morning stroll

Work do where the new IT organisation was revealed. I do appreciate the transparency and it seems all quite reasonable and people seem to be generally happy with the proposals. I did not have much to say during the feedback session. Our corner of the organisation is suitably strange and isolated that at least at this stage the reorganisation doesn't impact us.

The invited speaker was Sascha Lobo, blogger, columnist, etc. His talk deeply pissed me off. He talked about transformation, AI, dataflows, personal health metrics and that humans overestimate their ability. His idea of humans is very mechanistic and that AIs will outperform humans in even more areas (his example was go). I am quite happy to accept that machines will outperform humans in specific tasks (that's what machines are built for). I missed the question of what are we building these systems for? How do they improve society at large? These ethical questions need to be answered before those systems are rolled out and change our society. I also have technical concerns. where is the resilience of the systems with ever increasing complexity that we built and rely on? Resource usage? Climate change?