Setting the stage for more Timnit Gebru shoot outs about bias and discrimination
13 September 2021 (Milos, Greece) – These last two weeks, if you attended either (both?) the international cyber security conference in Lille, France or the software development forum in Chicago, Illinois a really big thing … REALLY BIG … was the series of discussions on automating work processes related to smart software. The idea is that one smart software system can generate an output to update another smart output system.
One of my clients is working on a bang up video on how it all works and I’ll post it when it’s ready.
The trend was evident more than a decade ago in the work of Dr. Zbigniew Michalewicz, his son, and collaborators. He is the author of How to Solve It: Modern Heuristics. There were predecessors and today many others following smart approaches to operations for artificial intelligence or what is called by “analysts” AIOps.
And like other embedded components, some of these “modules” will become components, commoditized, and just used “as is.” That’s important because who worries about a component in a larger system? Do you wonder if the microwave is operating at peak efficiency with every component chugging along up to spec? Nope and nope.
Which takes me a wonderful example of Silicon Valley MBA thinking called It’s Time to Say “Ok, Boomer!” to Old School Change Management. At first glance, the ideas about efficiency and keeping pace with technical updates make sense. The write up states:
“There are a variety of dated methods when it comes to change management. Tl;dr it’s lots of paper and lots of meetings. These practices are widely regarded as effective across the industry, but research shows this is a common delusion and change management itself needs to change”.
Hasta la vista Messrs. Drucker and the McKinsey framework.
The write up points out that a solution is at hand:
“DevOps teams push lots of changes and this is creating a bottleneck as manual change management processes struggle to keep up. But, the great thing about DevOps is that it solves the problem it creates. One of the key aspects where DevOps can be of great help in change management is in the implementation of compliance. If the old school ways of managing change are too slow why not automate them like everything else? We already do this for building, testing and qualifying, so why not change? We can use the same automation to record change events in real time and implement release controls in the pipelines instead of gluing them on at the end”.
Does this seem like circular reasoning?
I want to point out that if one of the automation components operates using probability and the thresholds are incorrect, the data poisoned (corrupted by intent or chance) or the “averaging” which is a feature of some systems triggers a butterfly effect, excitement may ensue. The idea is that a small change may have a large impact downstream; for example, a wing flap in Biloxi, Mississippi could create a flood in the 28th Street Flatiron stop in New York City.
Several observations:
• AIOps are already in operation at outfits like the Google and will be componentized in an AWS-style package
• Embedded stuff, like popular libraries, are just used and not thought about. The practice brings joy to bad actors who corrupt some library offerings
• Once a component is up and running and assumed to be okay, those modules themselves resist change. When 20 somethings encounter mainframe code, their surprise is consistent. Are we gonna change this puppy or slap on a wrapper?
• Net net: AIOps sets the stage for more Timnit Gebru shoot outs about bias and discrimination as well as the type of cautions produced by Cathy O’Neil in Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.