Category: Collaborative Age value production system

How To Deal with Frequent Mistakes of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is quite often mistaken, and that’s something we must know and understand (see for example the previous post on ‘How Deployment of Facial Recognition Creates Many Issues‘). The best example I’ve read of the problem of humans not reacting adequately is highlighted in the post ‘Pourquoi l’intelligence artificielle se trompe tout le temps’ (Why AI is always mistaken – in French) when it evokes the Kasparov vs Deep Blue chess match (recounted here in English ‘Twenty years on from Deep Blue vs Kasparov: how a chess match started the big data revolution‘)

At some stage during the game, the computer did something which looked quite stupid. And it was actually stupid, but one could although believe it was brilliantly unconventional! Kasparov was destabilized. In reality, that was actually a mistake by the AI program! “The world champion was supposedly so shaken by what he saw as the machine’s superior intelligence that he was unable to recover his composure and played too cautiously from then on. He even missed the chance to come back from the open file tactic when Deep Blue made a “terrible blunder”.”

Because of the manner in which AI gets trained, it will necessarily create a high ratio of mistakes and errors when implemented. The challenge is for us to identify those occasions and not get destabilized by them.

First, we should probably get a systematic warning associated with the AI output about the possibility of a mistake. And, we should remain conscious and critically aware of the possibility of a mistake by running some simple checks for the adequacy of the output.

This high error rate of AI is a problem for high reliability applications of course, and we should also see some emergence of techniques to correct this problem or provide technological checks and balances to avoid inadvertent mistakes that could have actual consequences.

Still just knowing that AI is prone to making mistakes is something important we need to recognise and be able to respond to.

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How Deployment of Facial Recognition Creates Many Issues

In this Reuters investigation ‘Rite Aid deployed facial recognition systems in hundreds of U.S. stores‘, the major problems of deploying this technology massively are exposed. At the end it seems that this pharmacy brand has actually renounced using it for the moment.

The primary intent of this implementation was security and theft prevention. Beyond issues in the information of the public on the application of the technology, it seems that there have been many instances of wrong positive recognition, in particular with minority people of color. In addition the paper adds the links of the technology to China which reflects the fear that facial recognition data may be misused or the system manipulated.

Of course facial recognition software could be used for positive usage such as individualized service, but other technologies would also allow it. The current lack of reliability of the technology, and the fact that it is deployed without the proper guarantee for appeal for wrongly identified people is a concern. This probably calls for a strong regulation how people from the public can access the data and what is done with it.

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How Not To Be Forgotten in the Collaborative Age

I like this quote from Benjamin Franklin “If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.” I take that to heart writing books. But what does that mean in today’s collaborative age with the internet?

The quote provides two interesting alternatives so that you get remembered. In any case it reminds us about our own impermanence and what we can do to try to overcome it.

Writing since the writing revolution has been the way to get memories and information pass reliably from generation to generation. The intent is still valid today although the number of things written or otherwise published or created increases dramatically; and the barrier to writing and broadcasting is much lower than it was in Franklin’s time where being published was reserved to the few.

I still believe that quality, thoughtful writing is still important beyond what we all publish on all sorts of media. The process itself is enriching, and the outcome is a sounder basis for people to build upon – as long as it is worth reading. Even in the collaborative age, quality writing remains important; as are all creative work based on image or video. What counts is the effort and the depth of the expression.

Express yourself in ways that are worth reading, watching or listening to, and that will stand the test of time. Do the effort to reach that quality!

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How We Need to Recognize the Psychological Price of Entrepreneurship

This not-so-new 2013 Inc. article ‘The Psychological Price of Entrepreneurship‘ is still quoted often as a reference as it describes in no uncertain terms the issues entrepreneurs have to struggle with.

And it is true from my personal experience that the responsibility of a company can be sometimes heavy to bear in particular when the economy is down, that you may have to lay-off employees and lose a lot of what you struggled to build. This is compounded for entrepreneurs who are trying generally to build something that has never been done before, with a high degree of risk.

“Successful entrepreneurs achieve hero status in our culture. […] But many of those entrepreneurs […] harbor secret demons: Before they made it big, they struggled through moments of near-debilitating anxiety and despair–times when it seemed everything might crumble.”

The article also gives some advice: make time for your loves ones; try to limit your financial exposure in particular if it may affect your family; exercise sufficiently.

How to overcome the stress of being an entrepreneur is certainly a discriminating factor for founders. It is quite important to know what one is actually looking for in his life. And we need to recognize this struggle when we meet founders even if they have to put on their ‘successful entrepreneur’ face. They often need support and encouragement, and we need to provide it whenever we can.

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How Advertising is Often Wrongly Pointed As the Source of Internet Problems

This Atlantic paper ‘the Internet original sin‘ provides a reminder of the damaging effect of a web funded by advertising. It proposes, as many papers have proposed before, an alternate funding model.

“Advertising became the default business model on the web, “the entire economic foundation of our industry,” because it was the easiest model for a web startup to implement, and the easiest to market to investors. Web startups could contract their revenue growth to an ad network and focus on building an audience.”

Of course funding through advertising has led to some effects that are not quite positive: development of means to defeat search algorithms, need to pay to get promoted anywhere, and the most important, the trend by social networks to increase stickiness by making sure you only see stuff that conforms to your worldview.

I am not sure however that we should blame advertising so much. Historically, newspapers, radio and TV stations have also been mainly funded through advertising. This is not new. What is new is the power of digital to leverage advertising to a new level of personalization, up to showing a personal view of the internet to each user; and that the market for advertisement has now become global. In the case of newspaper, radio and TV, regulations have been introduced to allow a balanced approach to what was being broadcast. That’s probably what is missing for internet now.

It may be difficult to introduce regulations because they need to be global and internet has become a playground for power ambitions, but it is definitely possible to impose regulations nationally or by region, and that’s what should be done.

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How the Split of Internet is Linked to the Strategic Value of User Data

Following up on our previous post ‘How Internet is Getting Increasingly Split‘, let reflect for a moment on the reason for this. I don’t believe it is just censorship. Of course the censorship motivation applies for many non-democratic countries, but the reason is probably deeper and has been highlighted by the TikTok events: ownership and access to user data.

Access to user data allows all sorts of manipulations as people can be targeted individually based on their preferences and hot buttons. It also provides an insight into the private life of individuals and may help setup compromission. In brief, it provides a strategic advantage that can be used to disrupt of manipulate social situations. It is a useful source of information for cyberwar, as shown by manipulations historically performed on American, British and less developed nations elections.

The recognition of the strategic value of user data is an interesting issue at the brink of the exponential development of the Internet of Things (IoT): even more data will be generated that is linked to our private life, and often while we are not conscious of what is really happening. This will in turn bring forth even more push to avoid foreign powers to have access to user data, necessarily promoting an increased split of internet. Global companies will have to develop strategies to locate data in the countries they are generated and provide security as to the usage by foreign powers.

The strategic value of user data has now been recognized, as well as its potential negative usage. And one can expect more consequences in the near future.

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How Internet is Getting Increasingly Split

A good summary of what is currently happening on the internet is given in those posts by Darin Stewart ‘Welcome to the Splinternet‘ and ‘TikTok is just the latest victim of the fracturing Internet‘. Of course the trend has been around for some time, but it now definitely clear that internet is not any more global, but multiple.

“What was promised as the great agent of globalization is rapidly becoming an enabler of isolationism. The borderless, digital frontier international businesses and organizations aligned themselves to is fragmenting. New borders and checkpoints are emerging.” “Technical fragmentation currently prevents roughly 25% of internet users, most in emerging markets, from accessing 70% of the Web. Political fragmentation has already divided the Internet into East and West, but recent developments are further divvying up the web into strongly bordered regional federations.”

This fragmentation has been driven by legal aspects (data protection laws), copyright and commercial issues, political issues (China being the best known, but India also participating) etc. It is quite interesting that this trend is parallel to the trend to reel back from globalization.

“Over time it creates a parallel reality that is extremely difficult to break out of. When amplified by the walled garden effect users are separated from non-aligned segments of the web as firmly as if they were on different networks altogether.”

When travelling it is possible to overcome some of the access limitations but when staying in one’s country, only advanced tricks will allow to overcome these limitations. Most people will increasingly be participating to a more limited version of internet. And that is probably reinforce the current issue of people being increasingly caught in the bubble of their own opinion and social network.

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How Conversations with Artificial Intelligence Become Realistic

In this post ‘Conversations with GPT-3‘ we get some interesting insight about the experience of conversing with an artificial intelligence, on the basis of the largest natural language AI around, which was released in July 2020.

GPT-3 is “Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. It is the third-generation language prediction model in the GPT-n series created by OpenAI, a for-profit San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research laboratory” [Wikipedia]. It is one of the largest AI system produced so far.

“GPT-3 has been trained on most of what humanity has publicly written. All of our greatest books, scientific papers, and news articles. We can present our problems to GPT-3, and just like it transcended our capabilities in Go, it may transcend our creativity and problem solving capabilities and provide new, novel strategies to employ in every aspect of human work and relationships.”

The post presents some example of the texts that were predicted by AI. Well, the conversations are quite astounding even if of course, what “Wise Being” says (it is the name of the machine” is extracted from what we could call common knowledge. Take for example the conversation around Love.

The conclusion is that very soon we’ll be chatting with AI bots without even realizing that we are. They will regurgitate our entire knowledge in the right way, providing deep reach out in our collective culture and production.

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How to Deal with the Gig Economy

The book by Diane Mulcahy ‘The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want’ provides an oversight of the changes in the modern employment market, and pieces of advice about how to get successful in that game.

Before quoting the main principles of the book, I need to emphasize that it is quite hard to become successful in the gig economy, as it is in any other endeavor. But even more so because the individual performance can be expected to follow a power-law curve as in any complex market, with the top performers pocketing much more than the average performer. It requires a lot of focus and effort, and many will struggle. Nevertheless, here are the principles recommended and developed in the book:

  1. Define Your Personal Vision of Success
  2. Diversify and expand your network
  3. Create Your Own Security net
  4. Connect Without Networking (decide if inbound or outbound marketing is best for you)
  5. Face Personal Fears by Reducing Risk
  6. Take Time Off between Gigs
  7. Be Mindful About Time – focus on what matters
  8. Be Financially Flexible by restructuring your financial life
  9. Think Access , Not Ownership
  10. Save for a Traditional Retirement . . . but Don’t Plan on Having One

As you can see in the above, a lot of advice is actually on changing one’s definition of success and making sure that your financial situation is flexible and resilient (or even considering living with less income on average). It is somewhat defensive at times. I tend to believe that entering the gig economy is a personal choice that needs to correspond to a flexible way of life, and that many people may be overwhelmed by the effort.

I believe we have not yet found the right social model for the gig economy. While I am convinced that in the future there will be more flexibility in the workplace and in terms of career, the economy is not yet mature to allow this to happen with the right social support network.

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How Entrepreneurs Must Overcome Many False Assumptions

This post by Tim Berry crosses some t’s and dots some i’s in the field of entrepreneurship: ‘7 Very Common False Assumptions in Entrepreneurship‘.

Some key points mentioned in the post that I find very refreshing:

  • going for a high price option is a good way for a start-up, and often less capital intensive than the low cost option
  • It’s very difficult to be the first in a new market
  • a lot lies into commercial and marketing, and not necessarily in having the best product
  • Don’t overwork

On the latter we need to remember that starting a start-up is more like a marathon than a sprint and we need to keep the distance!

I believe this post reminds me how important it is for founder to be accompanied by mentors with experience in creating businesses so as not to fall into basic mistakes.

And I absolutely love the quote at the start of the post: “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.” — Mark Twain

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How Car Software is the New Automotive Battleground

This excellent post by Philippe Chain ‘Code, on wheels‘, explains how software is becoming the main differentiator in the automotive industry. And that the industry is becoming ripe for disruptors not originally from the automotive industry.

“Software will play a central role in the upcoming car revolution. Unless legacy carmakers quickly reinvent themselves, new players will fill the gap to provide an OS and an app ecosystem.” The author explains how Tesla is actually run as a software company at its core, upending the traditional organisation and approach of historical automotive companies. More than half of Tesla engineers are software engineers! Software updates are performed on a continuous basis in pure agile style.

This is very different from the traditional approach where everything needs to be specified in advance, and where development is split between various suppliers which need to be strictly coordinated.

The industry begins to understand that the company that will build the standard for the next automotive operating system will have a substantial competitive advantage. Seeing the danger, VW has announced that it gets in the race. Cars have today 100 million lines of code and very soon 200 to 300 million! “the likeliest evolution for the car industry is to see a competition between traditional carmakers and tech giants — with Tesla as the maverick — to come up with a car OS that will set the standard for the entire industry“. Not to mention the possibility to have an app ecosystem built on those standard OS.

The automotive industry is ripe for a revolution and not too many historical players may survive. Exciting times ahead!

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How Automation Increases Pressure on Basic Production Positions

As part of the current debates about the impact of automation of our work environment, I found this post ‘How Hard Will the Robots Make Us Work (In warehouses, call centers, and other sectors, intelligent machines are managing humans, and they’re making work more stressful, grueling, and dangerous)’ quite interesting.

The point of the article is that in many instances, workers get monitored by algorithms that catch much more than a human manager would do in terms of fine grained performance and efficiency, and that it leads to far more pressure on workers. “These automated systems can detect inefficiencies that a human manager never would — a moment’s downtime between calls, a habit of lingering at the coffee machine after finishing a task, a new route that, if all goes perfectly, could get a few more packages delivered in a day. But for workers, what look like inefficiencies to an algorithm were their last reserves of respite and autonomy, and as these little breaks and minor freedoms get optimized out, their jobs are becoming more intense, stressful, and dangerous”

The article goes on to describe a number of grueling examples, but what has struck me is that most examples relate to production positions that are close to being automated, and based on hourly compensation. The only exception in the article is a software engineer whose productivity and presence is monitored at tight intervals, but apparently he is supposed to provide run-of-the-mill coding. The point is quite clear that for those production positions, automation is stressful because they are increasingly expected to be as good as robots – until they will be replaced. This however does not apply to more complex positions related to creativity and system architecture, where productivity can’t be measured the Industrial-Age way.

Still, this is a warning that for production positions that are close to being automated, the current development of AI and automated monitoring systems will create a stressful environment through closer supervision and this may be an area where regulation may need to intervene to protect workers.

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