In the late 80s we were traveling with a group of friends in Tsavo East, a wild-life nature park in the south-east of Kenya, Africa.

This was a really remote area back then. We drove for hours without seeing anyone, and had lunch in the middle of the road because there wasn’t any traffic.

For miles around you only see bush, sand, and a few trees. It is a large savannah.

The road was uneven, and our friends did not have a 4-wheel drive.

So it happened that we had to cross a riverbed (a wadi) that had a lot of rocks in it, larger than we could comfortably drive the car over.

Turning back was no option, nor was waiting for help. There was nobody to call.

The only solution was to lift the car and put stones under the wheels to allow it to cross larger boulders.

For that we used the simplest, and probably most ancient piece of technology: the lever. Archimedes already said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

In the bush we found a 3-meter pole, we levered it on a rock, and used it to lift the car where we wanted it.

The lift was quite easy, as a little calculation shows. We needed to lift about half the weight of the car, let’s say 400 kilogram, with a 1:10 lever. That requires a downward force of 40 kilograms, which you can get by just leaning in your bodyweight.

That is the essence of technology. Creating constructs out of material that help apply force in a designed, intentional, and purposeful way.

It took us about an hour to cross the riverbed, but the memory of that experience has lasted a lifetime.

Ingenuity and the use of materials at hand had gotten us out of a difficult situation.

At the same time, we should be aware of the risks of using any technology. In this case, we need to consider if the pole is strong enough for the forces that we apply. Apparently it was. But the other tool in the story, the car, although sufficient to bring us to Tsavo, was not sufficient to bring us across Tsavo.

It looks like a big leap from that situation to IT and artificial intelligence, but the principles remain the same. Artificial intelligence is the newest technology that we apply to a data processing task.

AI allows us to do certain data processing tasks easier, better, faster. But to really benefit from this technology we have to, as always, understand the materials and how to apply them.

The “materials” here are the various tools, models, frameworks and services. How to apply them involves understanding their strengths, weaknesses, and risks.

In my recent travels I used AI to give me a morning brief on the activities of the day. It processes a number of unstructured mails, removes the noise, and sends me a summary.

That saves me time, and makes it easier to find the most relevant information.

Whether it is a wooden pole in the savannah, or the latest AI models and harnesses, technology gives us power. The question is who else has their hands on the lever.

But what is power in a tech context? That is what the next unit is about.