TECHNOLOGY

Humanity’s Four Truths in the Era of Technology

Published

11 months ago

May 12, 2023

Humanity’s Four Truths in the Era of Technology

The rapid advancements in technology have brought about both awe and apprehension for humanity, prompting us to seek guidance from the wisdom of ancient philosophers, such as Aristotle, and their four foundational concepts that frame our experience: truth, beauty, goodness, and unity.

These four dimensions can provide a modern-day rubric to help us establish the “right and wrong” to technology’s advancement, intrusion into, and transformation of our lives. Truth represents the cornerstone of various aspects of society, while beauty can extend into the user experience and craft a multidimensional sensory experience that redefines our human world. Technology shapes our perspective and opinion and should be driven by the moral path forward. Finally, connectivity and the democratizing of everything make technology a collaborative partner that aligns with humanity through these four dimensions.

How Do We Make Sense of it All?

How do we begin to understand the complexities of, complexity itself? Technology offers humanity a path forward, but the bumps, curves, and detours make the journey one of both wonder and fear. It seems that the guideposts of today’s technology and innovations are more a function of this contemporary reality than one anchored in the fundamental human truths and transcend the electron to offer a perspective of flesh, blood, and dare I say, soul.

Sometimes, the best way to look forward is to look back. Our history of thinkers, rebels, and philosophers can offer the “first principles” of humanity and provide a template for reflection and analysis. In his book If Aristotle Ran General Motors, Tom Morris takes a fascinating and critical look at modern business and how fundamental insights from varied philosophical traditions can provide the guideposts for business and humanity. Published over 20 years ago, Morris’ wisdom can be applied to how technology impacts all our lives and provides a strategic framework that can ground our contemporary reality in a timeless perspective.

Let’s take a step back — a philosophical step back to Aristotle’s world. Grounding his (and our) reality are four foundational concepts that frame our experience: truth, beauty, goodness, and unity. From ancient Greek times to the modern world, these pillars have been the foundations of human experience. These four dimensions — a philosophical hypercube — create our human reality and establish a moral compass, that today more than ever, is an essential tool for interpreting our reality and navigating our path forward. Perhaps, it’s this ancient wisdom that can provide a modern-day rubric or even an operating system that helps us establish the “right and wrong” to technology’s advancement, intrusion into, and transformation of our lives.

Truth: the First of First Principles

In today’s world, truth is often a perceptual reality driven by influence, groupthink, and search engine algorithms. It sometimes feels as truth has emerged as more a point of view than a basic and fundamental reality. While truth represents the cornerstone of various aspects of society — from relationships to governments — this very foundation is under stress from technology’s ability to reproduce or even “fake” a reality that cannot be discerned from the original. Our senses no longer provide a safe haven for reality but are subject to technological victimization. Yet, truth is the clarion call that can stand counterpoint to the contrivances of technology.

Beauty: Our Expanded Esthetics and the Emergence of the User Experience

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Yet today’s technological influences can project a reality where beauty can extend into the very process of viewing — the user experience. Augmented, virtual, and mixed reality will become the new artist’s brush to translate a conventional sense of beauty into a multidimensional sensory experience. Technology can become a new architecture of the mind that can craft much of what we can conceive. Pushing on the bounds of our senses, technology can open a grand vista of experience that redefines our human world and, in the final analysis, places us in a more rich reality that can make us even more human.

Goodness: Technology Shaping Perspective and Opinion

Technology feeds both our hearts and minds. As we seek wisdom and guiding principles to help, tech — from social media to GPT-4 — plays a tremendous role in shaping our sense of right and wrong. From politics to personality, today’s tech oracles are spewing a precarious collection of algorithms, data, and perspective. What’s right is now reinterpreted by what possible. And outcomes are freely accepted as another permutation of reality that fits the fashion of the times. Further, vague influencers who manage these processes are hidden behind corporate walls and have little or no accountability. The moral path forward must be the defining element that drives technology forward, not the other way around.

Unity: Connectivity and the Democratizing of Everything

Technology is making the world smaller and bringing individuals closer together. Human connectivity is growing, and a new collective reality is being established. From the ancient “thou art that” to the contemporary idea of crowdsourcing, these connections drive art, wisdom, commerce, and even a new human understanding around politics and world peace. Our collective engagement results in a democratization of data, ideas and the very social structure that can exercise power in the interest of all.

Over 2,000 years ago, Aristotle and other great philosophers defined first principles as the basis from which a thing can be understood or known. Today, we use a similar framework to analyze and solve our problems. As we break down complicated issues, we establish the ability to deconstruct problems to the core ideas that allow us to both comprehend and solve what was once almost an insurmountable combination of abstract ideas. First principles allows a method to unravel life itself and establish a basis to understand, live, and enjoy our own lives. Truth, beauty, goodness, and unity are the very building blocks of our humanity. And as technology becomes our collaborative partner, we need to look to these four human dimensions as our timeless benchmarks that help us define the path forward.

Yet, technology can be dizzying, overwhelming, and sometimes scary. We can easily become lost in the maze of tubes, wires, and blinking lights. In the vastness of the digital world, it’s often difficult to see the forest for the trees. Amidst all the chaos, we need a way to make sense of technology and our relationship to it. Philosophy can provide that lens. Philosophy is a tool that helps us break things down into their basic parts. It allows us to see the big picture by dissecting complex issues into manageable pieces. When it comes to technology, philosophy can help us understand the origins of technology, how it affects us emotionally and mentally, and where it might be headed in the future.

More importantly, philosophy, and these 4 pillars, can help us manage technology. It provides a framework for evaluating technology and helps us ask the right questions about its impact on our lives. By understanding the underlying philosophical principles of human achievement, we can make better decisions about how to leverage technology and how to protect ourselves from its potential dangers. The lens we use is can focus the truth, beauty, goodness, and unity into a perspective that aligns technology with humanity.

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

Published

5 months ago

December 1, 2023

Max

AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

Published

5 months ago

November 29, 2023

Max

Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

Published

5 months ago

November 28, 2023

Max

Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud