Catmachine

“Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.” – Terry Pratchett Back when I worked in the IT department of a higher education institution, many was the time a member of the university executive or administration would come into the IT offices with a brilliant new idea. This was usually something like “We need a blog!” or “We need a wiki!” back in the old Web 2.0 days when blogs and wikis were still cutting edge web technologies. When asked what we needed them for, the answer was more often than not along the lines of “Well, Warwick have got one!” In other words it was just a case of keeping up with the institutional Joneses. One of the IT management team had a very astute response to this kind of request which I’ll repeat here. “What do you need to do? Don’t come to me with a solution. Come to me with a problem.” It’s a piece of advice that I’ve started to think of recently as software houses and companies scramble to add AI to their products and services, chiefly because other ...

Sometimes a craze is just a craze. In the 1950s they were pushing the Atomic Age and added radioactivity and atoms to branding for everything. You could even buy a toy atomic energy lab with real uranium. I am strongly reminded of the way they're adding AI to everything now whether it's useful or not. I hope that in a few years this mAInia will have died down and we can just carry on creating as we did before. In fact more than that; I'm hoping that before long we'll arrive at a point where "AI-free" becomes a badge of quality so the market will HAVE to sit up and take notice, rather than telling us we’re doing Being Consumers all wrong. However, I do like to think I'm not being New Technology Baffles Pissed Old Hack here. AI definitely has a place. For example, analysing large scientific datasets, archive entry labelling. You know the incredibly tedious stuff that humans would find mindnumbing or actually impossible to do. I don't think it has a place...