A blame fuse is a human who is installed into an automated workflow as an “overseer” but whose main purpose is to be there as an individual that can be blamed and held accountable for the failings of that system.
First encountered in this post on mastodon:
Another term I like to use is “blame fuse”.
Blaming the machine or some higher part of the org would be costly. We would have to change them, which would cost a lot, have wide ranging impact, take efforts and possibly make powerful people look like fools. We may even have to pay compensation for torts.
So instead you install a blame fuse. The fuse come into the org, the human is fired, you replace them, everything keeps working like before but the blame was absorbed.