Asimov and Clouds...

Lori MacVittie has a great post titled “I, Cloud” where she takes on the challenge on whether Cloud technology needs three laws, like Asimov defined for robots. She does better than squishing the possible need for the three laws, but squishing the possibilities of IT and real people being replaced any time soon…

Every time a technological innovation has spurred automation – since the time of Henry Ford right up to a minute ago – someone has claimed that machines will displace human beings. But the rainbow and unicorn dream attributed to business stakeholders everywhere, i.e. the elimination of IT, is just that – a dream. It isn’t realistic and in fact it’s downright silly to think that systems that only a few years ago were unable to automatically scale up and scale down will suddenly be able to perform the complex analysis required of IT to keep the business running.

— Lori MacVittie

She goes on to challenge other reasons why computers won’t be able to simply replace us any time soon, data context, or information¹. She drops a great example of putting a number into context, as well as throwing in the effect of just depending on computers citing Facebook’s recent outage.

A post well worth reading, as are many of Lori’s posts. If she’s not in your feed reader, she should be.

1. I wrote about the difference on data, and information back in 2007 when I wrote Am I right?. ↩