Am I a bad person if...

…when I saw the queues on campus this morning I just laughed. Knowing full well that all those “students” will be standing in line for a good 2 hours just to get to the front of the line to get a flimsy piece of plastic, which they will largely never use except to get into the library, so as I say will largely never use.

Although this is a fantastic method of separating out the Brits from the foreigners. The foreigners clump together in little huddles and don’t fully appreciate or understand the system that is British queuing. And I love it, the very patient of it all, knowing that nothing at the end of the queue will possibly have been worth the wait, but we still do it in quite desperation.

Viva student life! Start as you mean to go on, with disappointment from day one. Builds character.


This page previously appeared on morganbye.net[^1]

[^1:] http://morganbye.net/2009/09/am-i-bad-person-if

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Life currently

What distinguishes you from other developers?

I've built data pipelines across 3 continents at petabyte scales, for over 15 years. But the data doesn't matter if we don't solve the human problems first - an AI solution that nobody uses is worthless.

Are the robots going to kill us all?

Not any time soon. At least not in the way that you've got imagined thanks to the Terminator movies. Sure somebody with a DARPA grant is always going to strap a knife/gun/flamethrower on the side of a robot - but just like in Dr.Who - right now, that robot will struggle to even get out of the room, let alone up some stairs.

But AI is going to steal my job, right?

A year ago, the whole world was convinced that AI was going to steal their job. Now, the reality is that most people are thinking 'I wish this POC at work would go a bit faster to scan these PDFs'.

When am I going to get my self-driving car?

Humans are complicated. If we invented driving today - there's NO WAY IN HELL we'd let humans do it. They get distracted. They text their friends. They drink. They make mistakes. But the reality is, all of our streets, cities (and even legal systems) have been built around these limitations. It would be surprisingly easy to build self-driving cars if there were no humans on the road. But today no one wants to take liability. If a self-driving company kills someone, who's responsible? The manufacturer? The insurance company? The software developer?