Tag: ai

When I was younger, my mother insisted that we label the shelves in the refrigerator. “Milk,” “Condiments,” “Leftovers.” It was a system designed to prevent catastrophe, or at least to keep my father from drinking bleu cheese dressing straight from the bottle under the assumption it was buttermilk.

I thought this was ridiculous. The milk knew where it was. Why not trust it to find its own way home?

Fast forward thirty years, and here I am, sitting in a meeting about data governance, explaining to a group of engineers why we cannot, in fact, allow machine learning models to drink directly from the “condiments” shelf.

“Why not?” someone asked, with the same incredulity I once had toward my mother’s fridge. “The data’s all there.”

Yes, but so is the ketchup, the horseradish, and that Tupperware of regretful lasagna from 2018. AI, left unsupervised, will happily eat it all and tell you with great confidence that the population of France is marinara.

Governance isn’t glamorous. Nobody goes into tech to write metadata policies or create retention schedules. They want to build robots that compose symphonies or tell jokes about dogs in French. But without the boring stuff, without the labels, the rules, or the grown-up supervision, you don’t get robots. You get chaos. And chaos doesn’t sing. It burps.

Data democratization, meanwhile, sounds far nobler than it is. “Power to the people,” we say, while handing everyone in the company a golden key to the database. It feels like Woodstock for spreadsheets: free love, free access, free analytics. But if you’ve ever watched a toddler try to pour milk from a gallon jug, you know what happens when you give freedom without structure. It’s not democracy. It’s a kitchen floor full of dairy.

The promise of AI makes this all more urgent, because AI is a very eager intern who lies. It will produce an answer to anything you ask, regardless of whether it has any actual knowledge, because its job description is “pleasing authority figures at any cost.” Governance is the uncomfortable adult in the room reminding everyone that the answer still needs to be right.

I sometimes fantasize about what it would be like if people treated their own lives the way they treat corporate data. Imagine your family photo albums scattered randomly across five different attics, basements, and glove compartments. Grandma’s birth certificate is in a shoebox labeled “Halloween Decorations,” and your high school yearbook lives in the freezer next to the peas. “Don’t worry,” you say, “we’ll let AI find it.” And then AI proudly hands you a picture of a cat in a pilgrim costume.

So yes, data governance is boring. It’s milk-shelf labeling, and it’s telling your overeager intern that, no, horseradish is not a population statistic. But in the age of AI, boring is the only thing standing between us and a world where business strategy depends on marinara.

And trust me, nobody wants that. Not even my father