Causal reasoning is essential for understanding decision-making about the behaviour of complex `ecosystems' of systems that underpin modern society, with security -- including issues around correctness, safety, resilience, etc. -- typically providing critical examples. We present a theory of strategic reasoning about system modelling based on minimal structural assumptions and employing the methods of transition systems, supported by a modal logic of system states in the tradition of van Benthem, Hennessy, and Milner, and validated through equivalence theorems. Our framework introduces an intervention operator and a separating conjunction to capture actual causal relationships between component systems of the ecosystem, aligning naturally with Halpern and Pearl's counterfactual approach based on Structural Causal Models. We illustrate the applicability through examples of of decision-making about microservices in distributed systems. We discuss localized decision-making through a separating conjunction. This work unifies a formal, minimalistic notion of system behaviour with a Halpern--Pearl-compatible theory of counterfactual reasoning, providing a logical foundation for studying decision making about causality in complex interacting systems.

Being alive and on the internet in 2023 suddenly means seeing hyperrealistic images of famous people doing weird, funny, shocking, and possibly disturbing things that never actually happened. In just the past week, the AI art tool Midjourney rendered two separate convincing, photographlike images of celebrities that both went viral. Last week, it imagined Donald Trump's arrest and eventual escape from jail. Over the weekend, Pope Francis got his turn in Midjourney's maw when an AI-generated image of the pontiff wearing a stylish white puffy jacket blew up on Reddit and Twitter. But the fake Trump arrest and the pope's Balenciaga renderings have one meaningful difference: While most people were quick to disbelieve the images of Trump, the pope's puffer duped even the most discerning internet dwellers. This distinction clarifies how synthetic media--already treated as a fake-news bogeyman by some--will and won't shape our perceptions of reality.

AIOps looms large as a way to help push the DevOps envelope. As organizations journey down the path of DevOps maturation, sustainable IT operations and IT service management remains a challenge for many. Even advanced organizations that have managed to speed up deployment rates and improve software quality struggle to maintain the resilience of the infrastructure that supports those applications. To support DevOps speeds, a growing number of organizations are turning to AIOps--the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in IT ops--to speed up analysis of IT problems and better automate incident handling. A new study out this week from OpsRamp shows that ops pros are able to reduce mean-time-to-resolution of incidents by as much as 50% through the use of AIOps.

Looking toward a future in which AI and human skills combine to resolve problems, Higashi predicted that today's Von Neumann-based architectures and neuromorphic device will complement each other. AI also will play a role in enhancing the immersive experiences promised by virtual reality, experiences which visionaries have predicted but which thus far mankind "has never fully experienced." When the industry moved from 28nm to 14nm technologies, performance increased by fully 50 percent. "Memory, logic, and sensing make it possible for AI systems to solve problems much faster than a team of geniuses.