How the topic of Ethics of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence is Growing

As already mentioned in previous posts, I find the excellent book by Cathy O’Neil ‘Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy‘ more and more quoted in many publications. I also noticed that in the last report on AI in France by Cedric Villani, the topic of ethics was given a large place.

Ethics in Big Data and AI is essential. “Big Data processes codify the past . They do not invent the future . Doing that requires moral imagination , and that’s something only humans can provide . We have to explicitly embed better values into our algorithms , creating Big Data models that follow our ethical lead . Sometimes that will mean putting fairness ahead of profit“.

Some have complained that ethics has taken too much space in Cedric Villani’s report and that those considerations may make it harder to catch-up in the field of AI. However as recent experience shows, it is also essential not to risk the rejection of new technology because it would not be ethical, leading to crisis and non-acceptance.

Ethics and regulation in Big Data and AI is essential to create a balanced world where everyone will have opportunities. Let’s not avoid the debate and the regulations that will ensue.

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How the Fourth Revolution Removes the Benefit of Industrial Scale Effect

This interesting paper in MITSloan review ‘The End of Scale‘ addresses the impact of the data revolution on the previous benefits of scale in industrial endeavors. “New technology-driven business models are undercutting the traditional advantages of economies of scale. But large companies still have strengths to exploit — if they move quickly“.

Industrial economy of scale

In the modern world a lot of services that were only available to large organisations are now available to all. Cloud-based applications are the latest, giving access for a modest fee to large technology platforms and services that previously could only be developed by large organisations for themselves. And scale becomes are drawback, as the organisation is much less flexible: “Business in the century ahead will be driven by economies of unscale, in which the traditional competitive advantages of size are turned on their head.”

Large organisations still have huge advantages, and in particular the financial resources that allow them to buy innovation and include them in their ecosystem. Some large organisations move fast to acquire lots of innovative small companies. However, whether their integration will be fruitful remains to be seen.

Anyway, the logic of scale has disappeared and small, innovative companies can make traditional models shake on their foundations.

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How We Constantly Underestimate the Role of Luck in Our Lives

Another demonstration of the decisive role of luck in our lives is given in this excellent article from the MIT: ‘If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance‘. The initial research question is quite interesting: since capabilities like intelligence are spread according to a normal distribution, and so is work time capability, how come wealth is spread like a power curve?

A computer model has been setup that accurately predicts this effect. “The results are something of an eye-opener. Their simulations accurately reproduce the wealth distribution in the real world. But the wealthiest individuals are not the most talented (although they must have a certain level of talent). They are the luckiest. And this has significant implications for the way societies can optimize the returns they get for investments in everything from business to science.”

The model is then extended to determine what are the best strategies for spreading support for e.g. research funds for researchers. The model shows some counter-intuitive results: since past success is not predictive for future success and mostly caused by luck, spreading funds equally between all is the most effective strategy. But that’s clearly not what happens in life where successful people tend to get more.

Work out to be more lucky!

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How Our Data is Really the Property and Worth of the Apps We Use: actual demonstration

Recently I was in South East Asia when Grab announced it was buying Uber’s regional business. Immediately Uber shut down, leaving drivers and clients stranded. But the most interesting is that as part of the transaction, Uber transferred to Grab the personal data of its users: history, trips taken, ratings etc. The article ‘Grab acquiring Uber’s data trove is a major red flag. Here’s why‘ explains the issue and why most people don’t care – but should.

Although users had to manually reset an account with Grab (most people had accounts with the two services anyway), this transfer of data as part of the business transaction reminds us that our personal data belongs to the service we are using and that it is an essential source of worth of those services.

“Uber should be criticised for how it handled its data transfer. The company did not ask users for permission to transfer their data. Even by the low standards of tech companies, Uber didn’t even include a ‘click here to opt-out’ option.” Regulation about the privacy of data should definitely extend to the situation where the service we use is getting acquired.

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How Posture Can Be Heard Across the Phone

We commonly know that a smile can be heard over the phone, but what about our overall posture? In his post about ‘Mastering the sales call‘, Dom Moorhouse explains how posture is an essential part of the success of a sales call.

“Your body position and language is really important. […] Stand up and consciously smile going into the call. At the very least sit up straight; put your body into a productive state. Remember sales is primarily a transference of enthusiasm”

I find this approach interesting. It combines what we know about presenting of singing in terms of dynamic posture with the fact the effect of our posture may be instinctively heard over the phone.

So next time you have an important phone call, be careful to adopt a dynamic posture, and smile!

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How to Easily Improve Your Life: Associate with the Right People

Robin Sharma writes something which is continuously demonstrated by more and more studies (specifically on social networks): to improve your life, “associate with people who you want to be and live like“.

Robin Sharma quotes the work of a Darmouth professor, Nicholas Christakis who writes in his book ‘Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives — How Your Friends’ Friends’ Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do‘: “Social networks help us achieve what we could not achieve alone. One biological mechanism that makes behavior contagious may be the so-called mirror neuron system in the human brain. Our brains practice doing actions we merely observe in others.”

Associating with people that are what we want to become is the most effective way of changing. What about doing this more consciously?

 

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How To Properly Regulate Facebook

Following from our previous post ‘How Facebook Model is Addiction and Growth – and Why It Can’t Change‘, people talk more and more about regulating Facebook. But, as Frederic Filloux argues in his post ‘Facebook could actually benefit from a little regulation‘, that may come exactly at the right time for Facebook as it currently has a dominating position – by making harder for competitors to be compliant. This is further developed in Techcrunch ‘Regulation could actually protect Facebook, not punish it‘

 

“Why the hell would Facebook’s lider maximo welcome the intrusion of a regulator? Two reasons: it could help his business in the long run, and by the time any regulation takes effect, Facebook will have consolidated even further its already immense power.”

All agree that Facebook have very little to fear from the regulator, except if some sort of anti-trust approach would be used that would force the conglomerate to split in various entities. That was actually what allowed capitalism to overcome the large trusts and dominating capitalist companies at the beginning of the 20th century. Is forceful split of the large internet companies the solution?

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How Facebook Model is Addiction and Growth – and Why It Can’t Change

Famous blogger Om Malik‘s post ‘The #1 reason Facebook won’t ever change‘ is worth reading. It came at the beginning of Facebook’s crisis about the leakage of personal data. His point is that Facebook model is based on addiction, data gathering and sharing and it won’t change.

Om Malik describes the DNA of Facebook as “a social platform addicted to growth and engagement. At its very core, every policy, every decision, every strategy is based on growth (at any cost) and engagement (at any cost). More growth and more engagement means more data — which means the company can make more advertising dollars, which gives it a nosebleed valuation on the stock market, which in turn allows it to remain competitive and stay ahead of its rivals.”

“Facebook is about making money by keeping us addicted to Facebook. It always has been — and that’s why all of our angst and headlines are not going to change a damn thing.” So, in spite of all the discussions and show times, Facebook model is not going to change. It will try to increase its addiction and lure all the users that still resist to it.

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How to Tackle the Risk of Alternative Augmented Realities

Following up from our post ‘How Videos can now be Faked Easily And What It Means‘ and The Atlantic paper ‘The Era of Fake Video Begins‘ (or the reality ends), fake videos increasingly point towards an alternative augmented reality that will increasingly surround us – and we won’t quite need special glasses to be immersed in it.

The Atlantic paints a gloomy picture: “If the hype around VR eventually pans out, then, like the personal computer or social media, it will grow into a massive industry, intent on addicting consumers for the sake of its own profit, and possibly dominated by just one or two exceptionally powerful companies.”

“Designers of VR have described some consumers as having such strong emotional responses to a terrifying experience that they rip off those chunky goggles to escape. Studies have already shown how VR can be used to influence the behavior of users after they return to the physical world, making them either more or less inclined to altruistic behaviors.” Still, it is useful to understand this might be a possible future and respond to it.

Will be prefer to be immersed in a not so rosy reality or flee to a virtual reality that might be more perfect but make us lose sense of what’s real?

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How Videos can now be Faked Easily And What It Means

There is a deep change coming upon us: the ability to manipulate videos is now so advanced that it is easy to do and videos can’t be taken any more as proofs. This issue is discussed at length in The Atlantic paper ‘The Era of Fake Video Begins‘.

I believe the impact of this technological change is quite underestimated, in particular because it will be democratized in the next months. Until now it was easy to fake or manipulate a sound track, but much harder to do so with video; in addition videos are intrinsically more believable because “we see it with our own eyes”. New technology allows easily to replace a face in a video, or else manipulate them in an undetectable manner. And this will be a huge problem because we have come to rely on video as a means of proof (for example, equipping police forces with video cameras). As the paper says, “We’ll shortly live in a world where our eyes routinely deceive us. Put differently, we’re not so far from the collapse of reality.”

Some call these manipulated videos ‘deepfakes’ and it is quite a good image. We won”t be able to believe any more what we see. Video certification programs will have to be developed to give us trust. Regulation will have to kick-in. A new world is coming.

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How the End of the Dilberts is coming

This is a striking expression from the head of the Bank of England, as reported by Bloomberg. He even mentions “the Massacre of the Dilberts“, meaning that many bureaucratic intermediate positions will be uprooted by the technology revolution.

Is bureaucracy going to disappear in the Collaborative Age? Probably not quite. Although it was a form of organisation made to manage large quantities of information at a time where there were no computers, bureaucracy will probably still exist even if many basic tasks will be carried out by computers and AI. Nevertheless, there is a question mark as to the many people currently employed by bureaucraties in intermediate jobs that may lose their job with the technology revolution. It may be that the issue would be even more acute in banks and in the finance industry, traditionally large bureaucraties.

The traditional office worker of the 20th century will have to re-invent himself or herself. On particular important job will be to deal with those cases which will be poorly treated by automated programs. But in general, middle-level jobs may disappear in proportion compared to low-level and higher-level jobs, causing a deep change in our societies.

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How the End of the Office and Meeting Rooms Looms

This is the end of the traditional office. Many people around me, even in management positions, have no assigned desk any more. They get available desks in an open space when they turn up in the morning. They are on the road anyway, or work remotely one or two days per week. I operate myself an office-less company (since we are mainly on the road to clients anyway).

Mitch Joel considers how meeting rooms are becoming obsolete too in his post ‘Walk it Off‘: “Laptops and connectivity have fundamentally changed the way we work and maybe this type of untethered work environment is also manifesting itself in how we physically think about the definition of a meeting. I know, that walking isn’t exactly new technology, but hearing that more and more business leaders are conducting meetings during walks feels like a new-ish trend to me.”

The trend is definitely against the traditional office and meeting room. Some more traditional organisations resists but the trend is definitely there. How do you fare? When will you transform your traditional office setup?

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