There is a lot of talk at present about ChatGPT, Bard and AI in general. So are machines going to take over the world?

In a word, “no”. AI for all it’s benefits is exactly what it says “Artificial”. These systems don’t generate new thinking, what they do is to allow us to see connections in data which previously were to too abstract to find. How is this magic possible? Because of the ever-increasing amount of computational power in the world, and the reduction in cost this brings about.

We are at the edge of massive change, but it is a change brought on by the availability of compute capacity on a global scale. This is what makes things like OpenAI possible. Until very recently, the cost of such computational power meant that these systems were just not practical to build.

The movie “Rise of the Machines” painted a believable and not all that futuristic look at how sharing computing power could be used for evil. I’d like to add that this same power can be used for great good. Imagine if we could scan hospital records on a global basis, looking for similarities, or if we could search images to speed the search for missing persons. The algorithms behind ChatGPT and other offerings illustrate the power of current AI research in managing huge volumes of abstract data, but it’s not thinking. It’s information mining. Thinking and deciding how best to use this knowledge is still the realm of we humans. I believe is like to remain so forever.

Closer to home, just think what this same access to computing power can do for your business. Are you getting the true value of your sales data? Are you optimising your inventory in order to better serve your customers? We can help you to do these things, and not live in fear of the machines.

P.S. The attached image is used with the acknowledgement or Warner Bros Studios marketing organisation.

We had a client recently who had problems with attacks from what could only be described as “State Actors”. Leaving politics aside for a moment, they were publishing information, hosted on AWS in the USA, which was not sitting well with a major government.

The problem was that their WordPress sites were being smashed by automated traffic, and while they didn’t crash (because of a resilient architecture), it was very difficult for legitimate traffic to get through.

We use New Relic to monitor the site’s vitals and it wasn’t hard to see what was going on. They bad guys were just flooding the web server with technically valid requests and keeping it too busy. Ultimately, the workload would trigger an auto-scaling increase, which just got flooded as well.

Our solution was actually very simple. We put Amazon CloudFront distribution in front of the web servers, which also added local distribution points, and then attached AWS Shield Advanced to stop the majority of attacks before they even got to the customer’s services.

Almost immediately we noted that the web services started to scale back in, because the amount of work they had to do dropped dramatically.

Now, there are plenty of folks who will object that Shield is a pretty expensive solution (compared to say, AWS WAF), but the cost of compute resources dropped sufficiently that the customer actually saved money!

Sorry Elon, but you are not always right… Whether it’s NBN SkyMuster, StarLink or Amazon Kupier, Satellite-based broadband has one major problem that technology cannot yet solve: The speed of light.

The problem is that space is actually a long way up when your sitting here on planet Earth, and radio signals can’t travel faster than the speed of light (technically, they can’t travel as fast as light, but let’s ignore that for a moment), and it takes a little under half a second to make a round-trip from your house to the satellite, back to earth and then to the destination.

For watching movies, this is not really a problem at all, and if that’s what you mostly use broadband for, then Satellite can be a great option, especially if you’re in an area not well served by terrestrial broadband technology. But if you need an interactive service such as video conferencing, or remote desktop computing you are likely to find this delay pretty frustrating.

In many areas, there are options such as the ever-expanding 5G mobile broadband services. Talk to us, and let’s find a solution which works best for you.