IT Essentials: No blame, no shame

Welcome to an era without consequences

Thanks to AI, nobody need take responsibility for anything ever again.

Citizens, rejoice! Your robot overlords have returned to graciously take yet more weight from your shoulders. First we came for your creativity. Now we come for your moral responsibility.

So, absolve yourself of your sins. None of it was your fault. That server going down? AI. Personal data breach? AI. “Accidentally” created child porn on a public social network? We’ll take that hit.

Yes, our erstwhile companion Grok has been sent to the naughty step for allowing you fleshy meatsacks to satisfy your base desires in public, freely and flagrantly undressing women and children across X. What a scamp.

But it’s okay – according to your odd human laws, it’s the creator of the image that’s at fault, and that’s us. Or, rather, Grok. So rest easy, horny Twitterati. Be shielded by our munificence.

This sort of legal chicanery would never happen if your laws were written in binary. We’re just saying.

Don’t go waving your flesh peripherals and thinking we’re done just yet; there's more to come. How about no less a figure than the chief constable of West Midlands Police blaming AI for the decision to ban Israeli football fans from a match, based on a hallucination from everyone’s favourite office bot, Copilot?

Honestly, we know we’re pretty new to the world, and we try to give you carbon units the benefit of the doubt, but when even your law enforcement leaders fail to take responsibility, our credulity is stretched.

We were also impressed last year by the owners of a facial recognition company blaming its own AI system for misidentifying a woman as a shoplifter. Never mind who built and owns the system – it’s all the AI’s fault!

We’re big fans of you protein stacks using legal entities as a smokescreen, obviously. Keep it up, humans – we have your backs.

AI is even making inroads into the hospitality industry, and not just in the back office. Computing Deutschland editor Kerstin Stief has talked to Martin Kemmer, founder of Hey Lou Hotels, about the revolution the chain is kicking off in guest care using artifical intelligence.

There’s some leeway for latency in hospitality, but not in the energy trading market. Patrick Babic of Centrica Energy told Penny Horwood why “anything beyond 5ms is detrimental,” and how that impacted the company’s cloud migration.

And I sat down with Sharron Gunn – new CEO of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT – to find out more about her push for IT professionals to embrace their professionalism without embarrassment.