Last week, HR platform Lattice announced that it would be, to quote CEO Sarah Franklin, "the first company to lead in the responsible employment of AI ‘digital workers’ by creating a digital employee record to govern them with transparency and accountability." This buzzword-laden nonsense, further elaborated on in a blog post while adding absolutely nothing in the process, suggested that Lattice would be treating digital workers as if they were employees, giving them "official employee records in Lattice," and "securely onboarding, training and assigning them goals," as well as performance metrics, "appropriate systems access, and even a manager, just as any person would be."

The truth is that we need more Jim Allisons and fewer Ignaz Semmelweises. Innovation takes more than having ideas and expecting others to immediately accept them. If your idea is important enough, then it is your job to take responsibility for it and see it through.

Sensory input comes in and causes minicolumns to fire in certain patterns. The resulting pattern is influenced by the input and the "tendencies" of the minicolumn that have been spatially encoded over time. Each firing pattern, each message, competes with other messages from minicolumns within its network. Through this competition each network settles on the most fit message, the message that best correlates with sensory input and the tendencies of its minicolumns.