Stories about: Wetware

Business consultants and analysts use a range of models and analogies to explain and describe complex concepts in a manner that is understandable by their audience. Sometimes they fail, quite spectacularly, and sometimes there comes along a new way of encapsulating difficult concepts. One such approach is Bruce Webster's "Thermocline of Truth".

Inventor, writer and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been a pioneer in speech and character recognition, reading technology, music synthesis, virtual reality and artificial intelligence. He has founded nine businesses in those fields, including Kurzweil Technologies Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., and he's won numerous awards, including the National Medal of Technology.

Wouldn't it be nice if every boss came with a standard API? It would be so easy to look at the interface specifications and know exactly what he expected, in what format he expected it, when you should deliver it, what predictable events would result from your input and how you should handle error conditions. All the politics would go away. Those pesky emotions would become a nonissue. Success would become deterministic.