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Look! I made a machine do a thing!
When I am doing hobbyist computer stuff, I often have moments which can be summarised as, Look! I made a machine do a thing! These moments bemuse family and friends, who are summoned to witness the thing that I have made the machine do, only to see a splurge of text at the command line, or an underwhelming web page. (But look at it - it works!)
The feeling of successfully making a machine do a thing is such an important phenomenon in computing that I think we should give it a name: perhaps LIMAMDAT, or LIMDAT for brevity and ease of pronunciation. The history of computing has been full of LIMDAT moments, from the first decrypts and trajectory calculations in the 1940s, through rocket launches and Moon landings, to the birth and development of the Internet.
Why have FO when there’s no MO?
If you are a business leader in 2026 trying to deal with AI, you are surrounded by fear on all sides. Analysts, investors, vendors and the media are all telling you that if you don't invest in AI, you should fear being left behind. At the same time, lawyers, risk professionals, privacy advocates and employee representatives are telling you you should fear AI harming your staff, your customers and your company's reputation.
Fear is rarely helpful in an enterprise setting. I once knew a large corporation which was desperate to move to cloud because they feared that their aging data centres could fail at any moment. But, after spending many millions to get their cloud environments ready, they wouldn't move their data because they feared security breaches. Fear drove double cost and double complexity.
Are LLMs the air fryers of AI?
Do you know someone who got an air fryer for Christmas? Or did you get one yourself?
If you know someone who got an air fryer, then there’s a high chance that you have heard all about it, and how it has been a complete game changer. They can cook things in a fraction of the time it used to take! And it’s not a fryer at all - it’s really a mini-oven! If you got an air fryer yourself, then there’s a chance that you’ve used it for everything, and that, even now, you are thinking about what you could use it to cook next.
I don’t have an air fryer myself, but am old enough to remember when my family first got a microwave. We lived off jacket potatoes for at least a week, and tried microwaving many things that should not be microwaved (there’s a reason that roasts are called roasts). Eventually, we found, just as my friends with air fryers seem to be finding in the weeks after Christmas, that, while the microwave is a useful tool to have in the kitchen, it’s not the only answer, and certainly not the best answer for everything.
Respect before beanbags
I have worked in some strange offices in my career. At a start up, I spent six months in a cramped office above a meat market, where arriving in the morning meant dodging large men in blood smeared coats carrying sides of beef. While working for a large UK bank, which had run out of space in its premises, I spent time in a business continuity centre, surrounded by banks of anonymous desks stretching away into the distance, waiting to be filled in the event of a disaster. As part of a confidential corporate restructuring project, I worked in an empty office scheduled for decommissioning and demolition, hoping that the security systems would keep working for long enough to let the team out in the evening.
And, because I have spent my career in enterprise technology, I have also worked in many environments which look as if they have been outfitted from the ‘digital’ section of the IKEA catalogue, full of bright colours, breakout areas, ping pong tables, expensive chairs - and, of course, bean bags.
Riding the rollercoaster of reaction and reality
Rollercoasters are strange.
They are arrangements of reality which cause sensations of acceleration and falling which would normally signal extreme peril - but in a safe environment. They are one of many examples of how humans use aspects of our psychology and physiology to create excitement, just like thrillers, horror films, ski-ing and skydiving. It seems that humans enjoy emulations of danger in situations which we control.
Someone observing the enterprise technology industry might conclude that it is subject to the same drives, especially when we ride the technology hype cycle, which looks and feels like an especially precipitous rollercoaster.