Part of the Process

Slightly delayed post due to going on holiday! My week's reading started with Hofstadter’s Law and Realistic Planning By Jane Collingwood where she outlines how "pessimistic-scenario generation is not an effective de-biasing technique for personal predictions .”  this got me thinking about how much of what we do in our lives is shaped by the people who provide us with the services and products that we use. This article by Monzo is a perfect example of ethical product design should be done. They have thought about what their mission is, who their users are and what issues they might face. Compare and contrast with stories of how Uber use psychology to exploit drivers to see the negative face of "disrupting industries" when that is the sole aim.  Again working conditions can have an impact even in subtle ways. There is a case here for Product Design and OS professionals to   provide more support on reporting usage to users . Computers are much better at this...

So, I've mentioned my side project a couple of times I should start to elaborate a bit more. I won't share the name or details just yet. Not because I'm worried about someone stealing it . Rather the idea, hypothesis, and validation are the next instalments of this story. When embarking on this journey as a side project it had to be fun and interesting. A chance to try a different experiment to my day job. Different tech stack, different tools. While being useful to people. So I set to work with a collaborator on something to meet these needs and we discussed a basic idea. The first thing was creating a Trello board. One of the first cards was "think of a name". Next came looking at the front-end stack that was lightweight and easy. A PaaS provider that had a free option and integration with source control. This also needed a free private repo option. And it was vital to have a pipeline that built and deployed a working version of the code on commit. Luckily...

Chatbots are an interesting example of how supporting technology can be the catalyst for innovation. In this case smartphones with messaging apps, constant fast network connections, and an API economy. All these enable comparatively low-tech chatbots to be viable (even I wrote a production text interface to an asset DB in 2000!). So, it's not new technology that's the innovation, it's combining existing technology in ways that change behaviour. This article in the Harvard Business Review is spot on. AI systems much more like employees than traditional IT. Because it "learns" you often can't just lift the data/business rules into a new system. So you need to start thinking about "handover periods" and " training " a lot more. (Also make the jobs-to-be-done framework about hiring tools to do a job much more apt!) There is much promise in Artificial Intelligence , this article on what to think about machines that think  contains some ...