Tag: Applicable to business

The Divide(s)

Surely I’m not the only one running up against total resistance (i.e., no discernable millimeter move) when one would want to even discuss disruption in industries hitherto untouched.
Like the financial industry. Really, the mindsets haven’t opened up to the 21st century at all. Despite in-roads by trading algorithms, something some even called a ‘financial crisis’ or so, and Bitcoin i.e. block chain trust.
But hey, at some point you just want some everyone to have their Kodak moment, right ..?

Maybe there’s three kinds of people:

  • The kind that embraces the New for what it is and brings; the innovators of course and the early adoptors. Ballpark: 10%
  • The early and late majority that tag along because everybody is doing it. About 60-70%.
  • The Laggerds, the retards (qua brain openness and movement…), the reactionary. The remainder 30-20%.

That’s not new. But the percentages may be different for various kinds of innovations and disruptions. The point being: How do you know where you are, if you’re in the third category and/or before the disruption strikes ..?
Yes, I do understand the flip at the other extreme, where Morozov–like second thoughs about what We as a global society would want. But that’s way beyond the frightened closure of mind that shrinks and shrinks consciousness (both meanings) ever further. Where you’d want to, metaphorically hey keep it real, bang someone’s head against the proverbial beamer display to make ’em see – with the contrary effect of disliking anything New even further in turn…

But OK. This was just an extensive RT of the LinkedIn link above… So, herewith:
DSCN2513
[Still standing (? as ‘t Schip), but gloom!]

P( Danger(You) > 0.5 ) ⇒ Shutdown( You )

For the Fellow Travelers among you, that still believe that AI (AGI or ASI) will bring us joy and an arcadic peaceful creative work-free life forever after, please do consider this here piece. And see that we’re only at the beginning.
[Oh for AGI/ASI reference, see here.]

Luckily, hopefully, the tide will turn. But there simply is no guarantee it will.

And on this most pleasant note, I’ll leave you with:
DSCN7386
[Málaga – but when the struggle is forbidden and ‘ratio’ quod non might seem to prevail, the Dark may roar and explode out of its confines in utterly destructive ways. As in this previous post…]

Digital Native Schative

A couple of weeks ago, there was this little row (that you may easily have missed) about some recruiter requiring digital nativity (yes.) of candidates (and whether that would be discriminatory since it would exclude ‘old’ folks). As in this here discussion.
Where the point was largely missed that one would indeed not want to hire anyone who would consider themselves qualified on this point…

As

  • Considering yourself such a native, or ‘born digital’ or whatever ridiculous phrase one could use, disqualifies you as you have no clue:
  • Those born in a time when there was already something digital (e.g., like stand-alone PCs), will still have grown up in environments with hardly if any of those devices. Either due to region (PCs were around in the US in the 80s, not so much elsewhere) or class (as if less moneyed classes had PCs in the US, before the 00s). Same / similar for all (sic) other ‘devices’, ‘systems’, and developments, that one could consider to fall under the ‘digital’ class if there were such a thing. If ‘born digital’ is about ‘computers’ having been around: that started in the 60s ..! If it is about pervasive ‘digital’ stuff being around: Those kids are still infants (mentally!), 0-20yrs of age; only some escape this nubness and indeed do understand technology.
  • So, there’s hardly anyone who could actually claim to be born and raised (sic) digitally. Maybe a handful, possibly placed outside their bio family by authorities as the digital overload would count as child molestation (compared to their peers, playing outside).
  • And, all the other kids may have actually learned something of the outside world in which one has to live (or be kept (sic) in a basement all their life…). May; apart from those that didn’t properly learn to ride a bike since they were driven around by tiger moms. Still, the ‘born and raised’ digital, would be of no use in the real world due to knowing nothing of it.
  • The ‘digital’ has in the mean time exploded. Is it about mobile, about social, about devices, about apps, actual applications, programming, security, business deployment, assembler, design (of ‘web’ sites (huh whaddoyoumean ..!?), apps, devices, brands, or ..?), privacy, economics, …, …? No-one can cover them all; some may cover a few but certainly not more. So anyone claiming to master the world because they were ‘born digital’, I show you the Fool. Ecco homo.
  • So you’d better not hire such worldview-morons.

But then, you could hire me. I was trained to work on mainframes (operations) and early PCs (use, programming down to C and assembler), have learned hardcore HTML (3, 4) back in the day and moved to ‘modern’ applications, and understand the Real World through education and experience (also in the business world), etc.etc.
Your call.

For reference:
DSCN6672
[‘Native’ …? Córdoba]

FogAI picture

… Just to put it out there: What has happened to all the thrilling AI initiatives that flew around one after the other at the start of the year ..?
At that time, I even included some stuff in my Predictions, as so many new things were popping up. But now, … not so much. Because what?

Or have all the ‘leaks’ been thumbplugged and is development still going strong in skunk works towards a renaissance explosion sometime soon ..?

Whatev’; for you:
DSCN2101
[Its back being Mont serrat. Or so. ?]

Signalling healthy process

Yet some more cross-over ideas from the IoT world into the administrative bureaucratic office world: Streams of transactions as signals.
Of the health of the process, of course. To be defined, obviously, as the fit to the surroundings. The fit may be off, either intentionally (wanting to let the world adapt to the process, enforcing (?) change) or unintentionally left blank                i.e., having to cope with exceptions to what was envisaged as transactions’ content or form.

Now apply yesterday’s first picture of process control.
Now, too, consider what one could do with sampling theory (as a subset of ‘Shannon’, if properly elaborated, possibly skirting with ‘classical’ statistics ..?). Taking 2log(n) samples (where n is the number of transactions ..?? Just a wild guess) and being able to reconstruct the ‘signal’ then taking its integral (discrete transactions … just summing it up ..?) for the total. Or Fourier-transforming it all and … get your basic theory straight before dreaming of moving on so don’t start at the other end as ‘accountant’…! And/or treating exceptions (as e.g., found by the sort of analysis that these girls/guys are so good at; that not even being meant as a cynical qualifier) as noise to the signal. Never fully suppressable, but useful to pick up secondary signals, stacked in their variation of frequencies, amplitudes an wavelet transformations. That all tell you something, if you listen. Whether you want perfect, over-HiFi replay [intermission: Ugh I’m getting old, even knowing that HiFi was a thing…], or lively veracity, actual fullness of music. And take in again the ole’ industrial process control with its recipe / derivative function(s), et al., and be able to better control it all from the ‘dashboard’ in the control room. When all of the routine stuff, the routine 80%, of business is done by … ‘robots’. Humanoid or digital-machines, IDC.

And hey, while we’re at it, why not throw in attempts to include in bookkeeping not only discrete numbers (arbitrarily rounded to hunderds, of random currencies) but Real numbers or even Complex numbers as well ..? The latter, e.g., to indicate VAT surcharges, etc.; leading to tuples-as-single-‘numbers’ in bookkeeping. Maybe somewhat harder to track that all is booked correctly, but also maybe powerful in capturing singular transactions and some processing rules/logic, and controls, in one tuple (‘record’).

Where AI may then be applied to do sanity checks. Not on this author; no AGI or ASI would suffice…

OK, for now:
DSCN1436
[“What a shoe box” but yes that *is* the Bata shoe museum, Toronto]

ICShape

Doing some pondering, digging and backtracking on the issue of IoTA. But, … already got stuck when considering how to (best?) model the architecture at lower levels. Would a classical picture, or a somewhat-less classical picture work best to gain understanding of the risk areas ..? As in:
Industrial control cycle
[Own pic]
Or
open-standards
[Plucked, adapted from the site linked below]
Where the former is from the industrial, process-oriented engineering world, and the latter from the digital networking world.

Yes I’d really like your advice on how to ‘marry’ both to be able to optimally visualise where the risks are; the potential, intentional or not, noise on the signal, or the wrong signals altogether. What might cause that, how to protect against that, etc.
Yes, taking into account the work already done here – which is impressive, but somewhat (?) protocols-oriented, not architecture-/risk-oriented. Yet. Something like
SCADASmartGridEfficacy_Page_2_Image_0002
[plucked off a simple search] is what I’m after.

But the other work, too. All, to overlay with risk lists on all surfaces at all levels… Then, to see how to protect that all against the (generic?) risks, and how one would audit sufficient (?) protection is in place. Not ‘controls’ – those are the losers’ weak retreats, the “didn’t want a cookie anyway” fig leaves. Taking into account this breakthrough though.
But for now, again already, leaving you with:
DSCN2075
[Life in stead of straight angles, Barça]

UnEllsberging your change

Somehow it only recently, and suddenly, struck me that the resistance to change that we see so pervasively in ‘organisations’ is indeed due to people’s very human resistance to change as one might loose some things held dear – for whatever reason.
The latter, obvisouly often stated in terms of losing something Known for replacement with Uncertainty even if prospects and rational risk calculations might indicate huge improvements achievable.

The crucial point being: the risk calculations may be rational but apparently aren’t emotional. The striking thing mentioned above, being that we need to integrate Ellsberg’s Paradox much better into our change approaches and programs… Indeed, rational calculations will not work in a world where humans function like described. The ‘future’, uncertain world must be described in terms of the same absolute certainties as the world we experience in the now/past [as the now of now is the past in an instant], just as perfectly credible also in the completeness of its pro and con arguments. Since not only do we exactly know the devil (our, e.g., work environment) we know because we have experienced it in full, hands-on, but also because we have quite a rosy picture of that devil when our brains forget nasty stuff easier than friendly bits.

Now go study all of the linked wiki – it has tons of good info, both explanatory and as pointers to slurp it all up into practical solutions.

And, for a glimpse of a better future:
DSCN4984
[They’ll come when the (grossly overstated) benefits are high enough and/or the left-behind is dismal enough; NY]

Overabsolute Majority Report

On this sad day (in NL), only a hint of a mer à boire on our future that will be – not so happy. Possibly.
Where the dystopian future scenarios are more right than the on the surface by and large generic tending-to-rosy robot movies predict. With Ex Machina having some interesting thoughts (again) on AI and what it is to be human but in the end also falling back to common standards. And with the similalry common flaw of expecting ‘robots’ to become near-human possibly to the point of indistinguishability [nice word] – that will then operate in a world where ‘individuals’ would be the unit of existence-currency. With no ‘government’ in sight, at least not in today’s sense where even the largest governments (agencies) are still made up of human elements. There is something, but it doesn’t matter too much for the discourse. Where the dystopian worlds we’ll live in (big question marks all around) may have quite a different set of physical media, e.g., all-digital.

Which makes it possible to see today’s (supra-)governments, the largest of them in particular and including the globally biggest private companies, where ‘company’ isn’t between a platoon and battalion of men anymore, as supra-national organisation forms in the abstract.

This already causes problems when one would want to get redress from e.g., the ‘financial industry’ and before, to tackle the military-industrial complexes that were (are?). This will cause problems now that the complexes are informational-industrial-military, with the middle part in the driver’s seat and the two others as wingman, protecting.

In the future further out, the global complex may be beyond the Singularity (negative view), about which I posted quite a bit before. How will we approach such overlord(s) when completely abstracted, sublimated ..? Hm, gotta read up on Negri&Hardt a bit more…

But for now:
DSCN6043
[When centres/seats of power were only this big; Madrid]

Not much on the books

Soo… We have been hearing for years, maybe for a decade already, that print books were completely dead, either already or within a couple of years … And now, the reports are that ebooks have an whopping … 15% market share. No, no typo, not 85% or 95% or even 105%, but just 15%.
So much for the Through of Disillusionment …

What if … what if subsequent ‘trends’, that are a great many in number, since, would have the same exponential quod non growth rates hence amount to not much ..?
Yet … As ‘exponential’ i.e. sigmodial-at-best growth goes, big blots on the hype-radar but under the actual radar of real life?

A lot of lapidary references. Hence, for now I’ll leave you with:
DSCN1147
[Old but ‘still’ very fashionable in its entirity, London]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord