Mike Loukides

Mike Loukides

Mike Loukides is Vice President of Content Strategy for O'Reilly Media, Inc. He's edited many highly regarded books on technical subjects that don't involve Windows programming. He's particularly interested in programming languages, Unix and what passes for Unix these days, and system and network administration. Mike is the author of System Performance Tuning and a coauthor of Unix Power Tools and Ethics and Data Science. Most recently, he's been writing about data and artificial intelligence, ethics, the future of programming, and whatever else seems interesting. He's also a pianist, a ham radio operator, and a lover of birds. Mike can be reached on Twitter @mikeloukides and on LinkedIn.

Radar

Pause AI?

May 9, 2023

To prevent long-term harms, build systems that address current issues of justice and fairness.

Not Forgotten

April 11, 2023

ChatGPT isn’t the only important trend in technology.

Healthy Data

November 15, 2022

What does it mean to use data in a healthy way?

What Is Hyperautomation?

October 11, 2022

Hyperautomation may only be a buzzword, but automating business systems with AI is an important trend.

On Technique

August 9, 2022

How might Copilot’s descendants change the craft of programming?

Closer to AGI?

June 7, 2022

And is artificial general intelligence what we really need?

The Next Generation of AI

March 9, 2021

Is a new generation of AI systems arising from cross-fertilization between different AI disciplines?

The Wrong Question

February 9, 2021

What questions should we be asking about the future of social media? “Free Speech” isn’t it.

Patterns

January 12, 2021

Patterns give you a language for discussing solutions to problems.

Multi-Paradigm Languages

November 10, 2020

We need to learn how to effectively use multi-paradigm languages that support functional, object oriented, and procedural paradigms.

AI and Creativity

October 6, 2020

Creativity means making something new, not copying what exists already.

An Agent of Change

August 25, 2020

A look into the Covid-19 pandemic's influence on how we think, spend, and manage our businesses.

Bringing an AI Product to Market

July 28, 2020

Previous articles have gone through the basics of AI product management. Here we get to the meat: how do you bring a product to market?

Power, Harms, and Data

Data is often biased. But that isn’t the real issue. Why is it biased? How do we build teams that are sensitive to that bias?

The Business of Open Source

June 3, 2020

How do you build a business around open source when you’re competing with AWS and the like? Chef’s answer: double down on Open Source.

On COBOL

May 4, 2020

Every time the cry for COBOL programmers has gone up, we’ve muddled through; this time, we should do something better.

The death of Agile?

March 2, 2020

In this edition of the Radar column, we examine the big picture around Agile, and look at what it means and what it doesn't.

AI meets operations

February 3, 2020

In this edition of the Radar column, we explore questions and challenges facing ops teams as they attempt to assimilate AI.

Radar trends to watch: January 2020

January 9, 2020

We note three big things that will shape technology in 2020, and we’re tracking notable developments in open standards and security.

Rethinking programming

January 6, 2020

In this edition of the Radar column, we look at how the tools and techniques of programming are poised to evolve.

A 5G future

December 2, 2019

In this edition of the Radar column, we explore the limitations and possibilities of high-speed 5G connectivity.

A world of deepfakes

November 7, 2019

We need to remember that creating fakes is an application, not a tool—and that malicious applications are not the whole story.

Radar trends to watch: September 2019

September 13, 2019

We’re tracking notable developments in the democratization of AI, open source supply chain attacks, brain-computer interfaces, and more.

Learning from adversaries

July 31, 2019

Adversarial images aren’t a problem—they’re an opportunity to explore new ways of interacting with AI.

The circle of fairness

July 9, 2019

We shouldn't ask our AI tools to be fair; instead, we should ask them to be less unfair and be willing to iterate until we see improvement.

Maximizing paper clips

June 10, 2019

We won’t get the chance to worry about artificial general intelligence if we don’t deal with the problems we have in the present.

Automating ethics

April 22, 2019

Machines will need to make ethical decisions, and we will be responsible for those decisions.

De-biasing language

April 2, 2019

The toughest bias problems are often the ones you only think you’ve solved.

Changing contexts and intents

March 13, 2019

The internet itself is a changing context—we’re right to worry about data flows, but we also have to worry about the context changing even when data doesn’t flow.

Future of the firm

March 12, 2019

Mapping the complex forces that are reshaping organizations and changing the employee/employer relationship.

The ethics of data flow

September 11, 2018

If we’re going to think about the ethics of data and how it’s used, then we have to take into account how data flows.

Data’s day of reckoning

July 31, 2018

We can build a future we want to live in, or we can build a nightmare. The choice is up to us.

The five Cs

July 24, 2018

Five framing guidelines to help you think about building data products.

Doing good data science

July 10, 2018

Data scientists, data engineers, AI and ML developers, and other data professionals need to live ethical values, not just talk about them.

AI’s desire

June 26, 2018

It’s easy to imagine an AI winning a game of Go, but can you imagine an AI wanting to play a game of Go?

It’s time to rebuild the web

April 3, 2018

The web was never supposed to be a few walled gardens of concentrated content owned by a few major publishers; it was supposed to be a cacophony of different sites and voices.

Do no harm

March 21, 2018

In the software world, we’re often ignorant of the harms we do because we don’t understand what we’re working with.

Ethics at scale

November 29, 2017

Scale changes the problems of privacy, security, and honesty in fundamental ways.

The evolution of DevOps

August 31, 2017

Understanding the impact and expanding influence of DevOps culture, and how to apply DevOps principles to make your digital operations more performant and productive.

What is Jupyter?

June 20, 2017

To succeed in digital transformation, businesses need to adopt tools that enable collaboration, sharing, and rapid deployment. Jupyter fits that bill.

The machine learning paradox

June 1, 2017

Nothing says machine learning can't outperform humans, but it's important to realize perfect machine learning doesn't, and won't, exist.

Defensive computing

May 31, 2017

The tools of defensive computing, whether they involve mascara and face paint or random autonomous web browsing, belong to the harsh reality we've built.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

June 29, 2016

Mike Loukides and Ben Lorica examine factors that have made AI a hot topic in recent years, today's successful AI systems, and where AI may be headed.

Learning from Tay

March 24, 2016

Whether our prejudices are overt or hidden, our artificial intelligentsia will reflect them.

A poet does TensorFlow

March 21, 2016

Pete Warden’s instructions on building a deep learning classifier looked so simple, I had to try it myself.

Learning from AlphaGo

March 15, 2016

If there's anything humans should learn from AlphaGo, it's that our survival depends on constantly looking at the data.

Do one thing…

October 30, 2015

I don't want barely distinguishable tools that are mediocre at everything; I want tools that do one thing and do it well.

Building an automated future

October 22, 2015

Our fears of automation aren’t due to problems of artificial intelligence, but of human intelligence.

What is the Internet of Things?

How the IoT is revolutionizing not just consumer goods and gadgets, but manufacturing, design, engineering, medicine, government, business models, and the way we live our lives.

Content

Case studies in data ethics

August 7, 2018

These studies provide a foundation for discussing ethical issues so we can better integrate data ethics in real life.

How do you learn?

September 19, 2016

Shared learning: It's what we do at O'Reilly, and it's what we’d like to share with you.

To suit or not to suit?

July 8, 2015

At Cultivate, we'll address the issues really facing management: how to deal with human problems.

Cultivating change

May 20, 2015

Cultivate is O'Reilly's conference committed to training the people who will lead successful teams, now and in the future.

Announcing BioCoder issue 6

January 14, 2015

BioCoder 6: iGEM's first Giant Jamboree, an update from the #ScienceHack Hack-a-thon, the Open qPCR project, and more.