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Who Gave the Machine Permission?
For decades, cybersecurity identity has revolved around a deceptively simple question, who are you? Passwords, multi-factor authentication (MFA), certificates, identity and access/privileged management (IA/PM) and eventually Zero Trust were built around establishing identity before granting access, the digital economy is rapidly filling with identities that are not human. Service accounts, application programming interface (APIs), workloads… Continue reading
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AI’s Hybrid Future – Frontier When Necessary, Private When Sufficient
Following a great day with at BIG SASIG and having the pleasure of speaking (Trust, Control & Resilience in an Era of Exponential Change) I enjoyed some stimulating discussions on one of the themes I raised. That of lessons organisations should be learning from their Cloud adoption experiences as they are now confronted with AI.… Continue reading
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AI Won’t Kill the OS, It Will Make You Forget It Exists.
At the weekend I reached a milestone in a project that has taken me through at least two cognitive event horizons in how I now see the familiar compute landscape which I felt might be interesting to share. It has also left me convinced of something else; AI is now here for the masses. So… Continue reading
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Digital Sovereignty is Being Designed for Borders, ‘The Fabric’ Has None
Hard on the heels of my piece on the Fabric, I found myself thinking about discussions last week with clients on the impact of the EU’s regulatory focus on pinning down what is meant by Digital Sovereignty. If you had not noticed the regulatory world has been and remains somewhat infatuated with defining digital sovereignty… Continue reading
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The Cloud Won, Now It’s Just Infrastructure … Welcome to ‘The Fabric’.
For the better part of two decades, the technology industry has performed an impressive trick, convincing boards that moving computing from one building to somebody else’s building constituted a strategic revolution. yes, for those of you who know me I have been part of that bandwaggon. To be fair though cloud genuinely changed everything. Infrastructure… Continue reading
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Give Socialism Enough FLOPS and See What Happens; AI & the Fantasy of the Perfect Economy.
Following a comment I made and subsequent discussion on a recent FT.com article (Could AI revive the socialist dream?), I felt the need to extrapolate, if only as a release valve to my own cognitive expression on the theme. My view being that for decades, the strongest argument against central economic planning was not ideological… Continue reading
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Stop Buying Bigger AI, Start Building Smarter AI Architecture
A recurring problem in client discussions about AI is that organisations are still comparing models using headline specifications that sound important but often tell them very little about whether the model is actually right for the job. More parameters. Bigger context windows. More tokens. More compute. All great ‘headology’ if your selling your latest Frontier… Continue reading
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The Next IT Lock-In Won’t Be the AI Model, Their after Your Memory
Enterprises (and individuals for that matter) are understandably becoming interested in a new generation of AI brokerage services; platforms that allow users to move between models while maintaining a common memory of previous conversations, preferences and context. It sounds compelling, one memory, any AI. It should also set security architects’ alarm bells ringing. The problem… Continue reading
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The Great AI Laundry, Why AI Watermarks Will not Solve the Authorship Problem
Further to my earlier piece on AI transparency The Great AI Labelling Illusion; When Compliance Becomes More Important Than Trust, AI watermarking sounds like the answer to a defining problem of generative AI, how do we know whether something was created by a machine? These new transparency regulations come as part of the European Unions… Continue reading
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AI Won’t Take Over the World, It May Just Destabilise It.
AI doom scenarios often assume that sufficiently advanced intelligence will eventually understand, predict and manipulate the world better than humans can. The kicker here is that civilisation is not a bounded game. It is a complex adaptive system in which participants respond to one another, interventions change behaviour and genuinely novel events continually alter the… Continue reading
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Is AI Gaining Agency Faster Than the Law Can Assign Responsibility?
My earlier argument on the accountability gap at the heart of AI postulated that delegating authority to AI should never allow humans or corporations to delegate responsibility with it. A recent US court ruling in Amazon.com Services v Perplexity AI shows just how quickly that principle is going to be tested. The Ninth Circuit considered… Continue reading
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AI Could Win. The Financiers Could Still Lose.
What a rollercoaster ride AI is proving to be. Its machine-speed DNA has already turned the assimilation of raw data and accumulated human knowledge into information available almost instantly to everyone, commoditising knowledge, if not necessarily judgement. In doing so, AI is collapsing innovation time horizons, rewriting productivity assumptions and disrupting almost every sector. Not… Continue reading
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Does Zuckerberg’s AI Vision Have a Blind Spot?
Mark Zuckerberg’s latest essay on Meta’s AI strategy deserves more attention than a typical technology announcement. His argument is not simply that AI should become cheaper, more capable and more widely available. It is that powerful AI should be distributed to billions of individuals as a deliberate counterweight to the power of governments, corporations and… Continue reading
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Are Universities Educating Students for a World That Is Disappearing?
Universities have traditionally prepared people for a world in which knowledge was scarce, expertise took years to accumulate and the ability to recall, analyse and apply that knowledge differentiated the graduate from everyone else. AI fundamentally challenges that model. Knowledge today is becoming abundant. Analysis that once required days can increasingly be completed in minutes.… Continue reading
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When Compliance Forgets Its Purpose
There is an old saying that bureaucracy expands to consume the time available for its administration. Increasingly that feels less like satire and more like a business model. No sensible executive disputes the need for Know Your Customer (KYC) or Anti-Money Laundering (AML) checks and or controls. They are essential safeguards against fraud, organised crime… Continue reading