Future of tech, workplace and us in news – May 28

Below is a collection of stories, articles and views from the last week that shift and nudge my thinking and views on AI, future of work and tech.

“We want AI systems to be accurate, reliable, safe and non-discriminatory, regardless of their origin,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Friday. The G7 leaders mentioned generative AI, the subset popularised by the ChatGPT app, saying they “need to immediately take stock of the opportunities and challenges of generative AI.” All this is a reflection of sense of urgency to balance the emerging tech with societal safety.

AI is gaining ability to communicate with the humans through language at the pace not foreseen even by its creators. Storytelling is the key to getting us, humans, to behave in a way we do. Gods, money and many other items are not biological; these phenomena are created by us and only hold their value through our belief in them. The AI tools will fight for our intimacy… In order to manipulate people’s behaviour, there is no need to modify them physically (e.g. insert a chip into their brains) – people’s perception and subsequent acts have been altered by language for thousands of years.

I’m paraphrasing Yuval Noah Harari’s thoughts here. I highly advise to watch his recent lecture at the Frontiers below.

When I spoke to my 12 year old son about the AI and related themes, I noticed he used term ‘they’. When I asked, he corrected it to ‘it’ stating, “it clearly isn’t he or she”. How do you think?

Trust but verify? Do I still have to verify if the platform provider has done it? Yes, because they verify the tweeter not their content. It’s still your job to think critically before shouting to everyone “OMG, look what’s happening!!!”. What’s happening is that you were tricked into believing something that didn’t happen. Fake it till you make it would be the new slogan of misinformation campaigners.

Meta’s researchers used Bible in spoken and written form to teach their open-source AI model to recognise a ton of languages. But, low and behold, the source is stuffed with ancient bias and may produce all sorts of output. So, move in the right direction for preserving small languages, and it needs more work.

OpenAI leadership is calling for an international oversight body to stem the sector. However, as I’ve written before, the race to the bottom hasn’t slowed down. From the tone it feels as “we need to slow down, but before we do it, we need to win!”. Yurval Harari notes in his speech that collectively putting the foot on the brakes in the western world will not result in China or any other counterforce suddenly gaining upper hand. If they had the capabilities required to succeed, it would have already happened. Pausing to design and install an oversight body now would not risk anything for the wider society. It’s a bit like post Cold War when the US had suddenly lost its counterbalance (aka the enemy) and its politicians are desperate to find a new one. I believe the race isn’t between the players from the east and west. It’s a case of the US domestic conflict where AI leaders all want to win the race. But what waits at the other end? So perhaps the political elite should look at their donors and decide what is important in the long term – stability of the nation or their position.

A recent study showed that adversarial neural networks (ANN’s) learn similarly to human brain. If we could only make these models less power hungry (i.e. raise efficiency) and push the computing to the edge, reducing redundancy on central components, we’d be over the hill with this one. Such step would enable applying machine learning wherever the it is, and conditional awareness would raise its ability to respond fast without prior knowledge of the environment. Oh wait, is that a good thing? Or is it a bit like Terminator?

Now, how do you counter a machine that knows everything and can memorise more than you ever could? You could train your memory to learn everything you need to know, or you could simply train it to know where the tools and resources are. Either way, memory training is good.

Here’s an interesting and promising development for anyone left paralysed and unable to walk – a brain-spine interface that translates intentions to electrical signals bypassing the damaged areas. Reuters meanwhile covered Neuralink FDA approval story – not too dissimilar, but with a wider long term implication. Positive or negative – we’ll see.

Have you heard of functional music? You know, the playlists that help you focus on a specific activity like being sharp or winding down. Endel is a startup who has managed to schmooze Universal Music to partner with it in order to capture the booming market. Win for the listeners and Endel as auto-generated music will be streamed on know platforms. I’d like to know how will they deal with the plagiarism question – was it an inspiration or a copy?

Meanwhile, Spotify has been working on simplifying its advertisement business – the next time you hear your favourite podcast host reading an ad, it may not be them any more. Give it a text, voice model, sentiment and voila!

How would you feel about the World ID, a concept of an identity based on your eye iris scan? That would be your way to maintain personal privacy while proving their humanness in an economy disrupted by AI and automation, as stated by Alex Blania, the cofounder and CEO of Tools for Humanity. TFH is a spinout of Worldcoin that Sam Altman started a few years ago. Investors are feeling bullish and pouring $115m into the project. I’d suggest reading the privacy notice and would like to see independent third party validation of those claims.

Multilingual LLM’s are seen as giving a leg up for social media platform owners, requiring fewer humans to moderate the content created in multiple languages. However good these LLM’s are, context awareness (or knowing your territory and where you stand) still matters. There are , as covered in this Wired article, a few issues we are going to face for the foreseeable future. These are:

  • focus on large languages
  • availability of training material for minor languages or dialects
  • definition of what is harmful
  • platform owners unwillingness to share how their models work

The companies should ditch the ‘rest of the world problem’ approach to shift their products towards being used more for good than ill.

This is really positive development in identifying and taking predefined action on the hateful content, bot in images and text. Kudos to Microsoft for developing such toolset. Yet, the time will tell how affective it is. Hope for the best!

Listen to Nilay Patel talking to Kevin Scott, a Microsoft CTO for AI. Some takeaways, but not all – spend that hour, it’s worth it.

  • Co-pilot creation – Microsoft doesn’t have the knowledge of the business users to build tools that help *this role in that sector*, but that person has. Giving them the ability to compose the co-pilot is an interesting development. As Microsoft owns the ecosystem, how will they share the additional revenue gained from AI co-pilot developments?
  • I really like the idea of media provenance system – put an invisible cryptographic watermark and manifest into the files showing the receiver where it originated from. This could be a boost to digital art and another hit at pirated content.
  • Not entirely clear in Microsoft position on compensation to the creative industry whose output is used to train the AI engines.
  • What is a definition of a good platform? Microsoft wants to encourage people to build assistive tools. Open platform doesn’t mean full access to the underlying tech but ability to build your stuff via API’s. What would you build when the unit economics enable you to start as price and quality leader, and then develop your revenue stream? Without burning some states pension fund. Would you focus on the tech or using the platform?
  • Common and separate objectives with Microsoft and Open AI, oversight boards and partnerships, and much more.

Future of tech, workplace and us in news – May 22

CBinsights has released Q1 ’23 AI funding report. There’s a notable drop compared to the previous period, but that’s expected considering overall belt-tightening in the tech sector. At the same time three generative AI companied raised enough dough to gain a unicorn status, and only one of them from the US! Overall, M&A deals are up and funding is sure to return to the 2022 level or surpass it by the end of the year. Money doesn’t like standing still…

“Money likes speed” painting in the Viirelaid Embassy in Tallinn.

Heard of Steven Levy’s Plaintext newsletter? If not, sign up for it. If not, then after reading his latest conversation output with Gary Marcus, the AI critic turned into even more of oneself lately. Marcus has an interesting idea of forming one International Agency for AI, a non-profit to guide and guard after the industry and nation states alike.

Caryn AI is a girlfriend for hire service, I mean, a digital twin of a Snapchat influencer designed to reduce loneliness. Or that’s what its creator states whilst hoping to pull in $5m a month at the engagement rate of $1 per minute. “CarynAI is a step in the right direction to allow my fans and supporters to get to know a version of me that will be their closest friend in a safe and encrypted environment,” Caryn Marjorie added. No, there’s no altruism in play here, pure capitalism. Sex sells.

Responsible AI is a theme that all major developers aim to invest in. After all, the trust or lack of it thereof, can change the users perception of a company and encourage them to look for alternatives. When an AI system recommends us more positive tone in messages, we are likely to receive more positive response. The technique is called latent persuasion. The same applies when the tone and messages of the chatbot are negative or biased (again, the bias may be by design). And biased they are, reflecting the values of the creators and validators. A study called Whose opinions do LLM’s really reflect? covers how we, the users of these systems, behave based on the tools we use. So our choice of tools will impact how we are perceived by others.

Who’s on the bus and who’s still trying to catch it? Ben Thompson covers Google I/O and related regulatory topics in his excellent Stratchery post.

Google has been in news with its Bard AI chatbot, but not so much with the work its been doing with pharmaceuticals industry attempting to cut the lengthy process of discovery/trial and time to market.

A subset of US voters are scared of the AI race. However, I have to agree with the words of founder of Anyscale, a UC Berkeley professor Ion Stoica “Americans may not realize how pervasive AI already is in their daily lives, both at home and at work”. Unknown raises fears, but are your congressmen any wiser than an average Joe on the potential benefits and threats the AI race can pose to your future? Ask them.

How very true! Corporate L&D often focuses on desired outcomes from the management, not from the people (those to be trained). Are we providing the most accurate skills training at the people who need it most at their time? Often we don’t. How to improve it?

New York Public Schools Chancellor has decided to remove ban on using chatGPT in NY public schools and instead start teaching the kids on the ethics of AI and opportunities it brings. MIT has celebrated Day of AI and created a starter curriculum for kids up to the age of 18 to get started with the topic. MIT’s RAISE programme looks good as a starting point. Have your kids school tried it yet?

Grammarly was chosen by many as their go-to tool for churning out readable coherent content. As tech giants are eating its lunch, Grammarly is desperate not to lose (paying) customers and claims it’s there for good. It feels that deep integration with Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure is a step towards showing off its product capabilities and eventually being acquired by MSFT. Agree with me?

Workplace and people

A friend penned a post on millennial workforce and currently prevalent business culture asking a number of questions at each section. I thought about it and felt need to chip in. As I do.

First things first. I think the behaviours Nicolas describes in his post do not only apply to the Generation Y and Z, they are seen to take root across the business landscape. Not everyone is directly contributing to digital economy yet many are affected by the changes it has brought about. Take any traditional trade. A brief look at its state today shows how much has changed within past 15 years. Supply chain has become global, primary distribution channel is online, delivery often by gig-economy workers who get paid per delivery and are not seen taking pride in their work as the quality suffers. Many early retirees have returned after realising the type of lifestyle their pension actually supports. Many are freelancing – not out of choice but necessity. Often they have no option but to as the organisations they work with (not for!) have their business models dependent on reduced staff overheads. Add what we sued to call “cost of doing the business” and you have no business. In some areas its global trade, in others high business rates. We have moved from stable, permanent positions to short term contracts. Many of us who have spent around 20 years working have changed their jobs three times at least, some even more. Even those of us on permanent positions don’t tend to stay with the organisations for more than three years on average. Careers built merely on longevity are out, sharp minds and clear objectives in. Or at least should be so. We are likely to see inequality in workplace for some time until the Big Reset comes. And it will come, either in form of Universal Income or nationalisation of (by then still traditional) industries.

I personally favour UI route. When set at 70% minimum wage it will enable people to just get by (on council property – hey, different topic!) and top up their earnings by freelancing and working with the organisations of their choosing. Some argue that it should be minimum wage, though latter camp will have hard time standardising this even in EU context (€1400 as minimum in France is above average in Estonia). Money will be digitised and all income over certain threshold is taxed as now, hopefully reducing incentive and options for fraud. Getting rid of physical money will also reduce the asset ownership cost to central bank and thus should again leave more to fund UI. Quartz @ Work has a very timely piece on full employment and fulfillment. Full employment is felt as cornerstone for Western society and people find usually hard explaining the gaps in their careers. Instead being out of work should choice when people feel they need a break followed by successful return to work provided people have necessary skills and attitude to perform as expected.

The themes Nicolas writes about are well covered by many – empowerment, ownership, flexibility, purpose, opportunities and new types of work. Let’s look at each once more then.

Many, not just younger expect to be empowered to make and have ownership about their decision making and outcomes. They expect to be treated as equals. Not equally capable and experienced but to get equal opportunities. Many have argued, especially about apprenticeships schemes that it’s all about them and not us, the employers. But this statement is untrue. The young, when motivated and allowed to make small mistakes, learn from them and not be punished will pay back with energy they have and willingness to throw all they have to complete the project on time. They are willing to shed that shy self in order to achieve the deadlines. Many more seasoned colleagues would try to delegate the task to someone else and stay in mediocristan. Working with apprentices 18 years ago in my own small IT business and recently with fast -streamers has shown me time and again how much value these young people can deliver with right level of coaching, delegation and independence. But wait, this applies equally to more seasoned employees as well. To ensure they don’t actively avoid decision making and taking ownership however, the organisation need to have reached necessary level of maturity. Not quite teal level, but micro-management must be out and trust in.

Flexibility in workplace is nothing new. Also not new is the notion of flexibility when it comes to choosing the place of work. I have a few friends who have been working from home study since mid-nineties. Fine, their jobs enabled this (editor, consultant, marketer, software programmer) but were never seen as revolutionary, rather as their choice. What is new is not just where but when we choose to work. Dan Pink spoke in recent RSA event about timing. I can attest to his conclusion of timing the work. There are generally three stages – peak, through and recovery. In my case its a bit like this:

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I’m usually switched on in the mornings and can stay focused for long periods of time until noon. Sometimes longer. This is the time to work on analysis and produce written content. Then comes the slump where I’n not the sharpest pencil in the box. That’s the good time for admin. Neither of the periods is suitable for meetings. When we are in focus mode, we find hard to accept others’ ideas. During the through we are simply unable to absorb any information. This is worst time for any meetings or workshops. Hence I try to schedule all my meetings (virtual or in person) either right before lunch or after 15:00. When the recovery kicks in, we are all more agreeable. This is flexibility we should grant to all our colleagues. We should deploy tools that allow people to submit the best time they are ready to collaborate in, and avoid any meetings outside this space.

You could say that people fall into two categories. First is static, second dynamic. The second crowd are after opportunities to prove how good they are. Get some testosterone going, tick that thing off the list and get dopamine kick. Feels good, right? It tends to be the younger crowd who are looking for ways to either gain some new knowledge or participate in that new venture. Perhaps it pays off. And if it didn’t, no biggie. Next time they’ll try again. What we need to encourage is looking for opportunities in the organisation. These may be incremental improvements to the process or product that drive our businessesuu forward. It’s very rare when a groundbreaking change is introduced and effectively managed to production. Th rest of the time everything is in beta. And changing. We need to create culture where risk is seen as both threat and opportunity, not just first.

Take all of these and… nothing works when people don’t have purpose in their working lives. Purpose and meaning is much coveted topic for the jobs over the threshold where increase in pay will have no effect on quality of output.

The types of work that existed in the fringe have become mainstream in Western economies and those previously taken for granted have disappeared. Manufacturing is a good example. Working for Saint-Gobain in late 90’s and first part of 21st century I saw automation and streamlining of supply chains in order to reduce the cost of product. Robotics found its way into assembly previously required highly skilled workforce performing tasks demanding precision. Need to reduce waste and not optimise but maximise output at highest level of quality will see new plants employing a handful of highly skilled operators work of many machines.

We used to cook at home and only occasionally order takeaway food. Especially in urban environment this has become mainstream – people value their time and are willing to pay for food and delivery. The delivery has often been outsourced to likes of Deliveroo and fulfilled by men on bikes searching their way through maze. They are often as lost as Über drivers. Everyone as taxi driver on their spare time? That’s not really valuing ones time, it may be seen as the only option to earn enough to live in a modern metropolis. Are these jobs going to be here in 10 years? Probably not, technology will develop along with legal framework to automate these jobs.

What will the future of work look like for us in the knowledge work? We’ll have many jobs over our working lives, quite possibly will be looking for work every few years and working for and with many different organisations. This raises need to be adaptable to the change. I thought learning enough but not mastering a single skill was not sufficient. Shallow generalist over highly skilled specialist? A recent Medium post by Michael Simmons nicely builds the case for polymath as probably best placed to survive in the unknown future. It’s not just transferable skills we need. We need to be able to synthesise useful elements from different disciplines to meet the future challenges.

 

I hope this sparks some debate.

Books on work

I have been checwing through a list of books on work and workspace. Read, thought about, considered and discussed with other like-mind individuals:

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

The Smarter Working Manifesto

The Joy of Work?: Jobs, Happiness and You

Business Reimagined: Why work isn’t working and what you can do about it

First book on the list was kind starting point thinking about the work and workplace/workspace as such. What really motivates us to do what we do and how we do those activities. Finding flow as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes here is a truly rewarding feeling, however can be exhaustive after long periods.

Smarter Working Manifesto is discussion about the finding the most appropriate place for tasks we perform – office, home, caffe shop, library, etc. This also lists good amount of food for thought for those planning to offer flexible working to their workforce.

The Joy of Work discusses our relationship with work – why we prefer to work rather than sit idle. Loads of references and long list of suggested reading. Best to read it and conclude whether applicable to your situation or not – Amazon reviews help.

And still to go through:

Planning Office Spaces: A Practical Guide for Managers and Designers

Workplace by Design: Mapping the High-Performance Workscape

Sound Business: How to Use Sound to Grow Profits and Brand Value

The Human Fabric

A Brief History of Tomorrow: The Future Past and Present

Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

The Future of Management

The Shift

Jason Fried / remote work

Just listened to Jason Fried speech / presentation in TED, where he talks about why work does not get done at the workplace. Bizarre, I know. I have been taking Fridays as my ‘admin days’ – just to be away from distraction. Turn Out-of-Office reply on and get on with the stuff from that week.

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