Understanding and managing conflict of physical sovereignty is challenging but possible when using maps.
Understanding and managing conflict of digital sovereignty is challenging but possible when using maps.
Try doing either at scale without maps. Hint : you can't.
I do love people trying to understand digital / technological / economic and political sovereignty through the power of stories. If there's a landscape and you're competing over it then take a suggestion from the old Egyption Kingdom (3000 BC) ... use a map.
X : I don't understand the map connection.
Me : With physical sovereignty, you have multiple collectives with different values fighting over a landscape that you can visualise with a map to both communicate and learn from.
Me : With digital sovereignty, you have multiple collectives with different values fighting over a landscape that you can visualise with a map to both communicate and learn from.
Me : We decided in the military field to progress from using stories to using maps to communicate and learn from about 5,000 years ago. In the world of business, technology and poltics, we're still using stories ...
Me : ... you can see this in the digital sovereignty space where there are rarely maps but an awful lot of effort going into finding a description .... it's like not using a map to explain the physical sovereignty of Greece but trying to find the perfect description of its land.
X : Is this just a problem with sovereignty?
Me : No, it is rife across many fields. We have landscapes which we don't map but try to use stories instead. Another example is Culture where anthropologists have been trying to agree on a definition for over one hundred years.
X : I don't see culture on that map.
Me : That's because it's all culture. It's a visual representation of culture, a map of what's involved.
X : Is that right?
Me : All maps are imperfect. All models are wrong. It's not about being right, it's simply about better maps.
X : Why haven't I see these before?
Me : It's slowly spreading, it's appearing in pockets but remember what it's up against.
X : Explain?
Me : The world is run by stories and storytellers. Maps threaten this, they allow for challenge. Hence there will be inertia against change.
• • •
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.