Four short links: 26 August 2016
Robot Shock, Teens Tech, Quality Pressures, and Orchestrating AI and People
- The Elephant Chart (Kaila Colbin) — Technology has gotten so cheap that it is now more economically viable to buy robots than it is to pay people $5 a day. Point people to this if they haven’t fully comprehended how different the future of employment has become in the last 15 years. Very Next:Economy.
- How Teens Use Social Media (Wired) — my teens find these “old people talk about teens” articles hilarious.
- A Focus on Stability — the summary of why quality has slipped is applicable to pretty much every startup project I know: (*) Components are intertwined with enough complexity that surprising emergent behavior must be dealt with. (*) Stability fixes are often under-designed, failing to address a problem adequately. (*) Fixes are also sometimes over-designed, adding unnecessary complexity. (*) Code churn (refactorings, new feature work, dependency upgrades) makes stability a moving target. (*) No engineers are focused on stability full time.
- Building Human-Assisted AI Applications — interview with the creators of open source Orchestra on weaving people and bots together to accomplish tasks.
