Werner Vogels

Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon and editor of All Things Distributed, published "Tech predictions for 2026 and beyond" on 25 November 2025 around one organizing claim: AI belongs inside the human loop, not the reverse. The evidence he assembles comes from care and education, not infrastructure. Loneliness affects one person in six worldwide and is designated a public health crisis by the WHO; Vogels attaches a 31% increase in dementia risk and a 30% increase in stroke risk to it. He reports that 95% of patients with dementia have beneficial interactions with the Paro robot, that between 50 and 80% of Roomba owners name their vacuum, and that personalised AI tutors save teachers 5.9 hours a week. He names the counterweights himself: emotional dependence on machines, the regulatory framing of health agents, and equity of access.

Nine months later, on 26 August 2026, Vogels introduced a guest post by Andy Warfield, an S3 engineer at AWS, titled "DuckDB and the changing physics of analytics". Warfield used the slot to announce that DuckLabs joins AWS as a subsidiary, with the project staying open source under MIT and under the DuckDB Foundation.

The same byline carries both a personal argument about what machines should do to people and a corporate announcement about where an analytics engine now lives. What the essay asks of AI agents in healthcare, that humans stay in command, is not applied to the second case.