By Robert Beckerbauer Jr | BIM Manager & Expert Contributor
Everyone is talking about AI. There is the continuous fear that it will go sentient and take over the world in a Terminator or Matrix style. The current fear is that it will control our lives, take away jobs and make us dependent on it. This blog post is not going to be about that fear.
On Monday October 20, 2025, the Amazon Web Service (AWS) servers had an incident. Over the past few days, there has been a lot of talk on the web about that incident. I have read many posts and even commented on a LinkedIn post by Phil Chan asking about redundancy. I have seen the comments from upset people who couldn’t work because of the incident. I have read the comment by Michael Freiert in support of AWS and pointed out that it has lower downtime than other hosting services. In the end, AWS was down and with it went a lot of programs. In the AEC industry we saw the Autodesk Construction Cloud, Miro, Bluebeam, Procore and many others not able to be accessed. For teams with a deadline that is a big issue. My daughter reported that many school programs were down and made it hard for turning in work. She even heard that the grade book program was not working. On a side note, all her Google software was working fine. It amazes me how wide spread of the number of software programs that were affected.
How does this all relate to AI? It really doesn’t. It relates to the fear of it taking over all our lives. While true AI is not here yet and the fear of becoming sentient and taking over is still being pushed by science fiction writers and Hollywood. Phil Chan made a comment to my comment on his post, he said, “And here we are, our livelihoods, both personal and work are at the mercy of some corporation”. That comment got me thinking. While true AI is not here, we are being controlled by the hosting services and their data centers. The AWS incident is proof of it. I asked people what they thought. It was surprising how many people were not surprised by the fact that AWS, Google, Yahoo, etc. really do control our lives through their hosting services and data centers. People were fine with that, and honestly, we must be. They provide a service we need and thus we have given them the right to control our personal and work lives. That control is out of the box and won’t be going back in anytime soon, so how do we minimize our risk? What steps are we going to take to so when it does happen, project teams can keep working?
True AI might not be here yet, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. are great tools to help our lives, they are not sentient and completely thinking on their own yet. While that fear is legitimate, I personally think it is a thing of the past. The AWS incident proves that we are already being controlled. The fear shouldn’t be about AI taking over, the fear should be what will happen if those who are controlling us currently, end up having longer and more frequent incidents or worse yet want more control. We should be asking what are they going to prevent that from happening? What are they going to do to create redundancy? How do we prevent them taking over more of our lives?
The fear of AI going to sentient, is still a legitimate one but we all need to take a deep breath and calm down. We need to start looking at who is controlling our personal and work lives, what they are doing with that control, and how do we maintain some semblance of control on our own.
*This blog post was created without any help from AI tools like ChatGPT. *