Butlerian Jihad???
Future history might not mark this as the first mistake that led to the chaos to come, but merely one of the poorer choices and certainly a contributing factor...
IBM staff are being asked to eat the company's dogfood in the form of an AI-infused career advice chatbot named “Myca”. The Register understands that Myca – an acronym for “My Career Advisor” - was developed in a staff hackfest and is sold as the Watson Career Coach. Multiple IBMers of our acquaintance tell us that a great …
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- What job should I do?
- MYCA-12412: You are qualified for a job at the other side of the country.
- I can't work there.
- MYCA-93121: In order to help you along your next step down your career path, I have automatically generated and accepted your notice of resignation. You have received your P45 via email. Please hand in your badge, leave the building, and print it out later at your own cost. Have a nice day. You are now logged off.
- But, wait!
- MYCA-01213: Sorry, unknown user, you are not authorised.
I think it means (what every IBMer has known for decades) is that IBM Management, and specifically their HR operation is a failure.
Although it is 20 years since I worked for them, even in those days there was a huge chasm between the day-to-day technical staff: generally on the ball, practical, knew what had to be done, just wanted to get on with doing it - and the managers. They had little or no experience of actual customers. Knew nothing except "processes". Managed by numbers. Simply did not understand any technical reasons for anything that didn't run 3270 protocols. And had no motivation to do anything that didn't directly improve their own lives.
Absolute rubbish. There's lots that's wrong in IBM at the moment but as a manager in IBM there are huge discussions going on about how to best recognise and value our people. This is just one of many things being done to improve the situation. It's interesting that there isn't an article about how IBM is focusing managers on having proper skills and career conversations with their teams... Face to face.
Interesting. My manager regularly cancels their 'Start of Week' briefings (held on a Thursday), the only potential F2F contact I have is maybe once a year for the PBC/Checkpoint meeting so that they can tick that off the list. In fact, my last two PBC/Checkpoint meetings were over the phone.
My manager has no interest in (or understanding of) what we do unless an escalation comes through or they appear in red on some upper management report for some pleb not filling in their hours plan, TVC, mandatory irrelevant education or CIRATS records.
My manager is not the exception but more the norm nowadays. The vast majority are too busy trying to save their own jobs by working on high profile activities and asking team leaders to do all the things the managers should be doing. You could decimate the entire managerial class all the way through to the C-Suite without it causing any detrimental effect to performance and I dare say a considerable improvement because we wouldn't be inflicted with whiteboarded ideas promulgated via Powerpoint that add zero value and show how clueless IBM management are.
I'm guessing your huge discussions on how to best recognise and value people was based on "what can we do that looks like we are doing something but costs nothing..." The fact that huge discussions (ie. meetings, confrerences etc) were required just illustrates the problem - too many people having too many meetings and very little action but as long as something 'looks' like it has been done...
...as a manager in IBM there are huge discussions going on about how to best recognise and value our people.
Ginny, is that you???
How can you tell when an IBM executive is lying? Their lips are moving.
How can you tell when an IBM exec is thinking? Aha! Trick question! IBM Execs don't think.
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I'm fairly gobsmacked as a manager in IBM that you believe that this is the only initiative we have to recognise and value our people. As one of the largest companies in the IT industry it is hard to get a full understanding of all of the opportunities to grow skills and career. This tool helps with this. I absolutely still spend time with my team and we talk about skills and next roles all of the time.
Yes, some people have lost their jobs and that's hard. Yes there are some crap managers as in all organisations. But in general IBM can be a great place to work and as managers we are trying make it better.
Keep on astroturfing, Shirley.
IBM can fun to work at despite the managers' inability other than sending 'encouraging' emails.
To skilled workers in customer facing roles: really, leave now, its the best thing for your career. You will be amazed at how good you are, you are just used to being told you are 'doing fine' but 'only the best' get a 'paultry 1.5% raise'**.
** ok the third was my own, but after 4 or 5 years of 1 and 2+ ratings, fairly sick of being told 'lucky boy' for this kind of insult.
Tell you what - explain to us how this bot helps you as a manager, helps IBM staff and helps IBM.
Give us an example of better outcomes it delivers.
Asking cos the IBM staff who pointed it out to us feel it's just more impersonal but insincere "we care about you" stuff in the wake of relocations, resource actions that strip the company of skills needed on live projects and drop remaining colleagues in it, attempts to reduce benefits and a bifurcation of the company in which those who work on the strategic initiatives are valued and the rest just aren't.
In the shape of an AI system. It will only see good/bad or Yes/No. If's , buts and maybe's will be regarded as a sign of weakness, not being a team player.
Welcome to P.45 land people.
If your IT Job has not already gone to South Asia or been replaced by a Robot, this is the next step.
And the idiots in HMG are still talking about getting young people to learn to code... Doh.
Haven't their £2000/day experts (cough cough) told them that all programming will be done by A.I Systems in the Future?
Welcome to the world of the breadline and the soup kitchen. There will be no money to pay you dole either.
We are truly doomed.
In the Reg article "IBM marketeers rub out chopper after visit from CEO Ginni "
I quipped:
"When I read the phrase "Big Blue chopper" I imagined IBM had come up with a machine that made people redundant. I'm a bit disappointed it turned out to be a helicopter. A remorseless sacking machine would be a good application for Watson."
I'm glad I left IBM. I'm not glad they are using my ideas however.
There are some key attributes of good managers to do with emotional intelligence, and for employees to actually 'feel' that *someone* is on their side, has their back. Well in the ideal world anyway. These are noble ideals that all managers should at least be aware of, if not aspire to. Giving these 'duties' to a bot really does not give employees the respect they deserve.
I'd love to tell you how much I loathe these types initiatives and bots, but I don't have strong enough powers of invective.
It starts with anything that begins with the cringe-worthy "my", as in "my likkle pony". Obsequious, condescending, profoundly insincere and utterly self serving. This is the IBM that Apple railed against and subsequently became.
There isn't one example of these bots that comes close to even the most incompetent customer service rep (Google support has come close though).
Dystopia is this running on on Watson.
That's a serious question. In my years there I never saw a single lateral posting that was real. I've never heard of someone using the system to actually find and get a different job. I never saw a single person hired in who wasn't a personal friend of a management consultant last hired by the VP. On rare occasions people were allowed to move laterally if they threatened to quit but that's clearly not going you work this time.
Less than a week after IBM was ordered in an age discrimination lawsuit to produce internal emails in which its former CEO and former SVP of human resources discuss reducing the number of older workers, the IT giant chose to settle the case for an undisclosed sum rather than proceed to trial next month.
The order, issued on June 9, in Schenfeld v. IBM, describes Exhibit 10, which "contains emails that discuss the effort taken by IBM to increase the number of 'millennial' employees."
Plaintiff Eugene Schenfeld, who worked as an IBM research scientist when current CEO Arvind Krishna ran IBM's research group, sued IBM for age discrimination in November, 2018. His claim is one of many that followed a March 2018 report by ProPublica and Mother Jones about a concerted effort to de-age IBM and a 2020 finding by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that IBM executives had directed managers to get rid of older workers to make room for younger ones.
IBM's self-sailing Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS) has finally crossed the Atlantic albeit more than a year and a half later than planned. Still, congratulations to the team.
That said, MAS missed its target. Instead of arriving in Massachusetts – the US state home to Plymouth Rock where the 17th-century Mayflower landed – the latest in a long list of technical difficulties forced MAS to limp to Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada. The 2,700-mile (4,400km) journey from Plymouth, UK, came to an end on Sunday.
The 50ft (15m) trimaran is powered by solar energy, with diesel backup, and said to be able to reach a speed of 10 knots (18.5km/h or 11.5mph) using electric motors. This computer-controlled ship is steered by software that takes data in real time from six cameras and 50 sensors. This application was trained using IBM's PowerAI Vision technology and Power servers, we're told.
Analysis After re-establishing itself in the datacenter over the past few years, AMD is now hoping to become a big player in the AI compute space with an expanded portfolio of chips that cover everything from the edge to the cloud.
It's quite an ambitious goal, given Nvidia's dominance in the space with its GPUs and the CUDA programming model, plus the increasing competition from Intel and several other companies.
But as executives laid out during AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2022 event last week, the resurgent chip designer believes it has the right silicon and software coming into place to pursue the wider AI space.
IBM chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna says it offloaded Watson Health this year because it doesn't have the requisite vertical expertise in the healthcare sector.
Talking at stock market analyst Bernstein's 38th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference, the big boss was asked to outline the context for selling the healthcare data and analytics assets of the business to private equity provider Francisco Partners for $1 billion in January.
"Watson Health's divestment has got nothing to do with our commitment to AI and tor the Watson Brand," he told the audience. The "Watson brand will be our carrier for AI."
Updated In one of the many ongoing age discrimination lawsuits against IBM, Big Blue has been ordered to produce internal emails in which former CEO Ginny Rometty and former SVP of Human Resources Diane Gherson discuss efforts to get rid of older employees.
IBM as recently as February denied any "systemic age discrimination" ever occurred at the mainframe giant, despite the August 31, 2020 finding by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that "top-down messaging from IBM’s highest ranks directing managers to engage in an aggressive approach to significantly reduce the headcount of older workers to make room for Early Professional Hires."
The court's description of these emails between executives further contradicts IBM's assertions and supports claims of age discrimination raised by a 2018 report from ProPublica and Mother Jones, by other sources prior to that, and by numerous lawsuits.
Qualcomm knows that if it wants developers to build and optimize AI applications across its portfolio of silicon, the Snapdragon giant needs to make the experience simpler and, ideally, better than what its rivals have been cooking up in the software stack department.
That's why on Wednesday the fabless chip designer introduced what it's calling the Qualcomm AI Stack, which aims to, among other things, let developers take AI models they've developed for one device type, let's say smartphones, and easily adapt them for another, like PCs. This stack is only for devices powered by Qualcomm's system-on-chips, be they in laptops, cellphones, car entertainment, or something else.
While Qualcomm is best known for its mobile Arm-based Snapdragon chips that power many Android phones, the chip house is hoping to grow into other markets, such as personal computers, the Internet of Things, and automotive. This expansion means Qualcomm is competing with the likes of Apple, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, and others, on a much larger battlefield.
Microsoft has pledged to clamp down on access to AI tools designed to predict emotions, gender, and age from images, and will restrict the usage of its facial recognition and generative audio models in Azure.
The Windows giant made the promise on Tuesday while also sharing its so-called Responsible AI Standard, a document [PDF] in which the US corporation vowed to minimize any harm inflicted by its machine-learning software. This pledge included assurances that the biz will assess the impact of its technologies, document models' data and capabilities, and enforce stricter use guidelines.
This is needed because – and let's just check the notes here – there are apparently not enough laws yet regulating machine-learning technology use. Thus, in the absence of this legislation, Microsoft will just have to force itself to do the right thing.
In Brief No, AI chatbots are not sentient.
Just as soon as the story on a Google engineer, who blew the whistle on what he claimed was a sentient language model, went viral, multiple publications stepped in to say he's wrong.
The debate on whether the company's LaMDA chatbot is conscious or has a soul or not isn't a very good one, just because it's too easy to shut down the side that believes it does. Like most large language models, LaMDA has billions of parameters and was trained on text scraped from the internet. The model learns the relationships between words, and which ones are more likely to appear next to each other.
Opinion The Turing test is about us, not the bots, and it has failed.
Fans of the slow burn mainstream media U-turn had a treat last week.
On Saturday, the news broke that Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer charged with monitoring a chatbot called LaMDA for nastiness, had been put on paid leave for revealing confidential information.
A prankster researcher has trained an AI chatbot on over 134 million posts to notoriously freewheeling internet forum 4chan, then set it live on the site before it was swiftly banned.
Yannic Kilcher, an AI researcher who posts some of his work to YouTube, called his creation "GPT-4chan" and described it as "the worst AI ever". He trained GPT-J 6B, an open source language model, on a dataset containing 3.5 years' worth of posts scraped from 4chan's imageboard. Kilcher then developed a chatbot that processed 4chan posts as inputs and generated text outputs, automatically commenting in numerous threads.
Netizens quickly noticed a 4chan account was posting suspiciously frequently, and began speculating whether it was a bot.
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