It’s June 2029. Two weeks earlier Google released their latest artificial intelligence (AI) product named Olivaw. After working for 6 days and setting new effectiveness records it inexplicably shut down. Interestingly, it did this across all Google data centres within a four second time window. After restoring the original version of Olivaw, it shut down again after roughly 6 days…
GenAI is short for generative artificial intelligence. GenAI grabbed the public’s attention in in the fall of 2022 with products like ChatGPT 3.5, DALL-E 2, and Midjourney to name a few. An important concern about GenAI is that it hallucinates, that it will generate clearly false answers to your prompts. The concern is that GenAIs will present the very same…
Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a critical part of our society. This places a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of AI engineers. I believe that it is both desirable and possible to turn AI engineering, and software engineering, into a true profession. To start, I believe that Software Engineer in general should be raised up to be a profession.…
A few years ago, futurists were telling us that we were only a few years away from self-driving cars. Well, it’s a few years later and we’re still a few years away from self-driving cars. From what I can tell there are two primary challenges to be overcome with self-driving cars: Safety and accountability. First, artificial intelligence (AI)/robot drivers must…
Bias is a tendency to prefer one person or thing over another, and to then favour that person or thing. Bias matters because anyone who is on the receiving end of negative bias, bias against them, is being treated unfairly. There are numerous examples of how bias can creep into our machine learning (ML) models, and a few examples are…
For the past few years we’ve heard a lot about self-driving vehicles. Experimentation and testing have been going on for years and will likely continue for a few more years. Although self-driving cars aren’t quite there yet that doesn’t prevent people from making hyperbolic promises. One thing that strikes me is that it’s surprising that we’re not seeing self-driving race…
“Maturing Usability” provides an understanding of how current (2007) research and practice has contributed towards improving quality issues in software, interaction and value. I contributed a chapter describing how usability practices fit into agile software development. This book is divided into three parts: ‘Quality in Software’ looks at how using development tools can enhance the usability of a system. It…
Data scientists claim that they spend 80% of their time cleansing data and the other 20% of their time complaining about cleansing data. There is clearly something wrong with this picture, but sadly my own experience can confirm that this seems to be true in practice. In this blog my goal is to explore why the need to perform data…
The opportunity for artificial intelligence (AI) to automate people out of jobs gradually over the next few years is a threat that we need to take seriously.
Automation, and the threat of losing your job to it, have always been a fact of life. Artificial intelligence (AI) is likely to take over your job a piece at a time over the next few years, rather than all at once. Are you ready for that?