The Importance of Honesty in Conversations
I’ll ask you a question but tell me no lies…
Articles and Posts
Insights on leadership, technology, and human-centered strategy, originally shared on LinkedIn and expanded for deeper exploration.
Navigating AI Risks and Organizational Culture
I recognize the serious risks posed by emerging technologies, particularly how they can deepen inequalities and spread misinformation. The push for fully autonomous systems raises real concerns for human safety. I believe the call for transparency, whistleblower protections, and a culture that embraces dissent is not only reasonable but essential for preventing blind spots in organizations. Regulatory bodies can help enforce these changes.
Addressing AI Risks and Organizational Culture
I recognize the serious risks posed by emerging technologies, particularly the perpetuation of inequality and misinformation. The rush towards fully autonomous systems raises real concerns for human safety. While the call for transparency and whistleblower protections is reasonable, changing an organization's culture to embrace dissent is challenging yet essential to avoid blindspots. Regulatory bodies can help enforce these changes.
Concerns About Personal Data Usage
I haven’t begun to think through all the ways my personal messages might be being used to train models (emails, family and friends social posts, messages…)
I know a great tool for summarizing all those changes in terms of use notices. Is that ironic? Or just sarcasm?
The Tension of Ethical Leadership
Ethical leadership derives from two values which exist in exquisite tension:
Integrity: Doing what you promise to do — as CS Lewis said, “…even when no one is watching.”
Empathy: Caring for the welfare of people not a projection of yourself. Engaging them on their own terms.
Sustainable Resource Consumption in Cloud Services
I love this idea. As with any resource intensive operation, part of sustainability is finding a way to consume resources off peak so that the provider doesn’t have to resort to the least efficient sources is supply. Given cloud services are often locally optimized, processing off business hours may make a difference.
Understanding Prompt Influence on AI Responses
Some transparency into the emergent behavior of these large models. Provides some insight into how the subtleties of how we write prompts activate different areas of the neural net and could elicite different responses.
In other words I’d suggest not letting our your inner domineering egotist out in your prompts. Unless you want the response inflected by decades of web discourse in response to domineering egotists.
The Future of Generative AI in Software Development
A well-respected, thought leader told me, generative AI will create plenty of work in two years when autogen code starts failing in production. That will happen because it happens with human authored code. Another told me to think about the needs we could serve if custom software were less expensive to create. And that is true as well.
There will be a waste and harm to these tools because we are fallible, outcomes are uncertain, and our system is mercenary. Those are our givens. Even more reason then as software developers that we insist upon quality, learn how to use this tech more responsibly, and seek meaningful purpose in what we build with it.
Leaders Who Honor Commitments
I want leaders who care about what their employees think of them. Not because they want to impress or be liked or care about some of their coworkers but because they feel obligated to honor commitments made by their organization. They exist. Seek them out or become one yourself.
Navigating AI's Environmental Impact
I frequently use large language models to enhance my coding and solutions. While I embrace the technology, I remain skeptical of the hype and the ethical dilemmas it presents. This study sheds light on the environmental costs of different models, emphasizing the importance of efficiency and responsible usage. I advocate for fine-tuning, smaller models, and thoughtful application to minimize energy consumption.
Empowering Non-Profits with Open Models
Providing access to open models and the processing required to develop applications with them for non-profits and non-commercial academic research is a great, pragmatic step towards positive impact.
Balancing Agentic Approaches and Engineering
This is exactly what I’m experiencing.
Agentic approaches might be powerful but they shouldn’t be thought of as a replacement for skilled problem specific engineering.
Think of it in terms of return on processing time. Invest in design time up front to avoid orders magnitude more processing expense at runtime
For many - if not all - reasons.