In February this year, I posted this about artificial intelligence and jobs: “In short, we don’t know what we’re doing. Firstly because we don’t have the intellectual capacity or processes generally to think widely enough about the systemic impacts across our economies, and secondly because we’re close to creating something that we (pretty quickly) won’t understand anyway.” There have been a few examples of AI creating […]
The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) just published a discussion paper called ‘Artificial Intelligence: the next digital frontier?’ Like most MGI output, it’s full of interesting data, in-depth background, some strong analysis, great graphics, and a case study or two, but the executive summary is disappointing. It just sounds a bit… desperate. MGI knows that most of their readers (the ones that matter – executives […]
After 15 years of consulting and technical engagements in the first half of my career (up to around 2002), it seemed to me that a key reason for high levels of IT failures in many organisations was that there were a number of competing visions (or versions) of the truth when it came to IT. Usually seven. And they were: What the business actually needed What business […]
Much of the discussion about the ‘robot revolution’ today is centring around the potential for mass unemployment, and what should be done about it. The existing commentary correctly (in my opinion) focuses on how to handle the aftermath rather than how to control it, given that the introduction of such technologies is all but inevitable. But focusing on jobs is missing the key point about AI. In […]
Key takeaways 1 Things that matter are intelligent enough to interact with the network – RFID tags for example don’t really count as ‘things’ any more than a printed bar code does 2 Real IoT solutions are delivered by a network of gateways that connect and interact as needed; Internet protocols already exist to make that simple 3 M2M does not equal IoT – they’re […]
Part one – takeaways: 1 Real IoT at scale is hard to do, which is one reason why there are so few examples today 2 The chasm between running a pilot and moving to production at scale is wide and deep 3 But some people will win very big from IoT in the coming years 4 Poor air quality kills more than 50,000 people a year […]