A blog about the philosophy of technology
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The boundary of AIs exponential growth
Adoption of AI is slow. It is slower than expected and the documented productivity gains are negligible, spawning fears of an AI bubble or at least that we have passed the peak of inflated expectations. While others might see cause for concern, tech optimists (and especially tech investors) view these developments differently. For them, this…
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Is agentic AI really disrupting Softwarre as a Service?
Recent stock movements away from Software as a Service stocks has been interpreted as a result of the fear that pureplay generative AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI would disrupt companies like SalesForce, SAP and ServiceNow which form the bedrock of companies’ CRM, Finance and support functions. This echoes a frequent perception by Investors, purportedly…
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The myth of American technological supremacy
There is no doubt that American tech giants and companies in general have a commanding position. Indeed, the entire technological basis of me writing these words rests entirely on American tech giants, writing on an Apple computer in Google docs, but does that fact generalise to make the American nation a superior technological power? We…
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The strawberry affair – LLMs and human communication
Recently much has been made of LLMs apparently not knowing how many ‘r’s there are in strawberry making them look stupid. But actually the whole affair shows something different and much more profound. First of all, the incident, LLMs across the board will anwer you that there are two ‘r’s in strawberry if you ask…
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Nature is (not opposed to) Technology
There is an undercurrent in contemporary culture that plots nature in opposition to technology. According to this view, nature is pure, morally superior and in any way preferable, while technology is dirty, poluted, morally suspect and something to be approached only with apprehension. This is worrying and in effect a false dichotomy that may not…
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The enterprise architect as city planner
The role of the enterprise architect is elusive to most employees of an organization and sometimes to the enterprise architect him or herself. To understand why an enterprise architect is needed we have to approach it from another angle that of the city. The majority of humans today live in cities and it defines modern…
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Five trends for financial services for 2026
Going into 2026 it is interesting to reflect on what tendencies we saw in 2025 that will develop into major trends in financial services. In terms of digitalization, financial services is one of the most interesting industries since it is inherently an information industry. Basically banks are 100% digital companies by nature, a fate they…
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The Wittgenstein test – why LLMs are halucinating and lying
A case could be made that modern LLMs come very close to passing the Turing test. Unfortunately Turing’s test only makes clear whether a system is good enough at mimicking human language, not whether it actually commands the language. It is in fact more like an advanced parrot test. Turing was a genius mathematisian and…
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In Defense of Consulting
I recently rewatched Steve Jobs’ famous MIT Sloan School of Management talk from 1992 where he asks the audience: “How many from consulting? Oh, that’s bad. A mind is too important to waste. You should do something.” As a consultant this criticism feels visceral coming from someone you respect deeply. Jobs was unrelenting but he…
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Things we lost in the fire – Logical Data Modelling
When I started in IT a couple of decades ago, I had the good fortune to be in a company that happily built everything by themselves and primarily on the Mainframe. I know it makes me sound older than I really am, but it is true. One thing that characterised development on the mainframe was…
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