Peter Cresswell

Almost 25 years ago I read an article on immobots in MIT Technology Review. It stuck: Immobots Take Control. I was a fresh grad at Husky Injection Molding Systems, assigned to improve self-diagnostics on injection moulding machines and their robots. It was a lovely problem. It got me thinking about monitoring systems for errors — and, more importantly, about what an error is. An immobot doesn’t watch a machine from the outside. It carries a model of the machine, compares that model to what the machine is doing, and reasons through the delta. The error is the drift — the gap between what ought to be happening and what is. That reframing has stayed with me for 25 years.

Recent article in The Economist highlighting an important paradigm shift whereby AI is flooding channels in the public sector. That is, there are various channels which governments provide to it’s citizens - complaints, legal filings, Freedom of Information Requests, etc. Those channels are now starting to flood and saturate. This phenomenon hit Open Source Software (thenewstack.io) first. The knee jerk response from some projects has been to slam the doors shut to AI contributions. That’s one option but not a great one. Especially not for governments. Closing access to the modern state is not feasible, both politically or practically.