June! A month full of promise – lengthening days, warming evenings and the run-down to Scots cockily going off on holiday for half the price of the English. No wonder they picked June when deciding on the best name for Terry’s wife. My demographic analysis of the readership of the Update says that about 62% of you will get that reference.
You also know it must be June because I’ve got another dose of this perpetual manflu that will not go away. I don’t think many of you realise just what a Brave Sodjer I am to battle through and present you with your Wednesday lunchtime reading regardless. Send tissues and fine single malt.
Our theme for this week is what my kids – who have no idea about Terry and June – would describe as ‘basic’ but nonetheless it’s been hurling itself at the Update Receptor quadrant of my blackened, twisted mind all week and I’ve got to get it out somehow.
This has to do with the old saw about GIGO – Garbage In, Garbage Out. Supposedly this first turned up in the 1950s, but I learned it in Higher Computing in 1990 so I reckon it came from them. In case you weren’t paying attention in your computing class, it just means that if you feed a computer garbage, you’ll get garbage back out again.
Babbage knew this back in the 1860s when he wrote of being asked if his machines could create correct answers from wrong inputs, and replied “I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question”, which I think we can all agree was a little bit pissy from the Father of Computing.
Anyway, you might have spotted a fun story earlier this week about Berkshire Hathaway’s share price (or the ‘A’ class anyway) PLUNGING 99.97% to just $185 a slice. For those unfamiliar, PLUNGING is the diametric opposite to SOARING; see also house prices. It was a technical problem at the NYSE, it all got fixed and don’t worry, you can still use your little Munger & Buffett quotes on your websites.
The GIGO effect here isn’t the technical issue itself; it’s about the ripples it caused. A couple of things struck me in particular: lots of automated news systems round to three significant figures and so reported the drop as 100%. Which it wasn’t. Sometimes you just have to be accurate.
More interesting even than that though was the rash of AI-generated “investor” posts that spread across social media within minutes of the glitch occurring, all highlighting a massive buying opportunity. The bots weren’t wrong – they correctly spotted that there was a massive price discrepancy and that normally signals an opportunity one way or the other. But they were working off duff information: garbage in, garbage out. Shrewdies like you wouldn’t act on something so obviously weird (right?), but not everyone’s as smart as you…plus of course it’s time in the market, not timing the market.
Let’s jump back over to our world. Regular readers will know that we have a tech showcase event coming up in a few weeks – the Advicetech Catwalk and don’t worry, I’m not punting, it’s already sold out – and quite a lot of the firms who threw their hats into the ring were using generative AI that would be trained on your own data and back office system content to create new reports and so on that would save you time, reduce belly fat and get the chickweed out of your lawn.
I’m all in favour of AI doing the donkey work (this quote kind of sums it up for me) so I can do more fun stuff, but of course if I train an AI on poor data, half-finished notes and a load of empty free-text fields then I’m not going to get much back.
A planner I met the other week who very much is a shrewdie described it really well – he was cross because something wasn’t in a client file that he needed (his business is of a size where more than one person works on a file), and he said that everyone needs to stop treating their practice management system as a waste-basket and start treating it as an actual system where the stuff that gets put in will come out again as something that actually matters.
There are really big opportunities for productivity gains coming – this tie-up between Intelliflo and Aveni announced yesterday looks interesting – but I fear too many firms will find their data just isn’t where it needs to be in order to make the most of new capabilities.
It might be a brave new world – but garbage in still generates garbage out.
Your music choice this week is from the indie titans James, for no better reason than I’m going to see them on Friday at the Hydro, with the lang kittens no less. This is the only song released from their new record, Yummy, so far. I’ll be honest, it’s no Laid, but here it is anyway. Please enjoy Life’s A Shocking Miracle in the full knowledge that the original doesn’t use the word Shocking.
