Second-Order Effects of AI Integration
When focusing on technology and its ever more advanced possibilities, it’s easy to forget that organisations, and the way they work and function, are still very human. The source of the creativity, and what is created, is driven by the friendships and frictions between people. Over many years working with teams and across larger functions I’ve seen how success is down to the culture and relationships, and the positive collaborations that develop. The common complaints I’ve heard in 1:1s, and what impedes technical progress and the happiness levels of people working within the business, are the result of bad relationships and inter-team attitudes. So, what does any of that have to do with AI? Understanding that success in a technology-focused company is a people-centred endeavour, helps teach us how AI tools help, and where they are dead-weight or actively negative influences. The places they can ease our pain, and where they will just increase it. In the last couple of years we’ve integrated more and more AI-first approaches into our ways-of-working. Time enough to see where the impact has been, where things haven’t changed, and some of the second-order effects of this step-change.
Digital Ethics - Making Choices
Our technology growth has taken us on a fantastic journey. Inside of the last 25 years we have gone from wired phones in our houses, to powerful computers strapped to our wrists. We can transfer money across to the other side of the world in fractions of a second. Whole autonomous organisations can be contructed from smart contracts that live distributed across the digital world. I can authenticate to my bank through facial recognition. My favourite websites know me better than I know myself, and can act as smart agents, predicting what I would like, where I would want to go, how I might vote… This digital world is one of data and machines, locations, behaviours, machine learning predictions. automated interactions. These abilities give us the power to do great things, but in doing so we have also achieved the power to do immense damage. How do we navigate this new world and maintain integrity? How do we cross ever-more amazing frontiers without losing our ethical direction?
Automated Business
If anything defines the business landscape in the modern world over the last few years it is the increasing sophistication of technology, the ever-quickening pace, complexity, scale of data, and dropping of costs. The power of the tools now available to organisations is incredible. With one click we can add massive data lakes, machine learning, and personal AI assistants, let alone the day-to-day underlying traditional compute uses we are more familiar with. What also seems clear however is that we aren’t able to keep pace with the availability of technologies in the majority of cases. Amazon and Google scale companies, and others whose businesses are essentially reliant on staying at the front-edge of technology, are able to harness the power of new functionality, their survival requires it. But what of the rest of the businesses out there, those who’s primary driver is not necessarily technological?
Agent Self-Organisation in the Cloud
In the field of modern cloud operations, multiple services continuously run on many different platforms, across a broad spectrum or hardware, network, and software environments. Broadly, they can be briefly summarised as having the following properties,