What is Cloud? What is AI? What is insert Tech Word ? The goal of this blog is simple: to give simple explanations for complicated, buzz-wordy tech topics.
I’ve been in the tech world for close to a decade now, and it still frustrates me to witness the knowledge gap between non-tech and tech people. I’ll be in a meeting, and a non-tech person will make a frankly bizarre statement about a technology they seem to have very little understanding of. Then a tech person will attempt to set them right with an explanation you’d need a Bachelor’s in Engineering for, just to decode the acronyms. Everybody loses, even the people watching. It’s not even entertaining. Just frustrating.
When I was getting my Bachelor’s in Engineering, one of my professors talked about the curse of knowledge. As he explained, the curse of knowledge is when someone who is educated on a topic assumes that everyone else is as well, and doesn’t bother to properly explain foundational concepts which are required to understand what’s going on.
I think a lot about the curse of knowledge. I work as a software engineer, so I’m sort of on the side of the cursed. I’ve worked as a researcher, so I’ve been confronted with experts who have no idea how far over my head their explanations went. And I’ve worked with technologies like AI, and Blockchain, and Cloud, and people are super interested in those. Which is good, because these technologies are new, affect all our lives in more ways than people realize, and remain largely unregulated. Learning about them is important. Educating people about them is important. So I spend a lot of time explaining, and I think about the curse. I ask myself, am I explaining well enough for someone outside the tech bubble?
That’s how the idea of this blog was born. What is Cloud? What is AI? What is insert Tech Word ? Simple explanations for complicated tech topics.
