Creative incompetence

Creative incompetence

I wrote a piece on the Peter Principle and Creative Incompetence on my LinkedIn blog.

The Peter principle, suggests that people are promoted to levels of incompetence. I the article I argue that this is aggravated by the fact that management values management and often values task and financial management more than people management skills.

The overpromoted are often unhappy and the insightful are either lucky and work for organisations that seek to avoid these traps by recognising and rewarding individual contributors or employ a strategy of “creative incompetence”.  …

On AI at GMB 25

On AI at GMB 25

There were two debates on AI, calling for Transparency, Accountability and Job Security. I briefly review the and reference the two motions, point at the TUC proposals, the French SA's fining of Amazon, ORG's critique of the Data Use and Access Act and cross reference other articles I have written on the coming impact of AI/LLMs. The full article is overleaf ....

On Cloud operating systems and security of supply

an image of an aisle in a datacentre

I wrote a little note on Cloud Operating Systems on Linkedin, provoked by an article, entitled “International Civil Society’s Tech Stack is in Extreme Danger” and published in “The Dissident”, this blog, is a fairly faithful reprint. The authors articulate the threat to civil society that the US corporate monopoly and Trump’s aggressive and unaccountable sanctions capability poses to progressives around the world. Trump has instructed the US cloud providers to sanction the International Criminal Court. The Dissident’s article asks how long it’ll be before progressive NGO’s are similarly targeted and whether US Banks and payment processors will similarly be mandated, as the US has done before.

It’s another example where the USA’s erratic and selfish political agenda must lead once friendly foreign governments to consider their “security of supply”. Most of the code required to run a cloud is open source, at the moment, and I would recommend that the British and EU governments ensure they can sustain access to this code as well as other critical open-source resources such as Office productivity and email products. We should also be looking at distributive governance models like mastodon and diaspora.

Fortunately, the EU has a massive, distributed computing capability and while the basic architecture of supercomputers and Internet platforms differs, they are in fact exceedingly similar. It’s also fortunate for the UK, while Rachel Reeves cancelled Sunak’s supercomputing projects, that the previous Tory government agreed to rejoin the EU’s supercomputing consortium.

Escaping from the US monopoly control requires will and knowledge and I am unsure that it exists within the UK’s political leadership, equally I’m unsure that it exists within the leadership of the EU member states. I should also add, it’s not really about the hardware, nor the land and electricity. …

AI ethics and accountability

a silhouette of a man in fron of computer code

I attended a lecture on AI Ethics and blogged on Linkedin and mirrored it on Medium, I catalogue the issues as presented by Dr Hung and used Google to see if there were any obvious gaps.

I look at Garbage In, Garbage Out problem, repeat the calls for transparency, I repeat my arguments about authority vs popularity and the role of the GDPR, and I look at copyright and the four [software] freedoms.  …

An AI prosecutor?

An image of a robot in black and white

I wrote a Linkedin an article called an AI prosecutor. In it I say,

The problem with modern software is much of it is inference, and completely unsuitable for “beyond reasonable doubt”. It’s also opaque and likely to fail the tests around if it returns popular vs accurate and authoritative results. It’s often wrong and arguably a bullshitter. The EU’s GDPR introduced the right to freedom from profiling, which means a freedom from being processed automatically by computers. This is an important barrier.

This is my first written declaration that that the GDPR’s “freedom from profiling” is a crucial defence of humanity against the machines.

My alarm about the consultation was probably unnecessary.  …

A note on managing content

A note on managing content

I made a post on LinkedIn called “Managing & distributing content on the cheap”. I look at what I do, i.e. use wordpress and plugins and what I have done and walked away from; I also mention https://postiz.com/ which claims to be an open source multi-channel poster, and was reminded of https://decidim.org/first-steps/, a community development project, for organising communities. Should I take another look at diaspora, or has it passed its sell by date.  …

Are blogs still useful?

Are blogs still useful?

In August 2009, I wrote an article questioning if blogs were losing their influence. In conversations over the last two weeks, I had reason to go back to it because I thought they were important things I’d said then which I need to check if they were still valid. If so, I thought they were worth repeating. I found the old article quite hard to read. I tried to simplify it, and clarify my proposed architecture. I have also tried to update it given the developments in the internet service provider space, both technically and commercially. It’s much harder to build a personal content graph these days; one needs to make it easy for people to find what you say! The revised article is on linkedin and medium.  …

Whose jobs are AI coming for?

Whose jobs are AI coming for?

McKinsey have produced a report on the role of generative AI on productivity and the future economy. The white paper can be found on their website. They launched the paper with a series of webinars, one of which I attended. The rest of this article describes my notes and thoughts ... I made a blog post on linkedin which I mirrored here, to see the full article, either "Read More", or click the linkedin hyperlink.

On rejoining Horizon Europe

On rejoining Horizon Europe

tI wrote an article posted on my linkedin blog, on Horizon Europe and the will they/won’ they attitude of the Tory Government. This refers to Another Europe’s Brexit Spotlight article which covers the issues including the fact that the scheme ‘s rules state that an associate member may not be net beneficiaries, and showing that the UK government is seeking to ensure that it is.

This is wrong in so many ways, but critically, the problem is that it would seem the British Government, seem to think they are ‘buying’ the grant, they are not, they would be buying the research output. The research output will be significantly larger than any individual stake and or any member states’ stake.

The final mistake they make, is that access to funding makes British universities and companies more attractive partners to other European companies and research institutes and thus underwrites the attractiveness of the universities to European teachers and students, and funds jobs for British based researchers. …