X: An example of a great leader?
Me : Oodles - a single mum, living on an estate, mental health issues, holding on with two low paid jobs who finds the time to teach the kids and help others ... remarkable ... most "great" leaders would crack in a week under that pressure.
X : Is that a real person?
Me : Yes. I find the most remarkable, stoic and talented people often exist in the harshest of environments. To "climb" out of that environment is super human. Any fool can go from privilege to privilege.
Take our PM Boris, he couldn't even last three days glamping ... I doubt he would last a week in real poverty i.e. not having a safety net to end it or knowing that after the week it would be over. Within a month, I suspect he would be a total wreck.
It's not the condition that cracks you (though it can be very harsh, some days you can't afford food) but it's knowing that there is no end in sight. It's not like sleeping on the streets for a night and then going back to your comfortable home. That's easy.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
We will be entering a phase in which the US high-tech industry (including the military complex) is highly dependent upon China, whilst China is not dependent upon the US.
For those who doubt how clear the intentions were ... go read Made in China, 2025.
China's government made its intentions evident in 2015. The US sabre rattling of sanctions reinforced that purpose whilst the US essentially continued with a misguided "market knows best" policy.
A couple of prompts with Claude 3 creates a Wardley Map for economic sovereignty in the defence space.
Not bad at all -
On par with political, military and defence folk I've spoken to. I'm also finding I can have a reasonable discussion about mapping with Claude 3.onlinewardleymaps.com/#clone:XvHskIi…
It's not perfect but it's not bad. There's more I want to interrogate Claude over ... i.e. the link to secure sourcing, the positioning of some components etc. But it's almost good enough that I can start a discussion over strategy and investment.
Anyway, upshot is that Claude 3, from my perspective, has left ChatGPT4 in the dust. Of course, I'll use Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini to cross-compare for now but if I do start building anything more complex then the obvious path is AWS Bedrock which gives me Mistral etc.
dX: What is the single most significant problem facing AI today? Safety? Lack of skills? Inertia?
Me: Overinflated expectations by the business.
dX: You don't think AI will become widespread?
Me: Of course, it will; industrialised components are rapidly becoming cost of doing business. Don't confuse that with expectations. There will be an awful lot of disappointed businesses hoping it would create some advantage.
dX: I don't understand.
Me: Imagine you're just finishing off your plan for how AI will revolutionise your business. Six months for budget approval, one year to build team, 18 months to deliver something ... that's 3 years from now. Any advantage you thought of is long gone.
For those who don't know, I'm working increasingly on and with Glamorous Toolkit - ... I have become fascinated by our willingness to blame humans for problems that are created by our toolsets ...gtoolkit.com
... I saw this last night at Cloud Camp. Apparently, the issues with understanding, explainability and observability in AI are down to humans' inability to deal with complex environments... no, they're not. The problem is with the tools and the type of tools we are creating ...
... we've imported concepts from a physical world where tools are constrained by physics - hence a hammer is a hammer, a drill is a drill - into a world without such constraints. Rather than building contextual tools, we've built constrained tools.
Faulty products, harm to users, executives profiteering, fighting compensation ... what is truly bizarre about the Fujitsu Horizon case is that the public seems to think that this is an isolated example rather than the normal way that traditional corporations act.
Just take a look into any industry, pick something like retail with BNPL (by now pay later) to EWA (earned wages access) to use of slave labour. It's story after story of despicable behaviour, of exploitation of both workers and consumers in pursuit of profit.
Or pick something like energy, where misinformation and self-interest abound from carbon capture to hydrogen - both technologies which are not primarily for the benefit of consumers or the environment but instead prolong a fossil fuel industry and all the harm it causes.