Category: Technology

An epidemic of apps…

Posted on by The Information Badger in apps, Automation, Change, Digital technology, Information Technology, Learning, Life, Technology

Organisations are increasingly insisting that you download an app because ‘it makes your life easier’. But should you really need an app on your phone to get a coffee in a garden centre’s café, to order food in an eatery, or to gain entrance to the changing rooms at a pool after a child’s swimming lesson? No. The Badger, perhaps, is just being grumpy about the epidemic of apps that is increasingly changing facets of everyday life.

The Badger’s young grandson attends a course of weekly swimming lessons. His parents have pre-paid for the course, and they and the Badger take it in turns to take him to the pool. All the kids and their accompanying adults congregate in the free poolside viewing area when they arrive. The kids, who all wear their swimming costumes under their normal clothes, disrobe. The instructor does a rollcall and then opens a glass gate to move the group of excited kids into the pool, and adults stay in the viewing area to watch proceedings. When the lesson finishes, the instructor sends the kids to the changing room the other side of the pool, and the adults go to the pool’s manned reception where the receptionist lets them through a turnstile to the changing area on mentioning the swimming lesson. This process has been long-standing. It works well, and it accommodates a reality, namely that there might be different accompanying adults each week. Three weeks ago, however, everything changed because a mandatory app that had to be used to operate the turnstiles to the changing room was introduced.

The Badger’s daughter-in-law, who had booked and paid for the course in the first place, downloaded the app and used it successfully to access the changing room after her son’s swimming lesson. The following week, the Badger’s son, who had also downloaded the app, was refused access at the turnstile because his phone wasn’t registered to the person who booked the course in the first place, i.e. his wife! Other accompanying adults experienced the same thing. After frosty exchanges with the receptionist, they were all let through. This week the Badger, who has consciously not downloaded the app, was his grandson’s accompanying adult. The receptionist simply sighed and let the Badger through the turnstile. One can but wonder how on earth this app has ‘made your life easier’.

An app collects all kinds of data about you and your behaviour that provides an organisation with advertising/notification opportunities, tighter control over their operations, and more profit. With the current epidemic of ‘apps for everything’ it’s worth remembering two things. Firstly, that every organisation pressing you to download an app has their interests at heart, not yours, and secondly that when you download an app you are trading some of your privacy and freedom for a convenience that doesn’t always really materialise…  

Digital advancement depends on physicists, material scientists, and engineers…

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI, Digital technology, Engineering, Information Technology, Science, Technology

Browsing the stalls of a large vintage and antiques fair recently, the Badger came across a battery-operated Sinclair Cambridge pocket calculator in working order. It took the Badger back to the 1970s when he, and many of his student friends, purchased one for £19.99, the equivalent of £290 today! Battery-powered pocket calculators had just become widely available, and they quickly became a ‘must have’ amongst students on science and engineering courses. Unsurprisingly, more powerful multi-function pocket calculators soon came along, and the Badger’s Sinclair Cambridge was replaced by a Texas Instruments TI-57 which provided years of service before being consigned to the back of a cupboard.

Since the fair, the Badger’s reflected on how digital technology has evolved since the pocket calculator of 50 years ago. The powerful, multi-purpose, smartphones we carry in our pockets today were pure science fiction in the 1970s. Since then, however, ‘digital’ has been one of the great achievements of the 20th and 21st centuries, ostensibly because it touches nearly all areas of human activity. Most people will, at some stage, have quietly wondered how its continued advances will impact their life in the future. After all, we can already see that drones have altered warfare, humanoid robotics has reached extraordinary levels (e.g. see here and here), automation dominates manufacturing and supply chains, electric vehicles are changing motoring, services are online-first, hybrid working is normal, social media is an asset and a liability, and that super-intelligent AI has as much capability for evil as it does for good. It’s thus natural and human to wonder about how the continued high rate of digital advancement affects our future.

Can, however, the high rate of digital advancement be sustained? Having retrieved his vintage TI-57 from the back of a cupboard, the Badger reflected on this question. The TI-57 has a semi-conducting silicon chip at its heart, and it’s the speedy development of integrated circuits and such microchips to provide more and faster computational capability that’s fuelled digital progress since the 1970s. Fundamentally, progress in the likes of physics, material science, and micro-engineering/manufacturing have determined the rate of digital technology’s advancement. It follows, therefore, that if progress in such subject areas slowed, then so will the rate at which digital advancement impacts our lives. Is slower progress in these subjects likely? Well, the Badger thinks it takes a brave person to write-off the possibility.

The future we hear about today, especially regarding AI, depends on more and faster computer chips at a time when the scientific boundaries of what’s achievable are being reached using the chip methods of recent decades. Just as it was when the pocket calculator first arrived, it’s scientists and engineers who will find necessary new solutions, and it’s their success in doing so that will really determine the rate of digital progress in the coming decades.

Who really gets a problem project back on the rails?

Posted on by The Information Badger in Business, Delivery, Information Technology, IT Project Management, Leadership, Learning, Technology

There’s rarely a single cause for why a software or systems project goes off the rails. Normally, project problems are a consequence of human, organisational, and process-related issues caused by things like poorly defined requirements, scope creep, poor planning and tracking, poor line management oversight, poor communication, and difficult client relationships. Sometimes projects really hit the buffers and matters end up in the law courts. More often than not, however, client and supplier executives recognise that failure is, for one reason or another, not an option and so they agree to do what it takes to get the project back on the rails and get the system delivered. One of the Badger’s formative experiences was being part of a small team tasked with getting one of his employer’s major fixed-price projects back on the rails. The project was a basket case exhibiting all the causal characteristics noted above, but the system to be delivered was strategically and politically important to the client and supplier alike. Turning it around was hard work but a great learning experience.

One of the Badger’s colleagues on the fix-it team, Jock (not their real name), was an experienced Scotsman with a sense of humour. Their task was to re-establish a comprehensive, contractually compliant, Functional Specification for the system that was fully agreed with the client. This meant Jock and others, including sometimes the Badger, met with the client’s team of operational users and contractual minders for daily functional discussions over many weeks. It was soon evident that Jock was objective, entirely focused on his task, and masterful in corralling those with different opinions and functional perspectives to a common agreement. Eventually a new Functional Specification, the lynchpin to getting the project back on the rails, was formally agreed. Jock had been firm, fair, and engaging throughout. Although he’d built a good relationship with the client team and great respect within the project team, he didn’t consider himself a natural leader or negotiator.

What did the Badger learn from working with Jock? Firstly, to recognise the difference between a negotiable issue and a non-negotiable principle. Secondly, to say ‘No’ and mean it when it’s appropriate and necessary. Thirdly, that saying, ‘Yes, but that’s not part of the contracted baseline’ unemotionally and assertively is an effective way of saying ‘No, you can’t have it unless we agree the impact and price’. The Badger learned something else too, namely that Jock was a natural leader, and that leaders don’t have to be extroverts, aggressive, intolerant, petulant, or have a distant demeanour. Jock demonstrated that natural leaders are relatable, build respect, have a backbone and principles, don’t clamour to be in the spotlight, and remain objective and fair under pressure. When a project goes off the rails, we should remember that it’s people like Jock rather than company executives who really get it back on the rails.

The digital world – a public nuisance?

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI, Business, Digital technology, Information Technology, Life, Risk, Science, Technology, Transformation, Wellbeing

The old coin/card ticket machines in the local High Street’s car park have been replaced by swanky touch-screen units that only take contactless payment. To be fair, there’s one new machine in the car park that still purports to take coins and contactless payment, although nobody has so far been able to get it to actually accept coins! There’s something else too. It’s an open-air car park and the screens on the new units are hardly readable on a bright sunny day. The new machines are straightforward to use once you know how, but earlier this week the only functioning machine was the one purporting to take coins as well as contactless payments. There was a queue, which the Badger joined, but the pensioner at the head of the queue was having trouble getting the machine to accept their contactless card payment. Giving up, they tried coins instead, and that didn’t work either. The flummoxed pensioner thought there was something wrong with their bank card. A kind lady stepped in and said she’d pay for the pensioner’s ticket using her own card. That didn’t work either, causing the lady and the pensioner to grumble ‘The digital world is a public nuisance’.

The Badger subsequently cogitated on whether the digital world is indeed a public nuisance. Putting the legalities of what constitutes a public nuisance to one side, whether the digital world’s a nuisance depends on your perspective. Grandparents, parents, young adults, and children have different perspectives, but research across this age spectrum apparently suggests that views are not purely yes or purely no, but definitely not neutral. Many think the digital world enhances social interactions, learning opportunities, business efficiency, innovation, convenience, and so on. However, many believe it’s become a nuisance because a) it’s dominated by self-interested major corporations who put their profits rather than users first, and b) it lessens person to person physical contact, encourages excessive screen time, distorts our sense of reality, erodes personal privacy, is an enormous source of mis and disinformation, and causes mental, health, and behavioural issues in young adults, children, and vulnerable groups.

Does the Badger think the digital world’s a public nuisance? No…but beginning to lean towards yes! No, because a lengthy career in the IT industry showed that in the right hands, with good laws, controls, and ethical and moral human behaviour within acceptable societal norms, the digital world produces enormous benefits and is a good servant to mankind. Why leaning towards yes? Because although the science relating to the digital world’s impact on humanity has been too slow over the last few decades, it’s now confirming that nuisances are real and often harmful. It’s thus reasonable to conclude that mankind is fast becoming a servant to the digital world when it should be the other way round, and that AI is destined to reinforce this in the coming years…

More STEM-educated MPs needed for effective national leadership

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI, Education, Engineering, Information Technology, Leadership, Politics, Science, Technology

The lawn’s brown, the flowers and trees look decidedly sad, and there appears to be fewer bumblebees, honeybees, and small birds than usual. There are, however, a greater number and variety of butterflies than normal. These were the Badger’s first thoughts when sitting in the shade contemplating the world after entertaining his grandson at the weekend. His thoughts then wandered into the realities of the current world that his young grandson’s generation face. It’s been an exceptional UK summer, with blue skies and high temperatures across much of the nation. For a nation that is renowned for talking about the weather, the heat brings mixed blessings – there are water shortages, hosepipe bans, and a high risk of destructive vegetation fires. Many people are wringing their hands and banging the climate change drum, but the Badger’s grandson is taking the heatwaves in his stride! He thinks it’s much better having good weather in the school holiday period so that he can be outdoors rather than housebound due to rain and gloom.

The Badger’s thoughts moved onto matters oblivious to his grandson. Things like, for example, the fact that being big and powerful doesn’t mean you’ll succeed (as the Ukraine and Middle East conflicts illustrate), and that with AI the world’s embarked on its most dangerous period of change ever. Whilst there’s much worry due to fossil fuel emissions and climate change, the consumption of resources driven by AI and other technological developments also have major consequences for the planet that hence the future life of the Badger’s grandson’s generation. With a sigh, the Badger’s cogitations concluded that the nature and predisposition of humans, and self-serving leadership dynamics, are at the heart of many of the world’s woes.

The self-serving leadership conclusion prompted the Badger to explore the educational background of the current UK Cabinet. This revealed that only one current UK Cabinet member has studied a STEM subject at university; a situation that’s essentially unchanged from Kier Starmer’s Cabinet. It also revealed (see here) that of the 650 elected Members of the UK Parliament, ~83% have university degrees but only 17% have a STEM degree, a proportion that’s barely changed in 20 years. With ~ 46% of UK undergraduates in the country studying STEM subjects, a measure of 17% suggests significant STEM underrepresentation in the country’s political and governmental circles. No wonder, the Badger mused, that the country has not been firing on all cylinders during this century.

Life today is dominated by science, technology, engineering and maths. In an era of AI and rapid, AI-enabled, science and technological advances, surely there must be more STEM-educated people around the UK Cabinet table for effective national leadership? Of course, there should. Afterall, STEM-educated people, as noted here, base decisions on data and unspun truth, both essential if the nation’s ever to have the leadership needed to get its mojo back…

AI IPOs – Look, Listen, and Learn…

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI, Business, Delivery, Information Technology, Leadership, Technology

The young Badger was given some advice by his new boss when joining a dynamic IT company many years ago, namely ‘Look into everything that’s put in front of you, especially numbers. Listen quietly and closely to everything that others say. Learn from situations and from the good practices and behaviours of others. Heed this advice and you’ll do well’. Decades later that advice is as good today as it was then. As the Badger’s witnessed over the years, not everyone takes such advice on board. He’s been amazed many times that some people running projects or business units have not taken the trouble to ‘look, listen, or learn’ in order to understand the underlying performance of their areas of responsibility.

Looking at, understanding, and being able to explain what’s driving the metrics is important in managing any business or project activity. It’s crucial to leadership, being in control, and instilling confidence in others. One of the young Badger’s first formative experiences was at a CEO review of a business unit’s operational performance. The CEO was a demanding, numbers-focused individual, and the business unit leader had the reputation of being a handwaving optimist with a reluctance to hear bad news. The review did not go well. It quickly became clear that the unit leader’s view of their business was completely at odds with the trends in the unit’s metrics. The irritated CEO raised their voice and said ‘It’s not wrong to make a profit, and if you don’t know your numbers then you don’t know your business’. A lecture followed, pointing out that understanding financial and other metrics was crucial to successful business management. It was an uncomfortable review to witness, but it reinforced to the Badger that the advice he had received was sound. Shortly thereafter, the business unit leader was replaced.

In the AI world, SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are progressing IPOs. The Badger’s applied the look (at the numbers), listen (to a wide variety of knowledgeable commentators), and learn (from the history of the digital revolution over 30 years) advice from years ago to assess if these IPOs might be good investments for members of the public. He concluded that they are speculative investments. AI may be a transformative technology that cannot be ignored but investing through a fear of missing out (FOMO) rather than rational assessment is rarely a good idea. Huge sums are being spent on building the necessary infrastructure, but so far none of these companies have made a profit from AI. This short YouTube video neatly explains the AI race in an easily understandable way. It ends making the point that building AI is one thing, but making money from it over the long term is the real challenge. The Badger’s decided that wariness is always sensible when no profits have been made so far, but a huge pot of gold is promised in the future…

Digital slop…

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI, Business, Information Technology, Life, social media, Technology

Over the years, the Badger’s been involved in company acquisitions, and he’s also been on the receiving end when his employer was itself acquired by another company. Experiencing both sides of the equation has been valuable and educational. Acquisitions normally follow standard processes. When the transaction is finally agreed and completed, the subsequent integration activities also follow fairly standard processes. This week the Badger was asked about his view on ‘digital slop’, and – oddly – this triggered a memory from way back in 1997 when the Badger attended a post-acquisition leaders conference following the purchase of a Dublin-based company in the telecommunications software market. This company had products in the short messaging services (SMS) sector, and the conference took place in a rural hotel in the Irish countryside some distance from the city.

Why did ‘digital slop’ trigger this particular memory? Probably because a memorable element of the conference was a presentation by a leader from the acquired company on their vision of the future for mobile phones and telecommunication software products. They described a vision of the future in which everyone had an internet-connected mobile phone which enticed them to enter a shop every time they walked past one in a shopping mall or on the High Street! It was an interesting presentation which occurred during the year of Amazon’s IPO, before Facebook existed, and shortly before Google was founded. Most conference attendees could see its technological feasibility, but most questioned why people would want to be bombarded with ‘marketing and adverts’ as they walked through a mall or along a High Street. Most, including the Badger, thought members of the public would say ‘I don’t need this, I don’t want this, and I don’t trust this’.

It was these 1997 words that underpinned the Badger’s answer about today’s ‘digital slop’, a phrase that’s emerged in recent years to describe the huge growing volume of dubious online content produced using AI tools. Digital technology has changed the world since 1997, AI continues to change it under our feet, and AI-enabled ‘digital slop’ does little for humanity except add to the mass digital exploitation of people. People have come to learn with social media over the years that dubious content, online misinformation, and addictive scrolling are not bugs but features of the system, and that they are becoming ever-more slaves to algorithms that don’t have their best interests at heart. Countering this requires an iron will and some disciplined personal behaviour. In relation to AI produced ‘digital slop’, perhaps ‘I don’t need this, I don’t want this, I don’t trust this, and I don’t consume this’ is a better mantra for today than the 1997 words. AI is a powerful technology that cannot be ignored, but the general public probably need more attitude and behavioural alignment with these words if humanity is to resist its mounting digital slavery…

Studying at University, the electronic pocket calculator, and AI…

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI, Education, Engineering, Information Technology, Learning, Opinion, Technology, universities

Last week the Badger wrote about his nephew’s burst of doubt about whether AI renders going to university pointless. He messaged this week to say thank you for the Badger’s guidance and to confirm that AI is not going to get in the way of fulfilling his dream of studying a STEM subject at university. Good! The Badger has no doubt that he’ll get to university and do well in his chosen subject. The Badger say’s this not through optimistic rose-tinted glasses of family connection, but because his nephew ended the message saying ‘I’ve concluded that while AI provides an additional set of tools, I don’t expect to use them to cut corners and do the thinking and work for me because this technology won’t help me be me, or help me develop the independent thought processes, behaviours, and skills that people like Tim Berners-Lee acquired when they did their degree at university’. This sentence got the Badger thinking.

When Tim Berners-Lee did his undergraduate degree at university there were no laptops, tablets, smartphones, or desktop personal computers, and no AI. In fact, the pocket calculator was a recent innovation! It’s easy to forget that it was only ~50 years ago that the emergence of electronic pocket calculators started to make rapid calculations accessible to a wide personal and professional audience. When they first hit the market, the Badger was just starting his degree course. He and most other students on the course had soon bought a pocket electronic calculator. The Badger purchased a Sinclair Cambridge for £19.95. Others bought a Sinclair Scientific costing £49.95, a price that was beyond the Badger’s means. By the end of his degree, however, the Badger had upgraded to a Texas Instruments SR-51, which served as a great workhorse for many years. But here’s the point. Calculators became an essential tool, but they didn’t fundamentally change the content of our degree course, or the concepts, methods, processes, practices, ways of thinking, practical skills, and interactions that were at the heart of the subject matter.

Many of today’s tech leaders went to university in the 1980s and 1990s when every student had an electronic pocket calculator, and rudimentary personal computers were very limited compared with those of today. They’ve all done well without AI. Of course, AI is different to the pocket calculator, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that it’s a tool. Those studying for a degree today should use this tool responsibly, because outsourcing your thinking and development to this technology just to gain a qualification serves no useful purpose, especially if you value your independence, freedom of thought, personal creativity, and the maximisation of your career options. As the Royal Observatory recently put it, AI can ultimately trivialise human intelligence. The whole point of going to university is ultimately to grow human intelligence, not trivialise it.

AI in the dock?

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI, Business, Information Technology, Legal matters, Life, Technology

Consider this scenario. Someone approaches an individual and asks them to provide answers to some questions. The individual performs some Google searches of the internet, consults books in a local library, and then pieces together the answers to the questions. These are then communicated to the requestor face to face, or by phone or video call. The requestor uses the answers to commit a wicked crime for which they are prosecuted. The person providing the answers to the requestor’s questions is deemed by law to have some culpability for the crime and so they are prosecuted too. Now consider the same scenario but with the perpetrator directly asking ChatGPT (or similar) the same questions. The AI’s answers are used to commit the same wicked crime for which the perpetrator is prosecuted. The AI, however, does not have the same legal culpability for the crime as the individual noted above.

Reports that Florida’s attorney general has opened a criminal investigation into whether ChatGPT provided advice to a murdering gunman last year, see here for example, made the Badger wonder about the following question: ‘Are people using AI professionally or personally really aware of where the boundaries of responsibility sit?’ Probably not, was the conclusion after musing in the Spring sunshine. If a doctor follows a wrong diagnosis delivered by an AI, is the doctor responsible or the hospital, the engineers who built the AI model, or some other organisation in the chain? Some who build and deploy AI models appear to think such responsibility questions can be sorted out later when something goes awry and causes a crisis. This is never a sensible approach.

The more AI develops, the more it impacts important aspects of everyone’s life. However, it isn’t obvious, at least to the Badger, that professionals or the public understand much about how AI arrives at its answers. The Badger, who’s not a lawyer, thus spent a little time exploring how the law deals with the question of responsibility when someone takes action guided by AI’s output. It appears that you – not the AI vendor nor the algorithm – but you the user are legally responsible. This means that anyone – organisations, professionals, or members of the general public – using AI is always responsible and liable for the actions taken on guidance from AI. Organisations and humans can be sued, but AI cannot. When AI makes a mistake, liability flows to the humans and organisations that deployed it and used it,

That’s not really a surprise, but it’s a reminder for all users that they are more likely to find themselves in the dock than AI. It’s also a reminder that proper human consideration and diligence is imperative before acting on AI’s outputs. The Badger also thinks it’s a reminder that we must never allow AI to autonomously rule the world…

Digital backlash…

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI, Backlash, Digital technology, Information Technology, Life, Online Services, social media, Technology

The Artemis mission around the dark side of the moon, the sight of humanoid robots running a half marathon (here and here), Anthropic’s Claude Mythos AI model and comments by ex-PM Rishi Sunak, all illustrate the power and relentless advance of digital technology. Having a decades-long career in the IT industry, it’s been routine for the Badger to deal with perpetual change in digital technology. The rapidity of that change kept the Badger and his colleagues motivated, challenged, learning and eager for new skills, and greatly satisfied when systems were delivered to clients and put into operational use. With this background you might think the Badger is an ardent digital technophile today, but he’s not. He’s ‘neutral’ with no strong affinity for, or aversion to, digital technology. He’s not overly enthusiastic about digital technology’s constant impact on our lives, but not overly critical of it either. Why is that?

The answer lies in three points: there’s no putting digital advances back in the box once they exist, not all digital technology is good for society, and digital technology dominated by a handful of individuals, corporations, or countries does not lead to a focus on benefiting humanity as a whole. Regarding the first point, innovation is a human attribute that will always produce advances, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the second and third points which have moved the Badger to ‘neutral’ over the last decade, because digital technology has taken over our lives by stealth, driven ostensibly by agendas set by giant US and Chinese corporations controlled by a handful of individuals. Regulators have been slow, and tech giants have strongly resisted the introduction of sensible new laws that benefit wider society at every turn because of the threat to their own agendas. Digital advances have infiltrated society by default and diffusion without too much regard for the impact on the public. AI simply illustrates the point. Philosophical objectivity is thus at the heart of why the Badger’s become a neutral rather than ardent technophile.

Everyone today is more aware than ever before of digital technology’s downsides. There’s a growing willingness for the public to push back on the digital world. The UK government backtracked on Digital ID ambitions after a backlash, there’s a growing backlash against AI in the US (see here, here, and here), Swedish schools are cutting back on digital learning and returning to books, pen, and paper, numerous countries are  moving to ban social media for under 16s, a ban on children using smartphones at school has just been announced in the UK, and big tech has just lost a landmark social media addiction case. Society’s pushing back and questioning an unrestrained digital world more and more, and this backlash seems likely to grow with time. Indeed, with the world as it is today, the Badger’s unlikely to move from a neutral affinity any time soon…