A 30 year anniversary tribute — CFEngine is 30 years old this year. For a piece of software, that’s been quite a long life. A lot has happened on its journey to arrive at where we are today, but most users have now forgotten how it emerged from a young lad’s dreams of artificial intelligence. I’ve…

New research on relating trust, (machine) learning, and heuristics — Would you get into a taxi on a late night in a dark alley? In your hometown? In a foreign country? What would help you to make that determination? What is it that makes us trust? Few subjects have been written about more than this one, both in philosophy and…

Treading water — For years I worked as an odd job man in tech. That’s the only way I can describe the life of a consultant, especially one with my profile. I hoped to be able to use my knowledge and experience (and minor fame) to help companies work on cutting edge technologies…

Balancing priorities in the cyborg age — In a series of articles about our modern Cyborg Age, I’ve argued that our traditional understanding of trust is flawed. We’ve misunderstood its role as a moral imperative, when in fact it seems only to be a rough and ready predictor of attention costs (attentiveness to reliable outcomes) and benefits…

Alignment, group dynamics, drifting intentions, and the Promise Theory of Trust — Whether we’re talking about the animal kingdom, human collaborations, teamwork, or just choosy people, it’s a common narrative: birds of a feather (i.e. members in a group) flock together because they “sort of trust their own”. The recent work I’ve been doing about trust shows that–in fact–the opposite might well…

How some quantum weirdness may be explained by a software model — Last year, I made a model of quantum entanglement in software. Below, I'll try to explain how to make a model of virtual processes which is dynamically similar to the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-Bell-Aspect experiment, so that a series of independent trials of the experiment converge on the result predicted by quantum mechanics…

What can Wikipedia tell us about trust? — No one seems to know for sure when humans started cooking, but most would agree that cooking was the technological leap (not in fact the 2001 monolith) that allowed humans to advance beyond an animal livelihood, to spend less time micromanaging their survival, and to go on to do greater…

Due diligence versus brand loyalty — TL;DR : human attentiveness has dwindled! The pace of modern cybernetic life saturates our cognitive faculties and leaves us unwary of concealed intentions, even vulnerable to suggestion. Once upon a time, we could take our time over breakfast with a newspaper or magazine and ponder the long and the short…

Why AI is not the full story about our new class based society — Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. I stumbled across a website of public speakers recently–individuals who could be hired to talk at company events on a wide variety of topics for a (not inconsiderable) fee. At first I thought: this is interesting, perhaps I could join! But then…