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A technology architect’s guide to humans part two: it’s not them, it’s you
Nobody believed Cassandra, but she had a good excuse.
Cassandra was a figure in Greek mythology. When she spurned the advances of the god Apollo, he gave her the gift of prophecy, but also inflicted the curse that no-one would believe her predictions. Depending on which versions of the myth you read, if people had paid attention to Cassandra, then Odysseus could have avoided the long wanderings of the Odyssey, the Trojans would not have taken the horse into their city, and Paris would not have abducted Helen in the first place, avoiding the whole Trojan war.
All technology architects feel like Cassandra at least some of the time.
A technology architect’s guide humans part one: humans are human
It doesn’t take long working as a technology architect to realise that technology is easy, but humans are hard. Today’s technology is complex, can be difficult to understand, and changes at an ever increasing rate. But technology behaves in predictable ways, even when it fails. As you long as you understand it at a sufficiently fundamental level, technology does what you tell it to.
By contract, humans are less predictable, and less inclined to do what you ask them to do. They ask questions, they raise objections, they suffer fear, uncertainty and doubt. They need to be emotionally committed as well as rationally persuaded before they apply all their energy. They misunderstand and they forget. But when they are persuaded and committed, they bring imagination, passion and creativity that no machine can match.
If you are a technology architect, you probably work with humans every day. Your family and friends are likely to be humans and, unless there have been unexpected advances in AI since I wrote this blog post, you are probably a human too. Yet, if you’re anything like me, I expect that you feel that you still haven’t figured these humans out yet.