AI

“AI doesn’t work” has never once been a fact about AI. It’s always been just a confession. About you. “I don’t know how to use it.” Back in 2008 I was writing a book. Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 , together with David Roys – Dave, of the Gaspode’s Brain Dump fame, if you were around the NAV blogosphere back then.

There is a moment in my workshops that I have learned to wait for. I am showing something on screen, agents doing their thing, and somewhere in the middle of it I drop the line. Casually. The way you’d mention the weather: “…and then I usually tell it: when done, commit and push.” And the room changes.

Programming is not a 20th century invention. Ideas behind what we call programming have existed since at least the 9th century. The very term “algorithm” comes from the name of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, a mathematician born around 780 somewhere in modern-day Uzbekistan.

Over the past 5 months, I’ve delivered 8 workshops, 17 sessions, one podcast, and participated in more discussions about AI and its capabilities than I can count. Most of those included some talk around how we should approach this AI power marching into our offices – and I won’t say here “AI power…

Back in 2016 I bought a new car, and one afternoon on the motorway it did something that made the hair on my arms stand up. I was driving home, traffic was light, and I clicked the thing on. And the car just… drove. It held the lane on its own. Gentle little corrections, left, right, following the curve of the road like it had done it a thousand times.

Every time someone says the machines are coming for the jobs, there’s a guy in the back of the room who knows the term. Lump of labour fallacy . He’s read his economics and he’ll explain it to you slowly, the way you explain things to a child. Work isn’t a fixed pie, he says.