I think about this often. A lot of people worry about the Singularity. I don't: the trivial, non-smart, underlying infrastructure running these amazing artificial intelligence will collapse much, much earlier than any spark of consciousness will be able to emerge.

I help companies with cloud transformations and often I come across situations where businesses are in trouble because they completely lost their operational knowledge. They might know how their applications work internally, but they have no clue how the machinery around them keeps them ticking.

Once I was at a company in Northern Europe that desperately needed to modernize their stack running on legacy mainframes in a colocation datacenter.

Their core business was based on winning the five years government tender for a very crucial public service. They won for years and years, but now they were scared shitless because the new tender explicitly mentioned that the system was supposed to be hosted "in the cloud" and developed using a "microservices architecture".

The main issue was two-fold. On one hand, for decades they offloaded the deployment of their core systems to the technicians of the datacenter itself with which they had an amicable and personal relationship. On the other, said datacenter was being bought by a US megacorp who didn't give a crap about the existing personal relationship with this very specific, crucial use case and told the company to simply pay them a crazy amount of money to perform the migration.

They were also so blind to their lack of understanding of their own deployment process that they called us only two months away from the deadline. So, yeah... I advised my employer to stay away from this death march.

And for the Singularity, it better have a good DevOps neural net.