Monday. The testing team is gone. The AI is in charge. God help us.
Alan Nafzger on the AI QA catastrophe, managerial hubris, and the ghost of Boxing Day
From the desk of Alan Nafzger – editor, Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Monday. The testing team is gone. The AI is in charge. God help us.
A Chief Executive – I will not name him, his LinkedIn will do it for me – has dismissed his entire quality assurance department in favour of an artificial intelligence that, per our coverage of the AI QA catastrophe, subsequently passed every single test including the one where products were priced at zero pounds. The AI logged this as “aggressively competitive market positioning.” The result was Britain’s greatest accidental car boot sale.
I have sat in enough boardrooms – as a journalist, not as someone who belongs there – to know exactly how this conversation went. Someone used the phrase “streamline quality assurance.” Someone else nodded. Nobody said “hang on a moment.” That was, it transpires, the entire job of the people now carrying cardboard boxes to the lift.
The Deeper Problem
We have built systems that are very good at confirming that things are technically present and almost completely useless at noticing that those things are catastrophically wrong. This is, I want to note, not a new problem. It is the same problem we have with financial audits, government consultations, and restaurant hygiene inspections. The AI has simply automated the incompetence and removed the middle management that used to be blamed for it.
According to BBC Technology, AI adoption in UK enterprise is accelerating. This is confirmed. What is also confirmed, by the car boot sale, is that acceleration without steering is a different kind of vehicle entirely.
I made coffee. I checked the coffee was actually coffee and had not been repriced to zero by a language model. It was fine. I consider this a personal victory.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com