2022 seems to have been a strange year for a lot of people. There’s a lot of bloggers I follow whose output dropped a lot this year, myself included. Some of that I’m sure is a seeming loss of community, with changes to Twitter and Facebook, and I’m sure Google’s AMP as well, there’s been less drive-through traffic and less engagement.
I also think online discourse in many places is following the lines we see in politics where subtlety and nuance are increasingly punished and every platform is pushing shorter form content. We’re not giving ourselves time to digest and reflect.
And we should.
The pandemic is still here, but we’re adjusting, working from home is a natural state for many of us in tech, although that’s not an arrangement that plays to everyone’s strengths, so let’s make space for different companies with different cultures. There’s new ways of working to explore (hello the UK 4 day week experiment), people have moved jobs to take advantage of the change and create more family time.
But we can’t escape the world outside tech, and many of us are burning mental cycles on disease, on the massive weather events from climate change, on war, on the continued assaults by the far right, and watching inflation tickling upwards. It’s not an environment that leads us to our best work. It’s not an environment that helps us be in the moment.
Through 2016-2021 the world stared into the abyss of the rise of the far right, and the dismantling of certainties, before we were all thrown into lockdown. We were hoping for a turning point this year, but our leaders were lackluster in improvements, pulled us further to the right or were just plain incompetent. Instead of hope to counter the dispair, we got indifference at best Rather than turning away from the abyss, we collectively chose to build a car park next to it.
The greatest minds of our generation are building pipelines for ads for things we don’t need and can’t afford, whilst the AI engineers are building complex transformations that churn out uncanny valley versions of code, of mansplaining and of other people’s art. But of course the AI is built on a corpus of our own creations, and I don’t think we like the reflection looking back at us.
Ethics in technology isn’t just about accurately reflecting the world as it is, or how the law pretends it is (or seeks to adjust what is), STEM at its most important shows us the world as it could be. An airplane isn’t just a human pretending to be a bird. A car isn’t just a steel horse.
Yes, these advances in AI are cool parlor tricks, and they will lead to great things, but just like drum machines didn’t replace drummers, we need to get past the wave of novelty to see what’s really behind the wizard’s mask.
AI is dangerous. Look at how machine learning projected racial predictions on zip codes based on historical arrest data. Look at how many corrections Tesla’s “Self-Driving Mode” requires. Look how easily ChatGPT can be manipulated to return answers it’s been programmed not to. But, with the right oversight AI encompasses some very useful tools.
Let’s get out of the car park and look away from the abyss. What does the world AI can’t predict look like? After years of despair, what does a world of hope look like? What does the world you want for your children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews look like?
Land on your own moon. What’s your 10 year plan to change your world?
This is a fantastic explainer of the threats and risks, and opportunities of AI. Thinking about the nature of consciousness. Can we ever say truly what a machine consciousness is, or how it feels?
As a white man, I have no idea how it feels to walk this world in darker skin. I can understand fear, but not the constant fear of being stopped by police, of watching my back.
AI is being built with a Western and a Chinese perspective. We cannot understand what a conscious machine will be like, or how it feels, but we can understand the environment it is created in.
In the USA and in China, it’s an environment where the ruling party actively dehumanise sections of the community, particularly Muslims at the moment, and black skin for centuries.
That environment is the context under which these consciousnesses are created. And whether the engineers agree with the government bias or not, their data will always be informed by it, especially where that AI is trained on historical data, news or social media.
How deeply will that consciousness embed the ideas of division and hatred, that one group is better than another, that one group is less than human? And if that’s its world view, what decisions will it make?
And it’s not theoretical. We know machine learning algorithms routinely discriminate against black skin, non-European names, female job applicants, and more.
Without active anti-discrimination training, all these algorithms will build these white supremacist biases in, and that will be their world-view. Their water will be division and discrimination and they won’t be able to see it.
Because those who train them are unable to see it.
Machines don’t have to be smart to be dangerous. But a machine that embeds that bias into its own world-view can do it opaquely, just as systemic racism doesn’t have to use discriminatory language to prevent black kids from getting to university.
Just one nudge after another to say “you don’t fit”, “this isn’t your world”, “try something else”, “behave more white”, “look less black”. (Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race has a great section on a hypothetical black kid growing up and these barriers)
If you’re not actively building anti-discrimination into your AI, you are perpetuating white supremacy.
CSS is a real language, and you need deep technical knowledge to understand it. But plenty of software developers hate it and look down on it. It’s a good, if incomplete, tool for what it does. But I think it scares some of the gatekeepers who were drawn to software before the web.
It can’t be unit tested. It’s a language that only exists in a domain that stretches multiple sizes, multiple devices and multiple renderers. There’s more than 1 way to do things. And some of the biggest challenges with CSS are human. It’s the paintbrush for the bike shed.
Does your test plan or your requirements sheet still specify IE as a supported browser? If Microsoft doesn’t support it why should you?
Are you spending all your time monitoring your staff, making sure they’re working when they’re not in the office? Do you struggle getting the right reports? Do you feel resentment from your staff even though it’s in their best interest? Or have you tried trusting them?
Is every release delayed because the database team and the security team have to review all code, and they’re already overstretched? Have you asked them how to provide confidence with less manual intervention? How to minimise the impact any change could make? How to add automation for common areas? How to train the developers to fix common issues upstream before it gets to the frontline teams?
Have you ever thought about deleting a process that isn’t adding anything? About making things simpler?
That doesn’t mean no deadlines, but no timesheets – don’t justify every 15 minutes with a project, because the next ideas aren’t about 1 thing, they’re about connecting multiple things.
They’re about taking time to pause and thinking about the bigger picture: what problems are you seeing in multiple places? Where else would that new thing you’ve built be useful? What are multiple clients asking for?
I love working with smart people. I learn a lot and it gives me energy.
I hate working with smart people who aren’t motivated. They’ll either get sloppy, get a new job, or get creative with their code design. The kind of creativity that makes you curse when you’re debugging a production incident at 3am.
The best creativity happens in a constrained environment, which also happens to make the easiest debugging.
Sure, we could let the developers figure out the best way to do something for every component, and there’s sometimes a benefit, but for every hour they’re spending figuring out how to solve a problem that didn’t need to be solved, or figuring out an unusual design, or evaluating a logging package, or writing boilerplate, there’s an hour not delivering value.
When an architecture is designed to put everything right where it should be, where decisions that have already been made are baked into the code and the tools, where a developer doesn’t have to think about how to structure their solution, the code is easier to write, easier to review and easier to debug.
Chefs like to follow mise en place. Everything in its right place. Before preparing a dish, prepare the workspace, the knives, and the food. Everything you need for the task and nothing you don’t. Everything is in a predictable place. Because then you can concentrate on the dish, instead of the kitchen. Good preparation helps every task fall into the pit of success, and makes it easier to recover if something goes wrong.
The more steps you have to complete a subtask, the easier it is to make mistakes. You might forget what the previous step was, you might walk to the fridge and then have to return to your workspace to remember what you need. Multitasking adds friction and adds opportunities for error.
That’s why we want encapsulated classes and single responsibility. One change updates one file, as far as possible. Although one feature may cover many changes in order to make it possible. Isolate your code from the data store, isolate the public API from your code, parse don’t validate.
Keep smart people working on solving new problems, and keep them consistent, because that’s the way to get the best from the team at all times, especially when you have a Priority 1 to update a logging framework at 3am.
There’s a theory under agile, lean and similar methodologies that if something is painful, you should do more of it. If releases are infrequent and error-prone and once a quarter, do them 10 times a day and they’ll get easier.
Same idea with performance reviews, customer feedback, and security audits. If it’s a good idea and it’s painful, practice it and refine it until it’s natural and mostly painless. And the pain that’s left is manageable. Roll back the release, and have another catch-up tomorrow once tempers have dampened.
I’ve seen people make the mistake of assuming that it should apply to everything. Every pain point is a gathering, a thing to be controlled, minimised and made less painful, by repeating it over and over again. After all, if it works over there, it should also work over here.
But not all pain is equal.
Remember, focusing on doing something more means that we deal with the pain by eliminating it. We automate releases so we can throw out that painful checklist. We give small, actionable feedback at the time, rather than a sucker punch that brews for months until it’s released in the appraisal.
But don’t mistake pain for discomfort. Making big improvements will mean transitions that are scary and uncomfortable. And what’s painful for someone else might not be painful for you. That doesn’t mean the pain isn’t real and it still needs to be dealt with.
Here’s a few things that are painful because you shouldn’t be doing them. These are the pebbles in your shoes that you need to remove.
I was a JIRA admin once, bringing the tool into our enterprise. There were things I didn’t like about it on a technical level, but the central tool, with the defaults, isn’t terrible. But it’s so customisable, that you can codify any corporate process you like. And when it causes frustration, people blame the tool, not the admin. When the tool is the process, it makes concrete what people could fudge, and suddenly everyone has to work the way of the manager who needs to show their impact.
Start with the people. Don’t build a process around what people should do. Find out what they actually do and build from there. Some of it might be wrong, but find out why, and help them fall into the pit of success.
The following is a lightly edited conversation I had with a tech-savvy friend who is not in IT. It was about the FBI trying to break the encryption on an iPhone so they could access potential information on criminal activity, but in light of the UK government seeking to add backdoors to all messaging platforms, for much the same reason, I thought it was a good time to revisit the arguments.
My friend’s comments are quoted, and the unquoted text is mine.
Imagine a technology existed that let you send things via post and to you and everyone else it looked like an envelope, but to the NSA it looked like a postcard, and they could read everything.
How does the NSA prove it’s them? How can we trust them? What if the FBI or your local police force can pretend to be the NSA? Couldn’t criminals, or your stalker ex do it too?
Maths doesn’t deal with legal balance. Either you let everyone in, or you let no one in. That’s the political choice. Is getting access to this phone more important than keeping other governments, such as China or North Korea out of phones they are interested in?
I don’t know if it’s an all or nothing situation though… are we saying that the courts shouldn’t be able to force entry into criminals data? Or are we saying that all data should be accessible to all outside existing privacy laws?
Think of the Enigma code. Once it was broken, Bletchley Park knew most of what the military was doing. If the Nazis knew it was broken, they’d have stopped using it, and all the work would have been for nought.
Enigma is a great example of why the code needed to be broken in the first place. That’s a chicken and egg scenario. But also a really interesting point! What if an iPhone is enigma, and say GCHQ cracked it. Would the evidence be allowed in court?
Is it not the case of Apple granting access to specifc phones; not being given the technique to do so?
What I’m worried about is the fact that big companies could hold justice and common law to randsom: that to me is equally as worrying as big brother, if not even more so. We can “elect” governments, and they can pass legislation to create international privacy agreements (as what Snowden’s revelations led to) We can’t elect Apple and I detest how Apple seem to be influencing justice; that is a very very bad sign of things to come.
Don’t even get me started over how data protection doesn’t exist between companies any more. Logon via Facebook anyone?
Is it not the case that Apple can access all this data anyway? So does Apple not have an ethical responsibility to disclose evidence for an individual case that has a court request attached to it? Guess not. Is that an appropriate level of power a company should have? To dictate what can and can’t be shared with courts?
Corporations already have too much power in the world. By not establishing a legal framework of when it is appropriate for a court order to be issued and have access (e.g to break and enter) we are basically letting sometimes serious criminals have a get out of jail free card. And that includes tax dodgers like Apple.
Apple can’t access the data at the moment, that’s the point. It only exists on the phone, encrypted with a key that’s password protected with a password only known to a dead guy.
Interesting. So none of his data was stored on Apples / 3rd party servers and it was all encrypted on the phone? What about all his comms traffic. If I encrypt my (ah hem) Google Android phone, does that mean that my emails can’t be viewed by Google?
A lot of this comes down to trust. I don’t trust our govt nor the govt of others, but equally I don’t trust Google or Apple.
He switched off iCloud sync so it was all on his phone. However, as it was government issue, they could have changed that via policy if the FBI hadn’t tried to change the iCloud password, and hence locked the phone out of the government domain.
So they got locked out. That’s hilarious.
What I tend to do these days is try to remove my mind from the broader political implications and think about things at a ground level then I thought…. what if a phone contained information related to the death of my loved one.. then I realised there should be a controlled process in place to retrieve data legally and transparently.
I think the broader implications are important. If they can do it here, where else would it apply?
We have to think of real world scenarios : a murder in Glasgow, a child missing, that type of thing
Look at councils using anti-terror legislation to catch petty criminals, or DSS using it to follow people on benefits.
Imagine an encrypted padlock to a cabinet containing murder weapons.
Who watches the watchmen?
That’s conspiracy speak Craig. If we don’t trust the courts… then who can we trust?
It’s recorded activity. It’s not conspiracy if it actually happened.
courts are separate from government. They have been in Scotland since 1748.
I trust the courts. The problem is that many of these powers bypass the courts.
DSS is rarely a court matter.
Yes, but they are doing so illegally and that’s why new laws are coming in
And a backdoor for one is a backdoor for all. If the FBI have a post-it note with the pin for that murder weapon safe, it only takes one photo for everyone to have access.
The FBI is not the UK. We cannot control what Israel does but what we can do is create controls for the UK. so… if my loved one is killed, and there are photos on the phone.. then of course the police should have access! It’s a no brainer
True, so why would we want a situation that increases the risk of Israel, or North Korea, having the means to access something that sensitive?
What’s sensitive exactly? They don’t care about normal users!
Even if it means Journalists at News Of The World can also gain access to those photos?
That’s illegal! As is breaking and entering.
It didn’t stop them last time.
Yes.. and look what’s happened.
They renamed it to the Sun on Sunday, and carried on as normal?
Come on…. I’m saying that only the courts can have access.
Being illegal doesn’t stop things from happening. That’s why we lock our doors and fit burglar alarms.
and besides… they cracked the iPhone anyway!
That’s not how maths works.
Life isn’t maths. Life is ethics. Ethics are not maths
Yeah, there’s an Israeli company that will break into iPhones for anyone who pays.
What Israel does is up to them.
No, but encryption is maths.
But retrieving data is an ethical issue. It’s not black and white. It’s about appropriate use of powers
Like knowing when to put someone away for life, or releasing them in 10 years
It would not be acceptable for police to hack my phone without just cause, but it would be acceptable if they suspect me of plotting a terrorist act.
I agree, but when access to the data cannot be done without compromising everyone’s security, we have to ask where to draw the line?
We draw the line through the law.
CCTV inhibits crime in those areas, but we accept that it’s creepy to allow it in bathrooms.
And many offices do not have CCTV inside because the risk of losing sensitive data is higher than the risk of crime.
You can only film in your property. That’s the law. But.. of course there is a difference between private companies and local government. And that’s where PFI come in….
Plenty of public CCTV as well
Not here there isn’t
Depends where you are, agreed.
There’s a camera on the bus.. I think, and at the primary school, maybe one in the shop…. but I don’t think big brother is watching when they can’t find muggings taking place at the Broomielaw!
That’s about effectiveness though.
Google is the one to watch
And Facebook
Yeah… but Facebook has countless terrorist pages funnily enough. So they can’t even monitor effectively. Let alone GCHQ.
Depends who has the most effective Algorithms. We don’t know what GCHQ is capable of. Just ask Snowden.
You know fine well it’s not about monitoring – it’s about textual analysis – patterns – heuristics. GCHQ is trustworthy. I have no problem with them whatsoever.
That’s cos you’re not Harriet Herman, or a union activist.
I really don’t, maybe I am naive, but I’m not scared. If I want to disconnect all I have to do is switch off the router and remove my sim oh and stop using my bank card and then become a missing person…
Does that come as a surprise? They may as well just have attended a meeting.
No. But it shows trusting the courts is naive when it comes to backdoors
Attending a meeting is enough to put you on a watchlist.
This is not the same as getting access to evidence for a crime that has taken place. If you want secrecy, you can meet in the woods. It’s very simple…
Sorry, but I do trust our system of justice.. I don’t necessarily trust the government and I certainly believe that there should be water tight controls that allow for breaking and entering into criminals data. And that includes data from corrupt politicians. It works both ways.
Digital forensics is a thing… with impossible encryption the whole thing falls down
Now… I like encryption… especially for B2B, but Apple are not gods! And private companies should never be above the law. If we let private companies rise above the law, we will be in a much worse situation than we are now… it’s already bad enough with tax avoidance.
It’s not about being above the law. It’s about a clear standard, and if police don’t have evidence to hand, they have to collect it. Sometimes cameras are broken. Sometimes weapons are lost, and sometimes you can’t get access to encrypted data.
They can only legally collect evidence if they have sufficient knowledge of a criminal activity.
And they have ways to set up intercepts in those cases, without physical access to the phone
The constraint is that it has to be accessible. The perception is that it has to be screen reader friendly.
But… That excludes deaf people who miss the audio cues in the app … That misses the option to add voice control. If it’s a booking app, why not talk through the booking?
The constraint is that users need to be notified (it’s a legal requirement) The perception is that only one channel is acceptable (must be post, must be a tracked email)
But… each user has their own preference, or accessibility baseline. Post only may help, or hinder, victims of abuse. I can’t guarantee that you’ve read a letter, but I can guarantee you’ve hit the “I read this” button.
The constraint is that you need to mark and control personal and sensitive data because of GDPR, and you need informed consent to do that
The perception is that making users click “I agree” is informed consent The perception is that gaining consent absolves you of responsibility to mark and control personal data “because they agreed to our terms and conditions” The perception is that location data isn’t sensitive, even though Google knows your home and work address, and the address of the abortion clinic, the LGBT nightclub, the local mosque, the local love hotel
Craig Nicol 