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 ...

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...

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. ...

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, ...

In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss goal fixation. Richard Branson almost didn't make it back from space. His pilots had a problem and flew very close to the limit. They should have aborted. But the future of commercial spaceflight was resting on their shoulders. They were fixated on the goal, and that causes problems. The reason we are finding out is that authorities noticed the flight was outside its designated airspace because stronger winds than expected caused th...

In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss the narrow focus of IT professionals. This is an unavoidable consequence of the complexity of the technology we use. We've had to learn to give our computers very exact instructions, and that informs our thinking. The app from my local supermarket is obviously built by people with a narrow focus. If I search for "sugar," the first hit is "pickled cucumber (sugar-free)." The Amazon app, on the other hand, is built by people with a wid...

In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss whether you should force people back to the office. This will be your most important leadership decision this year. Apple told everyone to report back to the office. Apple CEO Tim Cook says that "in-person collaboration is essential to our culture." Google is expecting 20% of employees to work from home in the long term, while Facebook is expecting 50% remote work. The big Wall Street banks, on the other hand, require everyone back ...

In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss humans and computers. Jeff Bezos went to space in a fully autonomous computer-controlled rocket. Richard Branson went to space last week, and he had humans flying his spacecraft. The Silicon Valley mindset is that you can program or train computers to do anything. However, as the continuing struggle to build truly self-driving cars has shown, some things are still very, very hard for computers. Even Elon Musk, who claims his Teslas a...