The downsides of the A.I. industry.

Karen Hao in front of a book shelf

I have recently, watched the YouTube video, “How tech CEOs are lying to you”, where Karen Hao is interviewed by  Aaron Bastani on Novara Media's channel. Ms Hao has just published a book, “Empire of AI” and the interview covers the topics of the book.

At the centre of her arguments are, that large language modules aka AI, and their use of resources, water, power, land and rare metals are a choice, and one that society cannot afford. She questions the business model of the AI industry, sees it as a threat to [US] wealth and notes its scofflaw approach to its own regulation and its oppression of poor and vulnerable communities. She is highly critical of the motivations of the oligarchs funding the AI bubble.

The remainder of this article, which is over 2000 words is overleaf, use the "Read More" button ....

Agile, SCRUM and optimism

two men at a transparent wall board

I have posted an article to my Linkedin blog. I had come across an article on medium, and so probably behind their paywall, called, “The Death of Agile: Why Tech Giants Are Abandoning Scrum and What They Use Instead”. One of the alternatives the author suggests is a zero methodology regime.

I extracted what I consider important from the article and argue these are critiques of SCRUM not necessarily of Agile.  I made a note in 2021, called SCRUM, where after listing a series of critiques of SCRUM, I highlighted four of the principles from the Agile manifesto, which I think remain relevant,

·       Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

·       Working software over comprehensive documentation

·       Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

·       Responding to change over following a plan

While not a fan of poor documentation, as I don’t consider the product finished without good documentation, these are useful, people centric and optimistic strategies.They rely on empowering talent, not micromanaging it.

I first wrote about Theory X/Theory Y in my blog article “Maximising Creativity” (2004), where I acknowledge its authorship by Douglas McGregor. I first heard about it in the ’80’s and McGregor wrote his book , “The Human Side of Enterprise”, in 1960.

In my previous article I concluded that while Agile maybe a Theory Y methodology/ideology, SCRUM is not, it is a Theory X methodology and the result of a Theory X methodologies is a Theory X organisation. …

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.  …

Political Tech 25, a review

the door sign at the Political Tech Summit 25

I attended Political Tech 25 in Berlin in January. The slides and videos are sadly not yet ready but here is a reflection from my notes. I spent the first part of the morning in the plenary hall, and then visited the break out rooms. These notes cover insights into “elections and electioneering”, and “IT, Social Media and Persuasiveness”; I also cover a presentation from the Labour Party about their successful campaign in a separate document. Possibly the key lesson is that old school techniques still work, that AI is not yet used for communicating with people and the social media companies need to be treated as hostile spaces for progressives. I also include a short summary from the LP{ presentation. Use the "Read More" button to see my key learning points and links to the two documents,. ...

Another Europe, Big Tech and democracy

a cctv camera

This was a webinar called, “The big tech threats to democracy, challenging the oligarchy from Musk to meta” which was hosted by Another Europe. This article consists of the notes I took at the meeting and while I was hoping to improve my notes on the speakers contributions by reviewing the video, I am unsure if this will become available.  It also consists of the notes I used for my contribution as I was asked to speak from the floor. I made this article because I think it was the first time I argued for the need for joining the single market to participate in the EU’s democracy shield and digital market regulation regime. This article has been back dated to the day after the day of occurrence. I have tried to ensure that comments that became obvious or were impacted by events after the seminar, are presented as foot notes.For more, see below or overleaf … …

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.  …