Beneficial Intelligence Sten Vesterli

In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss other people's failures. They can affect you, as the recent Amazon Web Services outage showed. Cat owners who had trusted the feeding of their felines to internet-connected devices came home to find their homes shredded by hungry cats. People who had automated their lighting sat in darkness, yelling in vain at their Alexa devices for more light. More serious problems also occurred as students couldn't submit assignments, Ticketmaster ...

In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss the people shortage. It isn't real. Complaining about a lack of people is what is known as a "half argument." You say what you want, but not what you are willing to give up. That's like a politician promising to build a new public hospital but won't say where the money will come from. The full argument for missing people is "we cannot get the people we want at the conditions we are willing to offer." If you had a crucial pr...

In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss data hoarding. Gathering too much data costs money and doesn't add value. We think we need all this data to train our AI, but hoarding data is the wrong place to start. Using a counterproductive metaphor, some say that "data is the new oil." That is a dangerous metaphor with no less than four problems:First, data is not fungible like oil is. One barrel of oil is just as valuable as the next barrel. But one data record does not h...

In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss monoculture. Just like in farming, monoculture is efficient and dangerous.Modern farmers will plan hundreds or thousands of acres with the same crop. That gives efficiency because the entire crop will respond identically to fertilizer and pesticides. It also means that the entire harvest will be lost if some new pest or disease suddenly appears. Monoculture cost more than a million lives in Ireland in the Great Famine of the 1850s. Th...

In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss trusting your vendors. You trust them to make their best effort at producing bug-free code. You probably trust that their software will perform at least 50% of what they promise. You might trust them to eventually build at least some of the features on their roadmap. But can you trust them to not build secret backdoors into the software they give you?Snowdon showed we cannot trust any large American tech company because they send our data ...

In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss time to recover. The entire network of the justice ministry of South Africa has been disabled by ransomware, and they don't know when they'll be back. Do you know how long it would take you to recover each system your organization is running? When you have an IT outage, what the business wants most is a realistic timeline for when services will be back. If IT can confidently tell them that it will take 72 hours to restore services, th...