How Automation Should Not Be Marketed as Intelligent

There is a lot being written these days about putting some limits to the hype of ‘Artificial Intelligence’. In this interesting post on Forbes ‘Automation Is Not Intelligence‘, the point is made that while calling stuff ‘AI-enabled’ is trendy, it does nothing to create more intelligence!

In particular, the article makes the point that automation is not intelligence. Increased automation fosters productivity, but it is only to make repeatable dumb tasks quicker and more efficiently. However there seem to be a trend to mix both aspects in current marketing.

“Vendors that push automation solutions as intelligent are potentially hurting the industry. If customers are lead to believe that various automation solutions are what they can expect out of AI systems and humans are required to add intelligent components on their own to call their systems intelligent, then the industry is heading for a rapid correction.”

The issue is of course that there is excessive hype around everything artificially intelligent (supposedly). “While there is a lot of great, new innovation that’s pushing the industry forward towards more intelligent systems capable of many of the challenging areas that have previously not been able to be solved due to extreme complexity or the need for human labor, there are just as many companies who are using the term AI as more of a marketing ploy or a way to raise money.”

There will be a correction in the industry when people realize what are really the limits of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ technology (read this other interesting post ‘It’s not Artificial Intelligence, it’s a new level of automation‘). Let’s not call everything intelligent, for the moment not a lot is really except humans.

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How Our Phones Are Listening to Everything

Following up on our previous post ‘How We Get Tracked by Our Phones and by People We Don’t Imagine‘, it’s even worse: our phones are constantly listening too! This USA Today column ‘You’re not paranoid: Your phone really is listening in‘ covers some interesting details.

It appears there is a strong suspicion that new marketing approaches is to serve adds based on some key words that are listened by the phone.

“In mid-2018, a reporter for Vice experimented to see just how closely smartphones listen to our conversations. To test his phone, the journalist spoke preselected phrases twice a day for five days in a row. Meanwhile, he monitored his Facebook feed to see if any changes occurred. Sure enough, the changes seemed to arrive overnight.”

Of course there is some convenience in being able to instruct your phone or device by voice (although I still find it odd and prefer to type), but it obviously comes with some drawbacks.

So if you want to have a really important discrete conversation, have your phone somewhere else. Even when it’s off, someone may still listen to you!

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How We Get Tracked by Our Phones and by People We Don’t Imagine

We get permanently tracked by our phones… and they don’t even try to hide it! Like me you probably receive on a regular basis a Google Maps recap of the previous month. At the start I found those emails quite creepy, now I guess I got used to them.

My location data for January 2020

Nevertheless this excellent New York Time visualization ‘ONE NATION, TRACKED: an investigation into the smartphone tracking industry‘ shows the extend it takes when applied to the entire population.

The most interesting part is that although the dataset of the location of 12 million phones provided for research is supposed to be anonymous, it proves quite easy to associate a phone with an individual based on his location pattern. Actually it is not quite possible to anonymise a data set of locations.

And the scariest bit – the data did not originate from a phone network provider or a GAFA. It “originated from a location data company, one of dozens quietly collecting precise movements using software slipped onto mobile phone apps. You’ve probably never heard of most of the companies — and yet to anyone who has access to this data, your life is an open book.“

I encourage you to read and watch the infographics of this paper to really understand what we have all accepted to get into. It would be quite easy for non scrupulous users of the database – or some surveillance state – to know exactly what we are up to.

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How Superstar Firms Are the Result of the Collaborative Age

In this interesting post ‘Superstar firms and market concentration‘ the economist Tyler Cowen quotes a paper that rebuts the notion that market concentration is rising because of inadequate antitrust concentration. The thesis is that super companies arise because of the collaborative age: global market availability, communication capabilities.

“If globalization or technological changes push sales towards the most productive firms in each industry, product market concentration will rise as industries become increasingly dominated by superstar firms, which have high markups and a low labor share of value-added.”

The authors then make a number of predictions including that the pattern should be visible internationally, and that superstar concentrated firms will be where productivity increases most.

Still, the Fourth Revolution has created a concentration that needs to be regulated somehow. But we may underestimate the value of the possible scaling effect brought by modern communication capabilities.

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How the Paperclip-Maximiser Syndrome Has Become a Meme of AI

Have you heard about the paperclip-maximiser syndrome? It is a viral game and is used as a meme for negative consequences of a too powerful Artificial Intelligence. If this AI’s only objective is to improve paperclip production it may finally exploit all of Earth’s resources and beyond doing just that – destroying everything else in its path. This Wired Column explains the idea: ‘The Way the World Ends: Not with a Bang But a Paperclip‘. (an alternative AI meme seems to be the strawberry-picking AI transforming the Earth in a single strawberry plantation)

In this interesting speech ‘Dude, you broke the future!‘, Charlie Stross a known Science Fiction author refers to the Elon Musk feared singularity exactly as the “paper syndrome”… and then points wisely that “Musk isn’t paying enough attention. Consider his own companies. Tesla is a battery maximizer—an electric car is a battery with wheels and seats. SpaceX is an orbital payload maximizer, driving down the cost of space launches in order to encourage more sales for the service it provides. Solar City is a photovoltaic panel maximizer. And so on. All three of Musk’s very own slow AIs are based on an architecture that is designed to maximize return on shareholder investment, even if by doing so they cook the planet the shareholders have to live on. (But if you’re Elon Musk, that’s okay: you plan to retire on Mars.)” So it seems that Elon Musk is exactly doing what he fears AI would do.

This all serves to remind us that any “intelligence” should not pursue a single goal but a balanced set of goals, because maximizing a single indicator is always at the detriment of the overall balance. This is true in management, and could possibly take unexpected proportions when AI gets involved.

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How Mindfulness Requires Compassion

Following up from the previous post ‘How We Need to Remember that Mindfulness is Difficult and Messy‘ and the excellent post by Leo Babauta ‘The Honest Guide to Mindfulness‘, the author underlines an essential element: the need for compassion – for oneself and for others.

I like the conclusion of the post: “Mindfulness is only part of the work. The work also requires compassion — for yourself and others. It requires vulnerability and the ability to open your heart. It requires honesty and the willingness to face things. It requires being willing to love things as they are, without needing to control things. It requires letting go of what you think things should be like, letting go of what you think you should have or shouldn’t have. The work requires you to be willing to be curious, to be open, to remain in not knowing.”

Mindfulness is a journey and to be successful, a measure of acceptance of oneself and others is needed. It is actually quite a necessary condition to progress beyond a certain point. Be more compassionate to yourselves and to others!

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How We Need to Remember that Mindfulness is Difficult and Messy

This excellent post by Leo Babauta ‘The Honest Guide to Mindfulness‘ reminds us that mindfulness – a highly trendy concept – is difficult and messy.

“If you’re new to mindfulness, it’s easy to get the wrong idea from all the marketing you’ll find online. Images of people at complete peace with the world and themselves, full of bliss, simply by sitting still and meditating for a few minutes … they are beautiful images, but they don’t tell the whole truth.”

It is hard to be mindful, and it will take substantial practice and exercise to reach a satisfactory mindfulness stage. Leo Babauta also underlines that it is very uncomfortable as it will real things you’d probably prefer to remain hidden.

This also means that probably much less people have reached a satisfactory level of mindfulness than what they advertise. Difficult is always filters out those that are really motivated and ready to put the effort. Much less people are probably truly mindful than what they say.

If you want to embrace mindfulness, be ready for quite a tough journey of introspection and seeing the world differently, which can be quite unsettling. Still it is quite a beneficial experience, just fasten your seat-belt!

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How to Address potential global ‘Common-Cause Failures’ like Covid-19

Following on our post ‘How the Covid-19 is a ‘Common Cause Failure’ Crisis‘, let’s examine how this type of issues or their consequences could be better prevented.

There are quite a few potential common cause failures that could affect humankind with a sizable probability. Climate change is one obvious. Another example is some kind of solar magnetic eruption that could destroy electronic systems.

How can societies be made more resilient to this type of situation? The only approach is to diversify the means to minimise the possibility that they are all affected at the same time; and in addition build-up reserves to be able to sustain a painful transition to some other operating mode.

The important aspect here is diversity. And we need to recognize that the Collaborative Age needs to foster diversity, contrary to the standardisation that was so characteristic of the Industrial Age. Diversity needs to be express itself in society setup, and also geographically. Collaborative Age does enhance diversity; our supply chains also need to follow suit.

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How the Covid-19 is a ‘Common Cause Failure’ Crisis

An aspect which strikes me in the Covid-19 crisis is that it is a typical case of a situation made significantly worse by ‘common-cause’ failures. This is a typical situation in snowballing industrial accidents, which we now see unfolding at global scale.

‘Common-cause failures’ is a situation where the same root cause affects several aspects of the system, and specifically those aspects which were supposed to back-up each other. When they happen, they worsen significantly the outcome of incidents because they remove redundancy. Recent examples in large accidents include: tsunami and subsequent flooding in Fukushima, which damaged all redundant nuclear reactor cooling systems; a flock of geese that stuck both engines at the same time on the aircraft that finally landed on the Hudson river, etc.

For industrial risk engineers, preventing common cause failures is the number one action to prevent major accidents because major accidents by definition are accidents that will bypass all redundancies built in the system.

And this is exactly what happens with the Covid-19. A lot of complaints on the availability of hospital beds and medical supplies are based on the fact that no planning considered the simultaneous problem to happen nationwide and globally. Spare capacity elsewhere was not available any more to compensate for a local overwhelming need. Europe plans was relying on China providing supplies; US emergency response was relying on relocating local casualties to other states…

Thus Covid-19 is a common cause failure and this explains the extent of the snowballing crisis we observe, as many redundancies built in our institutions and supply chains have been affected.

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How to Address the Challenge of Weak Signal Detection

As mentioned in our previous post ‘How to Explain Covid-19 Blindness‘, the Covid-19 situation illustrates the more general challenge in complex systems to identify weak signals early and specifically, those that can, with some probability, develop into a crisis of significant consequences.

It is a challenge many organisations are regularly facing. For example in my professional field, project management in complex projects, the challenge to detect weak signals early and act on them is addressed by advanced project control approaches.

Nevertheless, it remains a difficult issue. This monitoring is prone to generate many false alarms; and some actions taken early will also avoid some of those weak signals develop into a situation or a crisis. Therefore, there is a risk that responsible bodies become fed up by too many weak signals and lose their vigilance. Still, maintaining this detection capability remains obviously essential.

In the Covid-19 situation as in some other challenges of humanity, the weak signal was identified and clearly delineated at least in some pockets of medical specialists, and even in some strategic analysis by the military. What was not anticipated was the consequential impact on the economy. This was probably because of a lack of pluri-discipline linkage and scenario planning. In addition there has been a lack of anticipation as soon as the first signs of a possible looming scenario appeared.

As a learning point, it is probably worth as in all complex system issues to setup a multi-disciplinary weak signal challenge team to review on a regular basis those signals and recommend actions.

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How to Explain Covid-19 Blindness

In this post “COVID-19’s General Blindness is Also a Journalistic Failure“, Frederic Filloux explains the reasons for a lack of anticipation of journalism on the epidemics.

The observation is that while the possibilities of a pandemics were exposed in many scientific publications and widely available, journalists have not raised the alarm early. Of course this blindness is not limited to journalists, but they could have played a significant role.

According to Frederic Filloux this can be explained by loss of in-house expertise due to newsroom shrinking in the current economic situation of the press. When there is a situation, external experts are asked to help, but the very possibility of detecting a situation is lost.

According to him “Newsrooms harboring experts — in house, or more realistically, on retainers — would have been more likely to read low-noise signals or even connect the dots of apparently unrelated facts, to put together a true picture of what is unfolding.“

It is well known that it is always difficult to detect low-noise signals and raise the awareness of a wider group. But in that case, the low noise signal was apparently not even identified, which is a concern.

What could be the solution? Frederic Filloux is currently supporting the development of an AI-based content editor, and is quite confident that such solutions could help. In my mind, in an ever-accelerating world, keeping more emphasis on memory and long term approaches is also important: countries that had been exposed to SARS 15 years ago did remember what had to be done.

Lack of memory and general loss of expertise in groups that could relay the issues we are facing are certainly important culprits.

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How the AIDS Epidemics Gives Us Pointers as to Behavior Changes Post Covid-19

This interesting article in the Atlantic “How the Pandemic Will End” points an interesting parallel with the AIDS epidemics as to how behaviors changed as a result.

“The rise of HIV and AIDS completely changed sexual behavior among young people who were coming into sexual maturity at the height of the epidemic. The use of condoms became normalized. Testing for STDs became mainstream. Similarly, washing your hands for 20 seconds, a habit that has historically been hard to enshrine even in hospitals, may be one of those behaviors that we become so accustomed to in the course of this outbreak that we don’t think about them.”

We can certainly aspect that certain habits and behaviors related to health and personal hygiene will change. We can for example expect that in western countries, wearing masks in public will probably become mainstream and polite as it is in Asia (as a way to protect others from your microbes). It will become more normal to stay home when we have the flu.

Just as AIDS had a deep and profound impact on the young generation at that time, so we can expect this crisis to have a deep impact on the current younger generation as it will influence their world view for the years to come.

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