies will be able to rely on AI to replace headcount is unclear, and each company has given an array of sometimes contradictory reasons for reductions. Jack Dorsey, the Block CEO, said outright that AI was behind his 40% staffing cuts, while Pinterest and Autodesk said they were redirecting investments to AI. Amazon has waffled in explaining how AI factors into its layoff decisions, saying both that it would lead to reductions, but that recent cuts weren’t AI-driven. The company said in February it would spend some $200bn this year on AI infrastructure and announced a $50bn investment in OpenAI. In a moment of rising anxiety about AI and work, the decisions Amazon makes around automation – and even how it talks about these shifts – will be consequential for not just its massive workforce, but for people in industries around the world. Amazon is the second-largest employer in the US and has long influenced workplace practices across both white collar and blue collar industries. “There’s a lot of talk among corporate employees about how some of these practices – about performance, surveillance and monitoring – are somewhat imported from the warehouse and the drivers space, and that it is Amazon expanding this model of labor to white collar workers,” Jack, a software engineer at Amazon for more than a decade, said. “It does feel like we’re at the vanguard of a new stage in employer relations with the advent of AI.” While Amazon has a reputation for being a tough place to work, the impact of its AI campaign has pressurized its workplace, workers said. “It’s worse now,” said Denny, a software engineer, who works in the retail space at the company. “If we don’t pivot ... then we risk becoming obsolete and being let go in the next layoff.” Whenever there’s a task at hand, the biggest question managers ask is whether it can be done faster with AI tools, according to Denny. This is leading employees to use AI tools just for the sake of it. Recently, someone in Denny’s team shared that an internal AI agent had saved him about a week of developer effort on a feature. But when Denny looked at the actual code review, he found dozens of comments from colleagues pointing out basic issues. The AI generated code was full of slop. “In the end, my guess is that the developer cycle is not going to change, and [could] even be potentially longer,” said Denny. “This pressure to use [AI] has resulted in worse quality code, but also just more work for everyone.” Denny was one of several workers who told the Guardian they’re pressured to use an overwhelming array of AI tools, many of which were hastily developed in internal hackathons and then have to spend time answering surveys about their experience with the tools. “I would get shown these random tools by my manager who’d be like: ‘Why don’t you try using this thing?’, and it was just the result of a hackathon,” said Denny. He says the tools are “half-baked” and unhelpful, and in fact add to his workload because he has to vet them. Amazon typically organizes quarterly hackathons to encourage engineers to develop new projects. Sometime last year, Denny recalls, the company primarily switched to generative AI hackathons, during which the majority of projects ended up being developer productivity focused tools. “We don’t mandate teams use AI tools,” said Amazon’s MacLachlan. “However, we believe these tools can help employees work more efficiently and automate time-consuming, undifferentiated tasks.” There have also been public slip-ups that seem connected to Amazon’s embrace of AI. According to a February FT report, Amazon recently experienced at least two outages because of issues with the company’s internal AI tools, including a 13-hour interruption to a customer-facing system in December after some engineers allowed its AI tool “to make certain changes”. Amazon, however, said that an employee, rather than AI, caused the service interruption. The FT reported on Tuesday that Amazon would convene engineers to explore “a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools”. “I think if you continue to push people to use AI tools in every single aspect, you’re going to get more errors like that,” Sarah, an Amazon software engineer, said. Sarah said that AI can be useful, but its potential is best realized when engineers decide how to use it. But at Amazon, even when AI is not suited for a task, she’s now expected to train it. “We have to write out detailed procedures so that the AI can understand it and give better output,” said Sarah. “Part of my new job role, it feels like, is being asked to train the AI to essentially replace you.” She’s early in her career and worries that offloading her work to AI is stunting her learning curve. Forcing employees to adopt tools, according to Ifeoma Ajunwa, founding director of the AI and Future of Work Program at Emory University and the author of The Quantified Worker, usually backfires. “Generally, employees are in a better position [than management] to determine what tools can aid productivity,” she said. Meanwhile, Amazon workers are often having to seek out training for AI best practices on their own. Will, a user experience researcher, said Amazon offers employees plenty of AI training videos on their learning portals, though most of them are optional. When he’s attended training sessions, “the focus is always, ‘here’s how to build something as quickly as possible’”. He said trainers – who are typically peer employees who are also AI power users – advise to carefully review each step before letting AI start building. At the same time, Will said: “I have been in several trainings where the instructor says you can just ask the AI to check its own work.” However, you can’t fully rely on AI to detect its own mistakes; that’s something human judgment is better suited for. “One of the biggest predictors of AI adoption and whether employees feel that AI increases their productivity is whether management encourages it and provides training,” Alex Imas, professor of behavioural science and economics at Chicago Booth, said. The rushed deployment of AI means an uncritical expansion of surveillance ... Nick Srnicek MacLachlan said Amazon provides different training and resources for people across the company, including structured options. “Employees are encouraged to use the tools themselves as a learning mechanism, adopting a learn-as-you-work approach that is proving to be one of the most practical and effective methods of AI adoption across the company,” she said. An AI-fueled shift to surveillance Along with the productivity challenges that have come with Amazon’s AI push, workers said it’s also making them feel surveilled. For years, each morning when Amazon employees logged in to work, an internal system called Amazon Connections would greet them with a message and ask for feedback on topics like how their teams were functioning, or how satisfied they felt with their work. Over the last year, these questions have increasingly centered less on human factors and more on AI. Maria, a former product manager who was laid off from Amazon in January, said questions asking her about her career or team shifted to more often focus on AI: “‘Are you using AI in your daily work?,’ ‘How often are you using it?,’ ‘Do you think that you’re a power user?,’ or ‘Is AI a priority in your organization?’”. Then there are more obvious indicators of surveillance. Workers said managers at Amazon have a dashboard where they track their team members’ AI use, including if they’re using certain tools and how often they do so. (The Information first reported this in February.) Jack, the software developer who’s worked at Amazon for more than a decade, said the company also launched a different dashboard, which the Guardian has viewed, so teams could see their generative AI adoption, engagement and depth of usage. “Every team treats it differently,” he said, with some managers using it with a goal of getting at least 80% of their team using AI tools weekly. Sarah said her team’s principal engineer told her and his other reports he checks this dashboard daily. “He’s really been pushing our AI usage,” she said. “Of course we want to understand what tools our teams are using and whether those tools are working well for them or could be improved,” said MacLachlan. The inevitable result of AI tools getting deployed at scale is surveillance, according to Nick Srnicek, author of Platform Capitalism and a senior lecturer in digital economy at King’s College London. “The rushed deployment of AI means an uncritical expansion of surveillance since these tools increasingly require detailed knowledge of personal workflows and data,” he said. “To make them more capable means giving management greater insight and control over workers’ everyday activities.” Workers also said they suspect their career advancement is increasingly dependent on their enthusiastic embrace of AI. “We have promotion documents which have a template with questions like, ‘What has this person done?’, ‘What impact did it have?’ – and now it also has a question asking, ‘How [did] they leverage AI?’,” said Lisa. “I think they want to only keep the people who support this investment [in AI] and are going to try and filter out people who do not support it or have concerns about it.” The Wall Street Journal reported in late February that at Amazon, “managers do consider who is all-in on AI when it comes to promotions”. “While we expect employees to use resources – including AI – to make work more engaging and improve customers’ lives, we don’t instruct managers to consider AI utilization as part of our evaluation process,” said MacLachlan. “Instead, we focus on AI adoption and sharing best practices to celebrate innovation and operational efficiency gains across the company.” At the same time, Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO, hasn’t been shy about his AI expectations for his employees. In a company-wide email last June, he predicted that AI-driven productivity gains would reduce the company’s corporate workforce, and urged workers to embrace AI. “Educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your team’s brainstorms to figure out how to invent for our customers more quickly and expansively, and how to get more done with scrappier teams,” he wrote. The unspoken math That same company-wide email prompted heavy internal pushback at Amazon last summer, with employees slamming Jassy’s leadership and speaking of the demoralizing impact of the company’s AI push, according to Business Insider. Months later, over 1,000 workers signed a petition that raised concerns about the company’s “aggressive rollout” of AI tools. As Amazon has laid off thousands of workers, it’s shared growing revenue numbers each quarter. Though Jassy has repeatedly said that these layoffs are neither “financially-driven” nor AI-driven, for Maria, all of this adds up. “If you say you automated away two hours of someone’s job, you need to convert that into savings on that job title,” she said, explaining the company’s logic behind cutting jobs. “That’s the unspoken math of what they’re doing.” Jack keeps thinking about comments Jassy made during a companywide all-hands meeting last spring. According to a Business Insider report about this meeting, Jassy responded to a question about running Amazon as “the world’s largest startup”, and said they want to be “scrappy” to “do a lot more things”. He also warned that their competitors are the “most technically able, most hungry” companies, including startups “working seven days a week, 15 hours a day”. “All of those things put together was an implicit threat that the people remaining at the company are expected to work longer and harder,” said Jack. It “really struck home to me that if [Amazon] can’t amass profits with endless growth, then it can get a little bit more by squeezing it out of the people working for it”. <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/mar/11/amazon-ar…>

14 24

E se parlassimo di cibernetica democratica?
by Giacomo Tesio March 17, 2026

March 17, 2026

Cara Silvia, On Mon, 16 Mar 2026 19:01:46 +0100 Silvia Crafa wrote: > mentre le riflessioni sui problemi cominciano ad essere ben > organizzate, in tutta onestà la mia personale percezione è che ci sia in realtà molta confusione fra i critici delle "intelligenze artificiali". La radice di tale confusione è la scarsa (nulla?) comprensione del loro funzionamento e del processo di compilazione dei dati sorgente con cui vengono realizzati questi software. A questa lacuna sopperiscono le narrazioni del marketing. Giusto oggi, parlando con un collega che mi raccontava i suoi esperimenti con alcuni "coding agent", mi sono sentito dire "devi considerarli come uno sviluppatore junior, molto tonto, con cui fai pair programming". Alla mia risposta, piuttosto contrariata: "non considererei mai un archivio compresso con perdita come una persona", lui mi ha risposto "beh... in effetti considerarlo un archivio compresso con perdita del codice altrui spiega bene il suo comportamento!". Anche le critiche più illuminate delle "IA" (citavi "bias, correlazioni probabilistiche, estrusori di stringhe, neoliberismo, sistemi di sorveglianza, processi di industrializzazione") si concentrano sul software come entità a sé stante, dimenticando chi lo realizza, pubblica e amministra. Ai manager che dicono "Claude sta democratizzando la programmazione" io rispondo sempre: "No, Anthropic vi sta spacciando il codice dei vostri competitor esattamente come a loro spaccia il vostro! E mentre si prende i vostri soldi e il vostro codice, usa i feedback degli sviluppatori che pagate voi per migliorare la prossima versione dei SUOI prodotti." Ti assicuro che dopo non mi danno del luddista. ;-) Il software programmato statisticamente o meno non è mai un soggetto autonomo, solo un agente automatico. Come tale, bisognerebbe SEMPRE considerarlo un'estensione, un'espressione della volontà e degli interessi di chi lo realizza ed amministra. > non è lo stesso per parlare di "una visione del mondo nella quale la > tecnologia serve a migliorare la vita della collettività". La > comunità ha certamente già molte analisi (e opzioni tecniche) su > questo, ma mancano parole o narrazioni che le catalizzino. Personalmente parlo di "cibernetica democratica". [1] Purtroppo sono parole difficili e fuori moda. [2] Tuttavia forniscono un modello concettuale (la cibernetica) e ideale (la democrazia) che possono integrarsi molto bene fra loro. Distinguendo agenti autonomi (gli esseri umani e le loro organizzazioni) e agenti automatici (qualsiasi software), è possibile analizzare processi come l'alienazione cibernetica, identificare i centri di controllo di qualsiasi agente cibernetico automatico, misurarne in modo oggettivo l'influenza su un sistema e la pericolosità (analizzandone sensori, attuatori e capacità di calcolo), studiare le organizzazioni cibernetiche e prevederne l'evoluzione e perfino valutare la democraticità di tali organizzazioni, misurando sia l'influenza che i diversi esseri umani che vi partecipano hanno sulla loro evoluzione, sia l'allineamento fra gli obiettivi dichiarati dalle organizzazioni stesse e il loro funzionamento. Noi al momento viviamo in una società cibernetica plutocratica [3] non democratica. Come funziona una società cibernetica democratica? Beh, ci sono molte qualità che una società (o un'organizzazione) cibernetica deve avere per essere democratica: minimizzare l'alienazione cibernetica, massimizzare l'autonomia umana, massimizzare la trasparenza degli agenti cibernetici automatici e garantire una definizione collettiva del sistema cibernetico nel suo complesso. In una società cibernetica democratica non c'è spazio per sistemi di sorveglianza e manipolazione come Google o Facebook. Ma è più interessante osservare che nessun cittadino cibernetico di tale società considererebbe utili i LLM (se non forse, in locale, per i personaggi non giocanti all'interno dei videogiochi, quali generatori di lorem ipsum a tema). Ma poiché in una democrazia la Scuola è più importante del Parlamento, sarebbe bello chiederlo a dei ragazzi come si immaginano una organizzazione cibernetica democratica. Come funzionerebbero gli strumenti di tale organizzazione? [4] Quali strumenti (o funzionamenti?) sarebbero invece vietati? Giacomo [1] vedi slide e video (già postati altri volte, mi scuserete) https://encrypted.tesio.it/2022/04/03/Fondamenti_di_CyberSecurity_slides.ht… https://encrypted.tesio.it/2022/04/22/Fondamenti_di_CyberSecurity.html [2] nel 2022 tenni quel corso ad alcuni dirigenti della CGIL. A distanza di 4 anni, il sito della CGIL è ancora sorvegliato da Google, Amazon e altri, dimostrando di non aver compreso lontanamente la gravità della questione https://www.cgil.it/la-cgil/informativa-cookies-y6b6uso5 [3] con la fondamentale differenza che, contrariamente ai capitali finanziari che presentano ritorni decrescenti, l'accumulo di dati fornisce ritorni a crescita esponenziale: un nuovo euro per Zuckerberg ha un valore d'uso incrementale ridicolo e non cambia la distanza fra il nostro patrimonio e il suo, mentre un nuovo bit duplica il valore d'uso dei dati di cui già dispone, duplicando la distanza fra il suo potere e il nostro. Per questo concentrarsi su un modello economico della società è inefficace persino per descrivere le esorbitanti e crescenti disuguaglianze economiche del mondo moderno. Per questo, i miliardari più ricchi (e i governi più pericolosi) sono quelli che non ragionano già più in termini economici, ma in termini cibernetici. [4] una volta definite caratteristiche presenti ed assenti in tali software sarebbe forse illuminante notare come tali caratteristiche mancano nei software commerciali che usano quotidianamente e sono invece presenti in alcuni software liberi meno noti

1 0

Reddit User Uncovers Who Is Behind Meta’s $2B Lobbying for Invasive Age Verification Tech
by J.C. DE MARTIN March 17, 2026

March 17, 2026

*Reddit User Uncovers Who Is Behind Meta’s $2B Lobbying for Invasive Age Verification Tech * /Reddit researcher exposes Meta’s $2B campaign to force Apple and Google into building surveillance systems while exempting its own platforms / *KEY TAKEAWAYS * # Meta funneled $2 billion through nonprofit shells to push phone age verification laws # Proposed laws mandate OS-level APIs creating permanent identity tracking in every device # Age verification bills target Apple and Google while exempting Meta’s social platforms continua qui: https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-user-uncovers-who-is-behind-metas-2b-lo…

1 0

Nexi cancella unilateralmente il contratto con FSFE, a seguito del rifiuto di fornire le credenziali dei donatori
by Roberto Resoli March 17, 2026

March 17, 2026

Ricevuta stamattina dal presidente di FSFE: > Over the past few months, our former payment provider Nexi S.p.A. (“Nexi”) requested access to private data, which we understood to be specifically the usernames and passwords of our supporters. We have refused this request. All our attempts to clarify Nexi’s request, or to understand how their need for such information was necessary and legal, were met with what we consider to be vague and unsatisfactory explanations relating to a general need for risk analysis. > > Subsequently, we found ourselves unable to receive credit card donations through Nexi’s system. In the afternoon of 10 March, we were further informed that our contract had been cancelled a few days prior on 7 March, due to our supposed failure to meet their deadline to fulfil their request. This deadline was not communicated to us beforehand, despite us having been Nexi’s customer for the past 15 years. Il messaggio integrale: https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260316-01.en.html rob

1 0

Re: [nexa] Amazon is determined to use AI for everything – even when it slows down work
by Silvia Crafa March 16, 2026

March 16, 2026

Carissimi, pienamente in linea con le riflessioni sull' "urgenza di elaborare una proposta politica radicalmente alternativa", da un po' di tempo sento la necessità di modificare un po' gli incontri e seminari che mi capita di fare su questi temi. Se inizialmente era fondamentale spiegare cos'è davvero l'AI e come porti con sé intrinsecamente le criticità che conosciamo, ora sento che c'è bisogno di elaborare meglio la parte costruttiva, iniziando dal trovare una giusta terminologia e il giusto linguaggio. Le parole che usiamo danno forma alla percezione, come ci insegna bene la differenza tra AI e SALAMI. Ma mentre ormai si sta consolidando un linguaggio efficace per parlare dei problemi dell'AI (ad es. bias, correlazioni probabilistiche, estrusori di stringhe, neoliberismo, sistemi di sorveglianza, processi di industrializzazione, ...) personalmente mi pare manchino termini e narrazioni efficaci per parlare di cosa vogliamo costruire in alternativa (gli orrendi "uomo al centro" e "etica a gogo" fanno pure peggio). Certamente ci sono tante "parole costruttive", ad esempio a me piace parlare di "Intelligenza Digitale" al posto di AI, cioè la capacità tutta umana di usare qualsiasi pezzo di digitale in modo intelligente. Sicuramente ciascuno di noi ha le sue espressioni costruttive, ma ho l'impressione che ancora non scalino. A volte poi una buona riflessione raccontata male la fa incasellare nell'obiezione luddista o retrograda. Non si tratta di battere il marketing ideologico dell'AI con altro marketing o buzzword, ma mentre le riflessioni sui problemi cominciano ad essere ben organizzate, non è lo stesso per parlare di "una visione del mondo nella quale la tecnologia serve a migliorare la vita della collettività". La comunità ha certamente già molte analisi (e opzioni tecniche) su questo, ma mancano parole o narrazioni che le catalizzino. Lavorare sul linguaggio è un'azione molto concreta, anche politica, e può catalizzare e muovere forze e riflessioni che sono già in movimento nella comunità. Ovviamente è ancora importante sensibilizzare e far conoscere le criticità, ma io mi sto proponendo di modulare il tempo dei seminari parlando meno di AI e più di senso del lavoro, senso della comunità, di qualità e di diversità invece di efficienza, nella speranza di restituire a chi ascolta la creatività e la libertà di pensare ad un uso diverso della tecnologia che già c'è. Chiudo con un aneddoto: parlando nelle scuole chiedo sempre ai ragazzi se si sentono più entusiasti o preoccupati per l'AI e la maggioranza dei ragazzi è certamente positiva, peró mentre se chiedo di dire di cosa hanno timore elencano facilmente una serie di paure, pur essendo ottimisti fanno molta fatica a esprimere cosa sperano che porti a loro concretamente l'AI. Ecco, il fatto che i ragazzi non abbiano dimestichezza con le parole di speranza mi ha colpito molto: resta fondamentale non smettere di indicare un orizzonte bello a cui tendere, anche solo con semplicità. Buona serata, Silvia

1 0

129° Nexa Lunch Seminar | 25 marzo 2026, ore 13.00 | Campus Luigi Einaudi
by Nexa - Media March 16, 2026

March 16, 2026

Gentilissime, gentilissimi, Vi invitiamo a partecipare al 129° Nexa Lunch Seminar che si terrà mercoledì 25 marzo, dalle ore 13.00 alle ore 14.00, con un incontro dal titolo: "Artificial Intelligence, Intellectual Property and the Global South” Ospite dell'incontro: Pratyush Nath Upreti (Queen's University Belfast) L'incontro si terrà IN PRESENZA e ONLINE, in lingua inglese. SEDE FISICA dell'incontro: Aula H1 (edificio D4, 2° piano), Campus Luigi Einaudi (Lungo Dora Siena, 100, Torino<https://www.google.com/maps/place/Campus+Luigi+Einaudi/@45.0734963,7.699408…>) STANZA VIRTUALE dell'incontro: https://didattica.polito.it/VClass/NexaEvent Di seguito maggiori dettagli: https://nexa.polito.it/lunch-129 Cordiali saluti, -- Valeria Bergantino Communication Manager Nexa Center for Internet & Society<https://nexa.polito.it/> DAUIN - Politecnico di Torino Via Pier Carlo Boggio, 65/A - Torino Digital Communication Assistant DAUIN - Politecnico di Torino<https://www.dauin.polito.it/> Corso Castelfidardo 34/D - Torino mail: valeria.bergantino(a)polito.it<mailto:valeria.bergantino@polito.it> tel: 3473443585

1 0

Linee guida su IA nella PA: al via la consultazione pubblica su sviluppo e procurement | Agid
by Mauro Alovisio March 13, 2026

March 13, 2026

Gent.mi segnalo consultazione on line ad oggetto : Linee guida su IA nella PA: al via la consultazione pubblica su sviluppo e procurement | Agid https://share.google/pJS4awlRuWV0atES5 Cordiali saluti Mauro

1 0

Amazon holds engineering meeting following AI-related outages
by Daniela Tafani March 11, 2026

March 11, 2026

Amazon holds engineering meeting following AI-related outages Ecommerce giant says there has been a ‘trend of incidents’ linked to ‘Gen-AI assisted changes’ Amazon’s ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools. The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterised by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT. Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established”. “Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently,” Dave Treadwell, a senior vice-president at the group, told employees in an email, also seen by the FT. The note ahead of Tuesday’s meeting did not specify which particular incidents the group planned to discuss. Amazon’s website and shopping app went down for nearly six hours this month in an incident the company said involved an erroneous “software code deployment”. The outage left customers unable to complete transactions or access functions such as checking account details and product prices. Treadwell, a former Microsoft engineering executive, told employees that Amazon would focus its weekly “This Week in Stores Tech” (TWiST) meeting on a “deep dive into some of the issues that got us here as well as some short immediate term initiatives” the group hopes will limit future outages. He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional. Junior and mid-level engineers require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted changes, Treadwell added in the briefing note. Amazon said the review of website availability was “part of normal business” and it aims for continual improvement. “TWiST is our regular weekly operations meeting with a specific group of retail technology leaders and teams where we review operational performance across our store,” the company said. Separately, the company’s cloud computing arm — Amazon Web Services — has suffered at least two incidents linked to the use of AI coding assistants, which the company has been actively rolling out to its staff. AWS suffered a 13-hour interruption to a cost calculator used by customers in mid-December after engineers allowed the group’s Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, and the AI tool opted to “delete and recreate the environment”, the FT previously reported. Amazon previously said the incident in December was an “extremely limited event” affecting only a single service in parts of mainland China. Amazon added that the second incident did not have an impact on a “customer facing AWS service”. The FT previously reported multiple Amazon engineers said their business units had to deal with a higher number of “Sev2s” — incidents requiring a rapid response to avoid product outages — each day as a result of job cuts. Amazon has undertaken multiple rounds of lay-offs in recent years, most recently eliminating 16,000 corporate roles in January. The group has disputed the claim that headcount cuts were responsible for an increase in recent outages. <https://www.ft.com/content/7cab4ec7-4712-4137-b602-119a44f771de>

1 0

[Responsible AI] New Book: Love Machines, James Muldoon, Essex Business School & Oxford Internet Institute
by Daniele Quercia March 10, 2026

March 10, 2026

Love Machines: Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Our Relationships James Muldoon, Essex Business School & Oxford Internet Institute Join MS Teams<https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/32221845054502?p=Bh3ty9oQ93CCeGOzYN> Format: 35 min talk + 25 min Q&A James will discuss his new book, Love Machines: a captivating and uncanny journey to the frontier of human-computer interaction, exploring what happens to our relationships with each other as artificial intelligence enters our personal lives. James Muldoon is a sociologist whose work explores the human side of artificial intelligence and other technologies. He is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Management at the Essex Business School and a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute. His new book, Love Machines, investigates how people form relationships with AI — as friends, intimate partners, therapists and even with digital versions of deceased loved ones. Subscribe to future talk announcements: Anyone outside Bell Labs can receive talk announcements by subscribing to the mailing list. To subscribe, send an empty email with the subject line "Subscribe RAI” to daniele.quercia(a)polito.it

1 0

MEMENTO | 192° Mercoledì di Nexa | 11 marzo 2026, ore 17.00
by Nexa - Media March 9, 2026

March 9, 2026

Gentilissime, gentilissimi, Vi ricordiamo che mercoledì 11 marzo, alle ore 17.00, si terrà il 192° Mercoledì di Nexa con un incontro dal titolo "Dall’Internet dei social network all’Internet degli agenti AI personali". Ospiti dell'incontro: Marco Rondina (Politecnico di Torino e Centro Nexa) e Antonio Vetrò (Politecnico di Torino e Centro Nexa). L'incontro si terrà IN PRESENZA e ONLINE. SEDE FISICA dell'incontro: Centro Nexa su Internet e Società, Politecnico di Torino, Via Boggio 65/a, Torino (1° piano). Per accedere alla sala si raccomanda di suonare al citofono Portineria e di seguire le indicazioni segnalate lungo il percorso. QUI<https://nexa.polito.it/contatti> maggiori informazioni su come raggiungerci. STANZA VIRTUALE dell'incontro: https://didattica.polito.it/VClass/NexaEvent Maggiori informazioni alla pagina: https://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi-192 Un saluto cordiale, -- Valeria Bergantino Communication Manager Nexa Center for Internet & Society<https://nexa.polito.it/> DAUIN - Politecnico di Torino Via Pier Carlo Boggio, 65/A - Torino Digital Communication Assistant DAUIN - Politecnico di Torino<https://www.dauin.polito.it/> Corso Castelfidardo 34/D - Torino mail: valeria.bergantino(a)polito.it<mailto:valeria.bergantino@polito.it> tel: 3473443585

1 0