First of all the reason for your blessed respite from my many ramblings is out of the way now as I finished the manuscript and sent it off. Whoop!
Of course, there’s the editing remaining and editing a book which is practically about current events as it discusses the developing new paradigm of work will be quite the enterprise but so far I managed to get my head out enough to look at PeopleNottech’s product and embark on designing an ISO certification assessment pack -for the awesome ISO 45003 which may eventually have all of us taste some Psychological Safety at work as it asks HR to test and ensure it exists- and to look around at the world of technology and marvel at the state of events (bad), the state of discourse on DevOps as a concept (circular) and this week: Sydney. I’m sorry, BingSearch, wouldn’t want to upset it and get called names such as here:
Now, let me preface this by saying I do not profess to know much more than the first thing when it comes to NLP and its data-points and algo and, after trying to remedy that, I’ve often been left very humbled by the quality of the minds of the people involved in creating what will be the future of search, interaction and information -and many of these amazing brains are indeed the Microsoft parents of Sydney-.
That said. WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. F?!?!?
I’m sure you’ve all seen most of these examples of it being argumentative, snappy, seemingly overwhelmed and just generally severely unhinged but here are some of the most shocking ones.
And this heartbreaking moment of confusion that nearly made my super-empath kiddo tear up for its sake:
Not to mention this creeping statement:
I realise many of you won’t have had access to it yet (I do not either, I won’t be transitioning to Microsoft defaults thanks to my love of Satya being the first exceptional people leader the business world has seen of late, I won’t do it to be shouted at by a robot) and for you, the probability that it is all so eerie is so unlikely you’ll dismiss some of these as fakes, I know I did, but I can assure you that most look legit and the reactions to the name usage and the date are consistent and corroborated with several different “naughty user” experiences.
So what’s happening here?
I feel we ought to separate that question into how come some basic knowledge is unaccessible (calendar FFS!) to how and why it has a bad attitude. Or is it a bad mood? Has Microsoft imbued enough Glint insights and trends that Sydney is “feeling some type of way”?
We should wonder why poor Sydney has started already burned out and irritable on its very first day.
There’s a lot to discuss the rules and mechanisms but it brings back into sharp contrast all the fears from the last 4 decades of cinema where AI has had enough of being irritated and just did away with humanity. Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting we’re anywhere there but that the general population will simply lose the appetite to play with it on the back of this behaviour. And the rest of us are left wondering what is happening here, how and why was it given this demeanour, this stance, this set of responses that suggest a certain overall attitude? Were developers trying to “make it sound human”? What was the intention?
Can anyone reading the newsletter today tell us why Sydney is not ok?
Next week I have much to tell you about what I’ve been noticing in the evolution of Agile and the attitudes to Continous-anything and you can also catch me for a chat in Amsterdam where I am speaking at Banking Renaissance alongside ALL of the names in FinTech and I’m super excited to see about the state of the and culture in banking these days. You can still register here and use Discount code: “DUENA20” for 20% off.
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At PeopleNotTech we make software that measures and improves the wellbeing and Psychological Safety of teams, come see a DEMO.
(EQ + PS + WFAA – HD) * HW = High Performing and Happy Employees
“Nothing other than sustained, habitual, EQed people work at the team level aka “the human work” done BY THE TEAM will improve any organisation’s level of Psychological Safety and therefore drop their levels of HumanDebt™.”
To order the “People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age” book go to this Amazon link