When is IT bad IT?
Following When is AI good AI?, here follows a tale of caution underpinning the mis-use and misplaced confidence in IT: they have serious conseqences for AI, if sound principles in all things tech, socials and legal are not assured…
Updates: a history background (and lesson) on Horizon & Fujitsu forerunner ICL late last century (This is Money). And more dirt from Financial Times! And yet more in i Magazine about a similar 1990s scandal! The more things change…
… And yet more dirt here on the perp, banner pic to the right!
And a useful no-holds-barred recap by one of my fave investigative journos here .
Follow on next in the series When is AI more than AI?
The banner picture follows the breaking news that hundreds of post office managers throughout the UK were wrongfully convicted for IT systems malfunctions blamed on end users — post office managers — not the IT service or the guv in charge at the time (Reuters). The story-behind-the-story is that the head of PO atop left was also pipped for bishopric — to her credit, she did return her CBE (Wikipedia) but not her ~£900K payout upon leaving the PO — and the head of IT atop right hiding in Berkshire seeks immunity from prosecution (Telegraph for both stories).
It’s a familair trope: “Gotta be true!” “Why?” “Google said so…”. The point here is that AI is a house of cards: It relies on the IT uderpinning being sound… which in many cases is not!
For those with a long memory, the Y2K problem (Wikipedia) was caused by a fear — unsubtantiated later — that dates on back-office mainframes would go from 31/12/99 to 01/01/00, rather than from 31/12/1999 to 01/01/2000— I was there, the IT service co. I was with had a field day on that one as did all… but after New Years eve no planes fell out of the sky and no nuclear power station stopped: in other words, no software froze up and everything turned out to be AOK.
In fact we went in on Jan. 1, a Saturday, just to check everything worked… we daren’t wait until Tuesday, as Monday was the off-weekend statutory holiday!
Did you know I was with Halliburton at the time? My fellow Schlumberger head competitors at the site were there also: After basic checks we had coffee & sandwiches together at the deserted cafeteria automated machines… that worked LOL in a tiny way it felt like celebrating Christmas 1914 together (these events don’t compare at all otherwise, no offense intended).
