Technology

The Unaccountability Machines

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

My regular readers will know that Dan Davies’ The Unaccountability Machine was a big influence on me. If you didn’t know this, well, you’ll probably keep hearing about it every now and then. Anyway, the short summary of this must-read book is that a lot of our systems (government business, etc.) go off the rails because they focus on a few metrics, insulate themselves and their leaders from impact, and become destructive.

There, I summarized an enormously complex book that sums up decades in a paragraph. Go me. Anyway, on to the subject.

I was reading a recent article in 404 media on how people are “staffing” companies with AI, or even discussing having entire companies that are just bots/agents. Yes, it won’t surprise you that people flush with cash or wild ideas imagine a world where they just automate everything and rake in cash. Yeah, you’re not surprised.

Nowhere’s many things wrong with this idea, from data center water burn to legal complications to AI being surprisingly crappy at many jobs. But I want to address something about what it’d be like to run a company with a bunch of stochastic systems doing work for you, because this sounds like the fears of The Unaccountability Machine taken to it’s logical conclusion. Or illogical conclusion.

Anyway, let’s imagine these AI companies, these automated companies, and what we know about AI. You have a lot of automated processes running things, running them with no moral agency because they’re not people. We know how sycophantic AI can be dangerous because it tells you what you need to know. All of this abstract and distant from real human experience, moreso because of the hype cycle.

What you’ve got here is, well, an Unaccountability Machine. A nearly completely automated company of AI agents spinning around one person is not going to get good, safe decisions. You may get something you can use to juice stock and sell off, but it won’t be safe.

What you have are devices that ape human awareness, using old data, telling people what they want, and when things go wrong the AI takes the blame. You have people insulated from real information, focused on limited measures, and using technology that will sound like it’s kissing up to them. All it is is amplifying what happens to various leaders anyway in our decaying government and business systems.

So, really, it’s just business as usual but faster. You can spin up bad ideas and unaccountability quicker.

Now I suspect a lot of this is just juicing stocks, posturing, and trying to ignore how AI costs are going to go up and legal issues will proliferate. So I’m more concerns what happens in the meantime and I doubt it’ll be good – and then of these “auto-companies” will need their work walked back.

Honestly, I hope most of them are scams. Maybe that’d be good.

I suspect Dan Davis is going to have to write yet another book.

Steven Savage

The Future Isn’t What You Expected

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

So as of this writing the Iran War ended. Or restarted. Or is under negotiation. I have no idea what’s going on and anything I do say may be irrelevant. Anyway it’s August 11, 2026 so you can remember how wrong or right I am.

You know I’d like to discuss what an absolute humiliating mess this was for America. But plenty of people far more qualified than me are discussing it. Actually people less qualified are discussing it too. Welcome to the modern age, and because it is the modern age, let me discuss two things that surprised me which is what I DO want to talk about it.

“War never changes,” is the quote from the Fallout games. Well, guess what, it damn well changed, and that’s a good reminder that we’re usually living in the future and don’t know it.

First, let’s talk drones.

We’re well aware of how effective drone have been for the Ukraine in their battle against Russian aggression. We know Iran has deployed both missiles and drones to definite effect, and everyone I read seems concerned about the drone part. A $10,000 drone can cost you an expensive missile and do plenty of damage if said missile misses.

Now Ukraine’s work with drones, it’s innovations, has been a diplomatic and economic boon thanks to relations with Middle Eastern states. Ukraine innovated on drones because it had to, and now that’s given it power and prestige, further giving it allies against Russia (or what’s left of it).

How much change did we miss, or not take into account, or figure was a localized issue? How much drone tech is out there we haven’t payed attention to as a society? Maybe it’s just me, but I feel that a whole lot of war changed, and a lot of people haven’t adjusted their mindsets? In turn this means Iran surprised people and Ukraine has leveraged their experience to become an even more major player.

It’s multiple world-powers getting ju-jitsued. It reminds me of a recent joke about people who played games like World of Tanks missing that their games were irrelevant.

Next, let’s talk memes.

I did not expect Iran’s social media game to be this good. From memes challenging the president to mockery using Lego aesthetic, they had a good game. I didn’t expect a repressive theocratic republic to be this good at social media, not going to lie. In a Mastodon discussion, someone noted they found the dry Iranian sense of humor was known, but not to Westerners.

As I understand it the team is probably a subcontracted group that’s not even in the country. But who knows what the story is. Anyway, whoever they are they’re playing to win.

Honestly, where was America’s meme game? What little I saw was Trump ranting, some strange propagandist stuff, and that was about it. Where was the humor? The fun? The meme potential? The Iranian social media folks seemed to be having fun, which is not something I associate with the Iranian government who are, let’s be honest, a bunch of religious a-holes.

And I saw it get mentioned all over, amplified. I have to ask how much are memes part of modern warfare. I wish I knew because I expect it’s a lot more than I would have guessed.

So here we are in iran. It’s a fluid situation as I write. I don’t know what’s happening. But what I do know is I saw two changes in warfare, and we need to pay attention. I’d like a future without warfare, but until we get there, we need to understand how they work.

And apparently it’s drones and vicious mockery. Well, that’s what I missed and some others missed – what else are we missing?

Steven Savage

Never Tell Me The Odds

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Han Solo’s famous quote (and Harrison Ford’s brilliance) aside, sometimes I want to know the odds. Actually I definitely want to know the odds, because I’m someone that likes to plan things, evaluate success, and plan for contingencies. I say this as a person who has debated with himself on “what day of the week does the week really start” kind of planning.

The odds, to me, a professional Project Manager (which I suppose means I’m worth listening to), are a way to calculate what to build. They let me evaluate success, plan for contingencies, and make something solid. If I do things right, the odds barely come into play because the plan, risk assessments, and options are all in place.

The odds are, at best, a tool, a way to get better, a way to improve. For all my world of flowcharts and checklists – professionally and privately – my world is one of solidity. I deal in how and results and measurements. From personal zines to environmental systems, it’s about results

But right now it seems society is more and more about playing the odds. As my friend Serdar put it once, more and more aspects of our society are coming to resemble a casino. The problem is casinos aren’t about building things, and that’s the problem.

As of this writing there are plenty of discussions about Kalshi, Polymarket, and other activities that are “prediction markets” which are really just gambling. That’s it, they’re gambling, and you can’t call it anything else. Draft Kings may have led the way with sports betting, but now we have prominent gambling companies. Call it what it is.

Our society is a casino. But it has been for awhile.

The stock market is not the economy, as we’re often reminded. It is, to an extent, about playing the odds and estimating chances. Now any economy is going to have some of that, as will any part, but if you ever looked at overvalued stocks and wondered, it’s not about the economy in many cases. It’s about the odds that something pays off, and it’s why some investments in companies that don’t do anything pay off, because people think they can sell before they loose.

Then there was Crypto, which really is just a stock on the blockchain. Then there was the NFTs, which thankfully crashed and burned then sunk into a swamp, that was gambling as well. Now we’re just to plain almost-honest gambling. It’d be refreshing if it wasn’t so prominent, so pathological, and in more and more cases it seems about people manipulating odds.

It’s all been a bit of gambling for decades – centuries? – but now it’s all gambling front and center. Bets and odds and manipulation. Know what it isn’t? Doing something with measurable achievements..

Where’s the plan? The results? The thing built? The thing made? Something that gets something done, that helps people, that can be felt, seen, touched, used? Where’s something I can break down into a Kanban backlog, where I can say “yes, here is a distinct result.”

But it’s a Casino. It’s about playing the odds, getting money, and that’s it. Nothing to be built, to be made, to be achieved. If you can manipulate things (say, with a bit of insider political information) so much the better. Why do something that has a role, a result, a history when you can just get paid for wondering what the body count is in a train wreck?

Play the odds enough and that’s all you can do. Look for the gamble, the payoff, the high. You just slosh money around and play the odds. That’s it.

The Casino economy is forgetting how to do things, and forgetting the value of doing things for and with people. And as a Project Manager, a person, and a citizen, I hate it.

Steven Savage