Opinion When the first generation of microcomputers landed on desktops, they promised many things. Affordability, flexibility, efficiency, all the good things still selling IT to this day. Mostly, though, they offered control.

PCs moved data processing from the local office and bureau to the person who most needed to control it. Since then, that control has been slowly clawed back until we’ve almost regressed to the pre-PC mainframe world. The promise of control has been broken.

Bad trip coming for AI hype as humanity tools up to fight back

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There are three ways this is hurting hard enough to threaten America’s imperial dominance over enterprise IT, only two of which can be blamed on AI. The other is more immediate, more political and potentially more permanent, and it came home to roost recently as lead pigeon of what may be a sky-darkening flock.

The immediate news was that the International Criminal Court was banging the gavel on Microsoft’s productivity software and moving to an open source alternative. A revenue nothingburger to the Redmond massive, but it signified a huge loss of control, the ICC had been sanctioned by Trump because it had followed its own rules and found Israeli leader Netanyahu had a case to answer. ICC leadership then found itself locked out of the organization’s Microsoft accounts. Time to bale. Microsoft denied it played a part in this. The optics weren’t good.

Not only did this make a move away from Microsoft seem inevitable, it likely ruled out any other service dependent on an American company. It ruled out any service, local or not, that depended on American cloud infrastructure. It signals to anyone outside the US that if they annoy Trump, their services and data might be out of their control. No American company can say otherwise. Every non-American organization that escapes validates the escape route.

Control is also being eaten away by obsessive introduction of AI on the desktop, in mobile devices and online. Every intrusion you didn’t ask for, every one that can’t be turned off or won’t stay turned off, is a loss of control. You don’t know how it works, what it’s doing with your data, how it will change behind the scenes once it’s buried its feeding tentacles deep in your virtual life. It’s bad enough for individuals, worse for organizations, and worst of all for state organizations with the strongest legal imperative to protect citizens’ data. Worries about data sovereignty can and are placed in the Too Difficult file, but that gets harder when they’re paraded on screen every day/

The final factor, the ultimate loss of control that can’t be ignored and can’t be remedied, comes from big tech’s own addiction to AI. It has never been easy to remedy inept, incomprehensible or insane decisions by big companies that bite you, but with more and more decision making ceded to AI systems with less and less human oversight, you might as well try praying to an Easter Island giant stone head. You have no control of your fate, because your service provider has little to none itself.

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This is going to get oh so very much worse. With its AI content moderation systems issuing opaque edicts like a mad king, Youtube is reportedly preparing a massive round of voluntary redundancies to decimate its human contingent still further. Voluntary redundancies are always a bad idea, for the simple reason that the brightest and best leave first, and in considerable numbers. Those who think they won’t easily find new jobs stay on. Institutional memory goes out of the door.

So why do it? If you’ve sold your investors on AI being a business transformation miracle worker, you’d better like the taste of that dog food. Investors like to see staff cuts anyway, it can be gussied up as revenue growth, for a while at least. For anyone working through it, it’s horrible.

Old things break, new things can’t happen. And humans, for all their imperfections, can’t be encrypted to oblivion by ransomware gangs. Those AIs nestling in your infrastructure are more vulnerable. Good thing your security team hasn’t taken voluntary redundancy.

All these cumulative pressures leave customers, the users and organizations feeling helpless and not in control of their data or their digital destinies. The business, economic and political models that have led to this won’t be deformed, they can only break down. Finding software and services that are independent of trillion-dollar broken robot you’re strapped to is very good indeed.

Open source is the ticket out of here. It has built-in immunity to AI overload. It is not tied to quarter-on-quarter Wall Street mandated revenue growth, nor the existential meteor strikes of investor panic. It needs different ways of planning, operating and developing the organizational IT you need, it still needs investment and responsible oversight, but how well is doing things the old way working out right now? It returns the promise of control, this time with inherent mechanisms to help keep that promise.

As with those early days when personal computing first invaded the enterprise, adoption leads to acceleration. IT that lets you choose how it works, what it does and where it does it used to be all the rage. Its time has come again. ®