(Lack of) Trust is killing the World

Not to take on the "Software is eating the world" meme, I believe the pendulum has swung too far in the SD* world.

Automation was the killer app driving the softwarize everything and give it internal guidance (read ML, AI etc.), but at the end of the day it ended up being a great tool for the bad actors who used the automation to conduct fraud, invade privacy and outright steal. Think of an airport with no security where airlines automate all ticketing, boarding, everything. Not a very secure flight is it? The biggest threat to efficiency/automation/AI is fraud, malice and hmm . bad actors or humans.

What we need now is to build a platform that promotes trust not just communication. I went to engineering school when having an email was a privilege given to certain university students. Today I can communicate with my family over four different chat programs. They all use different ones. Do we really need this? Given all these choices, I still could not locate the person who sold me stuff on eBay that never arrived. What's the point?

If software wants to run stuff, the it should be accountable. Is should be trusted. Currently, the only technology that straddles tech and human boundary is Blockchain. These large platform companies should store all PII on Blockchain which should be under the user's control. My digital recognitions from University diplomas to Employee of the Day award should be on my personal chain. When we get to a point where I get alerted for when someone or something (read SW) is accessing my data using my public key on any platform or within any organization, only then will people trust these newly classified communication services companies. Until then, I think SD* will be put on hold. Enough of efficiency, I just want my privacy back!

Too many Dashboards

It seems we have a dashboard for every metric and dashboards to pick dashboards. This reminds of the early 2000s when widgets were introduced and we placed a widget for every metric, data stream on the desktop. We have distributed our IT systems and that enables us to monitor everything, but dashboard is not the answer. In fact with so many dashboards I kind of miss the good old monolithic system :)

What we need is an automaton which processes these metrics and takes automatic decisions. Dashboard seems too much like a business process. What would be great is if we get a alert saying "metric reached threshold and controller took some action".. kind of like what we get from our banks when a charge is made or fraud prevented. What would be neat is if we replace a whole bunch of dashboards with a few controllers that execute some policy that was recommended real-time by ML.