Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Richard Veryard Last week I was in Berlin at the invitation of the IEEE to help develop standards for responsible technology (P7000). One of the working groups (P7001) is looking at transparency, especially in relation to autonomous and semi-autonomous systems. In thi…
Last week, someone asked me how I go about producing a data model. I found out afterwards that my answer was considered too brief. So here’s a longer version of my answer.The first thing to consider is the purpose of the modelling. Sometimes there is a…
In fiction, servants cough discreetly to make people aware of their presence. (I’m thinking of P.G. Wodehouse, but there must be other examples.)Technological devices sometimes call our attention to themselves for various reasons. John Ehrenfeld calls …
Diversion has various different meanings in the world of ethics.Distraction. An idea or activity serves as a distraction from what’s important. For example, @juliapowles uses the term “captivating diversion” to refer to ethicists becoming preoccupied w…
What are the ethics of diverting people from smoking to vaping?On the one hand, we have the following argument.E-cigarettes (“vaping”) offer a plausible substitute for smoking cigarettes.Smoking is dangerous, and vaping is probably much less dangerous….
In a recent commentary on #Brexit, Simon Jenkins notes that”disruption theory is much in vogue in management schools, so long as someone else suffers”.Here is Bruno Latour making the same point.”Don’t be fooled for a second by those who preach the call…
August comes around again, and there are ripe blackberries in the hedgerows. One of the things I was taught at an early age was to avoid picking berries that were low enough to be urinated on by animals. (Or humans for that matter.) So I have always re…
In an earlier post Towards the Data-Driven Business, I talked about the various roles that data and intelligence can play in the business. But where do you start? In this post, I shall talk about the approach that I have developed and used in a number …
Many people start their journey into the ethics of automation and robotics by looking at Asimov’s Laws of Robotics.A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm (etc. etc.)As I’ve said before, I believe …
What kinds of automation are there, and is there a natural progression from basic to advanced? Do the terms intelligent automation and cognitive automation actually mean anything useful, or are they merely vendor hype? In this blogpost, I shall attempt…
If we want to build a data-driven business, we need to appreciate the various roles that data and intelligence can play in the business – whether improving a single business service, capability or process, or improving the business as a whole. The exam…
@ruchowdh objects to an article by @etzioni and @tianhuil calling for algorithms to audit algorithms. The original article makes the following points.Automated auditing, at a massive scale, can systematically probe AI systems and uncover biases or oth…