BOFH: If the meatbags can't agree on aircon, AI will decide for them

Simon Travaglia’s latest BOFH column in The Register turns the eternal office thermostat war into a full-blown IT problem — and then toys with the idea of letting AI referee it. The long and short: the building’s HVAC went from archaic legionella-fostering plumbing to a networked controller, people fiddled with setpoints until rooms swung between arctic and Sahara, and the BOFH locked everything down to a sensible 22°C while redirecting HVAC helpdesk tickets straight to the Trash. It’s petty, glorious, and painfully familiar. Who hasn’t wanted to throw the thermostat out the window?

The thermostat wars

Travaglia sketches the chaos with affectionate contempt. Morning cold, someone turns the system on and cranks it to “boil the kettle” temperatures; an hour later another occupant freezes the place to absolute zero. CO₂ sensors and fresh-air fans join the farce, producing temperature rebounds that solve nothing. The BOFH’s cure: lock the controllers, set a reasonable baseline, and call it a day. Short-term pain. Long-term peace. Simple, if you don’t enjoy being part of an ongoing civic argument about whether sleeveless tops are “work-appropriate.”

AI takes the wheel — but should it?

Cue the twist: the Boss asks, “Surely AI could do something?” and the PFY nearly wets himself at the prospect. The trio brainstorms inputs — temperature, occupancy, CO₂, maybe calendar events — and flirt with the idea of handing control to an algorithm. It has been reported that the column even jokes about Bikram Choudhury being in the training data — allegedly explaining an AI’s sudden enthusiasm for sauna-like settings. Funny. Scary. And oddly of-the-moment: as offices hand more mundane decisions to software, who picks the comfort metric? And who complains when the AI decides your summer sweater is a human-rights violation?

Sources: The Register