The International Software Testing Qualifications Board provides an excellent preliminary definition of quality: “The degree to which a work product satisfies stated and implied needs of its stakeholders.” However, despite all its virtues, this definition still requires further clarification to fully grasp all of its business ramifications. Here is when the notion of value comes in handy.
It’s a well-known fact at this point that in the United States and most of the so-called free countries that there is a robust surveillance state in place, collecting data on the entire populace.
It’s been more than three decades since the Berlin Wall fell and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. At the time, when everyone knew that the time for the “mothership” of socialism had come, China didn’t want to take the Soviet Union’s position but opted for an ambiguous role. In the three decades after the downfall of the Soviet Union, it was clear which country was at the top of the world.
In a recent speech in Toronto titled: Generative AI, Productivity, the Labor Market, and Choice Behavior, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa D. Cook discussed the rise of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and how it may impact the future. In her own words:
Some of the uses of generative AI may be unsettling. For example, concerns about the ability of generative AI to impersonate individuals to harm their reputation or violate their privacy exist and are growing.
For a state to continue existing in any meaningful way, it must constantly seek to centralize power. Regardless of the original intentions of a state’s founders or the heritage that a state claims, if those running the state simply maintain their existing powers rather than growing them, they will find themselves circumvented. Subdivisions and organic local communities nominally under the state will develop independently from the state’s center of power, and the state’s power will, over a period lacking in centralization, be rendered negligible at best.
I was recently in a room presenting to a group of about thirty. At one point, one of my fellow presenters said, “In my opinion, that is why this area of the country has lost so many jobs.” I held my tongue but couldn’t help but think, “Nobody cares about your so-called economic opinion.” Economics is based on the science of human action. We can, with certainty, deduce certain causes and effects. Your opinion on something is akin to saying, “In my opinion, Pluto is not a planet.” It’s irrelevant.
We expect the lights to come on when we flip a switch, unconcerned with how the electricity is produced or how it reaches our homes. We are aware of telephone poles, wires overhead, and transmission towers, solar panels, and windmills across the countryside. But as long as we pay our electric bills, we trust electric utilities to provide our power somehow.
Who produces the electricity we use? Where does it come from? How does it reach us when we flip that light switch? And is electricity as “green” as we are often told it is?
