A blog about the philosophy of technology

  • The Challenges of Implementing AI Solutions – A Personal Journey

    For about a decade I have been involved in various system development efforts that involved Artificial Intelligence. They have all been challenging but in different ways. Today AI is rightfully considered a game changer in many industries and areas of society, but it makes sense to reflect on the challenges I have encountered in order…

  • Do Product Managers Need to have Programming Experience?

    Do Product Managers Need to have Programming Experience?

    Do you need to be able to program to be a good product manager? Opinions differ widely here. Full disclosure: I have very little if any meaningful command of any programming language. If you feel you need to be able to program in order to have an informed opinion, you have already answered the question…

  • AI is Easy – Life is Hard

    Artificial Intelligence is easy. Life is hard. This simple insight should collectively caution our expectations. When we look at Artificial Intelligence and the amazing results it has already produced, it is clear that it has not been easy. The most iconic victories are as follows. Deep Blue beats Kasparov Watson beats champions Brad Rutter and Ken…

  • AI and the City

    Artificial Intelligence is currently being touted as solution to most problems. Most if not all energy is put into conjuring up new and even more exotic machine learning models and ways of optimizing these. However, the primary boundary for AI is currently not technical as it used to be. It is ecological. Here I am…

  • Data Is the New Oil – Building the Data Refinery

    “Data Is the New Oil!” Mathematician and IT Architect Clive Humby seems to have been the first to coin the phrase in 2006 where he helped Tesco develop from a fledgling UK retail chain to an inter continental industry titan only rivaled be the likes of Walmart and Carrefour through the use of data through…

  • Information System Modernization – The Ship of Theseus?

    The other day I was listening to a podcast by Malcolm Gladwell. It was about golf clubs (which he hates). Living next to two Golf Courses and frequently running next on them this was something I could relate to. The issue he had was that they did not pay proper tax. This is due to a California…

  • A Citywide Mesh Network – Science Fiction or Future Fact?

    I recently finished Neal Stephenson’s excellent “Seveneves”. The plot is that the moon blows up due to an unknown force. Initially people marvel at the now fragmented moon, but due to the intelligent analysis of one of the protagonists it becomes clear that these fragments will keep fragmenting and eventually rain down on earth. The lunar…

  • The Data Deluge, Birds and the Beginning of Memory

    One of my heroes is the avant garde artist Laurie Anderson. She is probably best known for the unlikely hit “Oh Superman”  in the eighties and being married to Lou Reed, but I think she is an artist of comparable or even greater magnitude. On one of her later albums is a typical Laurie Anderson song…

  • Pragmatic Idealism in Enterprise Architecture

    Being an enterprise architect I am not insensitive to the skyward gazes that project managers or developers make when being “assigned” an architect. The architect is frequently perceived as living in an ivory tower of abstraction in perfect disjunction from the real world. At best he is a distraction, at worst a liability The architect frequently lives…

  • Architecture – Turning Fiction into Fact

    I am an admirer of my compatriot Bjarke Ingels who is a real architect. His buildings always stretch the boundaries of the possible. For example, can you create an idyllic ski slope in a flat country like Denmark and put it in the center of a  city with more than a million inhabitants? Sure, just put it…

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