Happy New AI-r?

in response to a prompt I gave to a GenAI image editor

I started the year sending out a graphic sourced from one of the AI design generators and I signed off as J.AI

Some of my friends caught onto the joke and reminded me of the time I signed off as iJay the year Apple launched its iPhone. Others reminded me how to correctly spell my name.

So, I decided to address the other elephant in the room, after the butterfly effects of geo-politics. ( Read this series of essays I anchored at the end of last year).

And that is AI- Artificial Intelligence.

Generative AI (the stuff that comes out of OpenAI‘s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, or Bard from Google or even Llama 2 from Meta and Grok from X) have captured the chatter within the white-collar world, but it is just a fraction of what’s brewing and cooking.

While text, images and videos generated by LLMs (Large language models) are upending creative fields across all types of media- movies, podcasts, advertising jingles, websites, novels, corporate collaterals; it is also reframing customer services with chatbots, voice and video enabled. No surprise here that screen writers and screen actors have been striking work, and large-scale layoffs are taking place in the backend and front-end process functions especially in traditional IT and tech enabled services sectors.

Software code that could take a team of coders months to put together is now being generated in a matter of seconds by AI. Making sure that it actually works and delivers the outcome expected is another matter, though.

But the leap of faith has been taken. Companies, startups, professionals are experimenting enmasse to find out use cases for their own use, or just for fun!

This year, however, is going to be different. Maybe the trough of disappointment that follows the euphoria of early adoption combined with the plateau of higher performance. That’s what investors who are investing their billions are betting on.

So here are my four imperatives for 2024.

AI Regulation: I had a chilling conversation with a tech governance expert who shared that tech gurus, corporate captains, and head honchos, are pushing their governments across the world for regulations. This is a first. Ever since the internet came into public domain emerging out of the US defense network (Look up DARPA, if you are interested), tech has always stayed ahead of regulation. Remember the time lag between a ride share app starting service and finally becoming regulated as a taxi hailing aggregator? Or the case of data privacy, when GDPR guidelines came into force almost a decade and many elections after populations had been subjected to targeted advertising during election time based on algorithms developed around people’s behavior.

With generative AI delivering deep fakes, flawlessly, along with ubiquitous uninterrupted social media amplification, the potential of AI to skew outcomes in elections across major democracies is no longer science fiction. Some believe that stranger outcomes may be possible with social media platform algorithms being hacked or compromised to create a stream of AI-generated content that can be customized and personalized to get a desired action from a group or even a person.

The core issue is the opacity of AI processing. No one, not even the designers who added weights and values to the core data .csv file know how the machine learns to generate the output it does after it goes into the neural network of the world wide web. This is also one reason why safeguards are necessary as many experiments have shown that left to itself, the self-generated code can potentially suggest biases of all kinds and even share details of chemicals and processes for making explosives to a kid sharing a “prompt” on wanting to make fireworks to celebrate her grandmother’s birthday.

The rules are coming. If only a basic one that ensures an extended sandbox phase for testing the output of an AI program. But whether that will be too little and too easy to bypass is something governments across the world are taking different views on. As history shows, the countries that built autobahns and freeways ended up driving the automobile revolution as opposed to the ones which put speed limits and/ or had men with flags walking in front of cars with internal combustion engines.

AI Compute: this one is for techies, and also for those who have nothing to do with it. Creating those fun videos and outlandish images need a lot of computing resources, energy, and cooling. Read, chips, electricity, and heat exchangers. That means massive data centers which house those super set of chips on circuit boards. It also means power generation and supply as well as cooling towers, air-conditioning, et al. And while the race for quantum computing is on, that doesn’t mean its only a matter of who’s got access to the biggest resource pool to pump in the investments needed. I remember back in the 80’s when a huge amount of legislative and policy back and forth was happening to import India’s first supercomputer, and then a bunch of engineers wired together something that performed as well simply by hooking together an array of commercial grade computers with innovative software.

The flip side, of course, this time around is how to beat the energy to performance ratios when the computing processes at work inside the box may be incomputable. Maybe GenAI should also have power units used indicator like Google’s search engine which presents data like how many results scanned in how many seconds. After all, energy generation has a cost and an impact in greenhouse gases.

The challenge is fundamental. A number of techies assume that AI is just a layer on top of existing digital infrastructure, the proverbial MALAI as in cream (but used by Indian techies as an acronym for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence) on top the milk. Designers on the other hand, are at work building models that upend that centralized model using distributed architecture. I remember a lot of techies in the early 2000’s downloading SETI programs, that would use the spare capacity of a laptop to run signal data searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Could this be a viable model for building AI? And that goes back to security and sandbox regulations. How would distributed architecture designs be kept secure from hackers and false attributes being inserted into the machine learning systems that power AI.

AI Use Cases:

At this point of time, most people who have used Generative AI to design efficient ways of connecting with customers, most optimal ways to organize logistics systems, (and even design greeting cards and New Year wishes like I did), are all looking at AI as a tool. Almost like another add on functionality of the web browser to find answers, or better ways to organize data and represent outputs. But it is early days yet. Think how mobiles and computing came together. If you were involved in tech in the late 90s or early 2000s, you had a brick sized handphone with battery life to support a few calls, you had a pocket digital organizer or PDA (personal data assistant not public display of affection) and a cable to sync your data with your desktop or laptop. Over the next twenty years, not only did all your handheld devices converge into one smartphone, but the number of functionalities including monitoring your health, air quality and weather based on location is simply a swipe away on your mobile screen.

We are going through a similar evolution in AI. As each launch of the next version of AI is revealing, more and more functionality is getting baked into core models like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s GPT4 or Meta’s Llama, and its happening at warp speed.

What took decades is now unfolding in months. Only to be discarded as the next new AI version is unveiled which is even more intuitive, more pervasive, and more targeted to your personal or organizational needs.

So, what should you do?

Be that kid in the sandbox! Provided the sandbox is put in place quickly and in easy reach within the park of your imagination. Connect with the child in you and allow your fun side to come into how you work, play and live. And just as you test your “believe but verify” instincts when you come across a too-good-to-be-true “deep fake”, make sure to call it out in time and not spread misinformation or be prey to disinformation. But then you already know that. After all, you have avoided potential insanity from the dopamine rush of mindlessly consuming social media content, and created your own frameworks on what to learn, where to earn from and where to spend your time and money.

My hope for 2024 is more AI use cases will be developed to combat bigger challenges like extreme weather and deliver simpler solutions for cleaner air, better water and productive land use for sustainable lifestyles. Meanwhile I will keep experimenting with more stuff I can keep signing off with j.AI.        

Keeping them on Read

Keeping them on Read

When I was in school, the English language and composition test had three letters to be written, one to the teacher or principal from a parent, another one to someone in an official capacity, say a municipal commissioner, on a public issue, asking to change bus routes or cleaning of garbage vats, and third one would be to a grandparent describing a new hobby.

The way to hack the test was to get the address line, and the signature greeting right. So, for the principal, your exalted studiousness, or for the municipal commissioner, Dear Honorable Sir and an esq. behind the name would get giggles from the class but usually high marks from the teacher.

The grandparents address line was usually hotly debated, with fellow mates struggling to convert from Hindi and Bengali; How do you translate ParamPujya or Sricharaneshu into English? We would be writing similar letters in Hindi and Bengali classes as well. We soon found out “Dearest” works fine in English.

By the time we hit the work force, handwritten letters to the bank branch manager were the only things one did, the rest was mostly on neatly composed printouts to be faxed and soon thereafter, emailed. That seemed to work for about a decade and half. With similar rules, mostly unwritten conventions, of address and sign offs taking over.

And as globalization gathered steam “Dear” was replaced by other more direct words of address such as the ubiquitously cringeworthy “Hi/Hello” and dropping the Mr./Mrs. with more LGBT awareness to simply the first name. Though, at times that became difficult as in a number of Indian cultures, the village or town name is the first name, then grandfather and then father’s name, followed by surname which could be a trade name like “mechanic, or Bottleopenerwala” if the person was a Parsi, or the lineage or community name.

Sign-offs became even more in your face. From the obsequious “I remain, Your Humble Servant” and “Yours Sincerely”, getting quickly replaced with Thanks, or Regards or versions of that such as Many Thanks and Best Regards. I didn’t hold my breath waiting for “Many Thanks and Warmest Regards”, but am sure that made it into someone’s inbox.

And then finally, emerged the generic inbox. With all social media came that personal messaging option, and some became chat groups with threads and comments. That almost happened in convergence with the proliferation of mobile phones and good quality data networks.

And as quickly, the new rules or unwritten conventions started emerging. Do you send a text first and then call? Or do you send a text, then an email, then another text confirming you have sent the email and then call. Meanwhile, the address lines and signatures had been replaced with emoji stickers. Or do you simply keep them on read, like so many spam mailers and messages offering everything from a spa session to crypto fortunes to a jackfruit tree.

And finally, with Covid came the video call, first on one platform and then on as many platforms as possible, with social media also chiming in. What started as a letter with copies to a mailing list, (a subculture called cc: culture in large corporates) became invites to calls on text, and email and then reminders in text and email and finally calls.

After so much communication about the nature of communication where are we headed with the advent of generative AI. With large language model machine learning softwares coming up with letters fit to purpose, collecting payments, writing like Hemingway, or even sonnets like Shakespeare the shoe is now on the other foot.

The task now is not what letter to write to the municipal commissioner, or the school principal or your grandparents, instead of doing a video call or leaving a voice note. The task now is asking the right question! Once the question or “prompt” in AI lingo, generates the desired letter in format and tone, the self-same softwares or derivatives generously adapt it to social media and videos for effect.

What happens to mail etiquette, and junk messages as in keeping texts on read without response, is something that AI can worry about. Including perhaps an effective useable equivalent to ParamPujya or Sricharaneshu.

What Pandemic Dreams be made of?

Airport illustration Abstract vector created by macrovector – www.freepik.com

I jumped out of bed in a tizzy today. And am still trying to get my head around the dream I had.

There are so many people milling about and am almost at the departure gate. The crew aren’t onboarding passengers in queues, or by row numbers. You need to hand over your boarding pass, they check your name on the manifest and allow you to get on board one person at a time.

NO ONE is masked up or with visors on. I think about what awaits on the other side and start fashioning a mask out of the yellow pocket square in my jacket. Should I need extra protection, I have a bigger piece of blue printed silk with me.

But, just before that, I look at the fob end of the luggage tag which is perforated into two stubs. One gets me a welcome drink and the other a meal. So, I go in search and get lost between terminals, with a few helpful souls pointing me this way and that. And all the while am stressing about, why am I not wearing a mask, and why is no one unduly disturbed by it. And will I find my way back to the gate in time after collecting food and drink, or will the plane have taken off without me?

In fact, am wondering how did I get inside the terminal in the first place and get my boarding card issued? And then I wake up.

Have missed the (Air)bus many times in the past, and in those days of old, have taken the next flight. Travel stress induced nightmares usually had to do with me waking up on time or landing up at the right gate on time.

But then, this is still ‘socially distanced’ travel only if you have to time. Maybe, the explanation lies in the extended isolation and lack of social contact, as this Nat Geo piece suggests.

What stuff are Pandemic dreams made of?

2020 and The Social Dilemma

Algorithms gonna get you!

If you look closely, you may find “social media maven” written on thousands of profiles on Linkedin, including mine.

In my case, I spent the better part of the last decade evangelizing and working on helping companies, brands, governments, NGO’s, celebrities, C-suite and common folk- like you and me, use social networking platforms for connecting with their audiences.

My initial ‘delight’ around people connecting with people of similar interests, shared joys, and pasts on common newly discovered contexts changed when “invite only” platforms turned open creating what we now know as “social media”. The gates that were initially there, was pulled down as MAU (monthly average users) and engagement ratios were pulled down to create the monetization models.

Soon, the “like farms”, the “Blue Tick Influencers” and the phenomenon of viral content which today is creating mental health issues among growing number of the connected youth, started indicating the strength of algorithms, that increase joy of having thousands of “likes”, hearts, comments, and the herd mindset created by trolls hounding people into a corner for behaving in a certain way versus another.

I had at various points of time, shared my skepticism on this phenomenon on various posts, and had also opined that these platforms should come up with their own regulations, as I continue to believe that those who work on these platforms, at least at the startup stage, genuinely believed that they were using tech to “make the world a better place”.

Here, where I argue for rules of self-censorship for social media. And then here, I questioned the feeding of algorithms, and the addictive behaviour of social media, and finally here, where I ask popular digital platforms, to start sharing easy to follow rules and take responsibility for the algorithms they are training.

Cut to present, 2020 is being called the Year of Digital Transformation. Almost, anything that can go online has, as staying home to stay safe from #Covid19, is the widely enforced cure-all. What that has meant is making digital tools- voice, video, text, email, memes, apps, not just acceptable but an imperative for survival. And yet, the flip side, the murky ‘click-bait’ copy, the phishing scams, and the horrendous social media coordinated riots, fueled by clips of atrocities shared on mobile video sharing platforms, and equally appalling counter measures either by the authorities or rival groups, has become common place.

It’s in this context, that “The Social Dilemma”, a Netflix documentary dramatizing the way #Algorithms harvest behavior information and push out content for engagement using #MachineLearning which now stupefies the same people who designed these lines of codes, becomes relevant.

Some quotes seem relevant! “It’s not the tech, it’s the business models” -seems to exonerate Silicon Valley as they seem to be held at ransom by Wall Street. But, Shoshana Zuboff, author of Surveillance Capital, calls it out as “A market for Human Futures”, where predictive analytics can enable marketers to create a need for chocolate ice cream in winter, or allow foreign powers to push for regime change or adopting a new way to make the planet green. The addictive nature of these platforms is described thus- “Only two industries consider their customers to be users- Hard illegal drugs and software.”

So what’s the way forward? As I wrote in another blog- With great power comes great responsibility. If you do want to build tech to make the world a better place, resist the urge to profit from it. Profit instead from wiping tears off the faces around you and generate ‘real’ smiles instead of ‘emoji’s.

Connecting the Digital Dots- the new rules CEOs still struggle with on social media

Getting it all together

An hour-long conversation with the CEO of a global training organisation, on how to do digital right, in other words, “Can you speak with my Head of Marketing, and get him to accept change, and convince him to go beyond the rules?” got me thinking.

What rules? And what changes? Simply put, does an organisation benefit from having just one identity across platforms on social media, or is there merit in allowing all the pro-active groups and program directors do their own thing?

Groomed in the era of an LPG world (Liberalisation, Privatisation and globalisation) I have heard this query being aired across the last 3 decades in various industries, right from American brands, which could go from Apple to iMac and iPod to iPhone, iPad and Macbook in a jiffy to South Korean Chaebol’s like Hyundai or LG which couldn’t or Japanese Keiretsu’s like Hitachi or Mitsubishi that didn’t want to. The truth then, as now, depends on the audience. What you want to communicate is important, but more important is who you want to communicate with, and finally, who has the ‘last mile’ connect.

In social media terms, while global organisations would like to have one corporate page on say, Facebook, the viewer in India, and the user in Indonesia would be looking for different things and different idioms to engage with. Facebook allowed large brands to set up Global Pages in 2012, to cater to different geographies, and even at this time, enables organisations to create market pages to target content and messages to different audiences. But, what’s the right time to empower various team internally, who feel restricted under One Company, One Page social media guidelines and what core messages or issues to control?

This is, of course, assuming Facebook as a default option for social media, which it is not. Demographically, geographically, as well as interest- wise the whole phenomenon has morphed beyond simple definitions. For Instance, young populations across the world are more frequently on audio-visual platforms like Instagram (a Facebook platform) and basis location and socio-economic strata on TikTok, Helo, Viigo, etc. than on any Facebook entity.

Whatsapp (yet another Facebook platform), has become the default for messaging, probably replacing email and Slack outside organisations, but so has Telegram, WeChat, Imo, Botim, to name just a few that I have personally used. Twitter has become the place to be for politics and news, both finding it easier to break their messages first on the micro-blogging platform, but folks in Europe and elsewhere are moving to Mastodon ( toots are replacing tweets, among the trolled classes). On the other hand, Linkedin with all the bells and whistles of a business Facebook, is still struggling to create resonance with audiences beyond the jobseeker and the B2B sales consultant.

And while Google drew a blank on G+ as its social network option, Youtube has created a band of YouTubers who are making it big with their own user-generated content.

So, the rules to break are to do with message ascendancy, “what comes first, etc.” and the new rules to follow, are based on lateral saliency. In other words, the messaging pyramid becomes irrelevant to Millennials and Gen Z’s as they skip across platforms, while they discover, engage and share content, which they can resonate with. Control and command structures in communications are breaking down (and rightly so) as organisations discover fans, and front-line staff using social media and digital platforms in more realistic and engaging ways than the Head of Marketing and Communications could even fathom.

That changes the dynamics of brand building for training organisations completely. And I proposed the following based on Digiqom’s ideation design philosophy. App-ify/ Game-ify/ Crowd-ify.

Most learning is happening online and experientially. Apps like Coursera, uDemy, UpGrad, or even the oldest online varsity- University of Phoenix Online can claim to have millions of users. And while gamification is built into all these platforms, starting with the basic Amazon feature, “people who bought this, also bought that”, the core takeout of learning at work or higher education, that of an alumni that works together, or helps each other out (Crowdification) is missing.

This could well be thanks to the serendipity engines built into the algorithms of all large social media platform newsfeeds, which suggest possible solutions, or even place user content in front of relevantly ‘magical’ people to respond to. A bigger reason for the break in the crowdification is possibly the increasing isolation of individuals trapped in echo chambers, who look for conversation prompts from social media, instead of each other and in groups.

When the most collaborative youth platform becomes the PUBG game instead of a Scrabble or a Monopoly Board game at home or with friends, the need for shared experiences like group travel, group activity or even the need for exploring the dynamics of diverse groups start to give way to “singleton” experiences.

Enter the Influencer, as a crowdification engine, with the complexity of “paid partnerships” or some kind of a beneficial rub-off hinted at, and the suspended disbelief of social media results in extremely low activation on the ground gains traction. So much so, that ads look and sound more believable than user reviews and Fake News goes viral even after fact checkers have debunked it.

How does all this help in the world of experiential training? And how should social media be used? I had run an experiment in the early 2010’s at a management institute when almost everybody with a laptop had a Facebook account, and almost no one was on Twitter. I had conducted the class on new age communications, with a few slides and a video and asked the cohort to express their thoughts and questions on a hashtag. The result was a plethora of users engaging on a hashtag, across platforms, increasing awareness among the group of the content of my lecture, including a heated debate among students that carried on days after the class, and a fairly high demand to repeat the class from other departments at the school and other institutes as well.

What would this look like in the 2020’s? I imagine groups doing their own local experiments, on themes that are most relevant to their audiences and contexts, on topics not limited to, climate resilience, sustainable living, energy efficient zero-carbon lifestyles, collectively sharing on worldwide platforms, attracting and self-selecting their own cohorts, and sharing their own and collective initiatives and findings among larger connected audiences.

May a Billion Connected Ideas bloom!

Three Thoughts for 2020

Three Thoughts

It’s just three days to 2020, and I thought it’s a good time to pause and reflect on the three decades that flew by while we weren’t watching. I first heard of Vision 2020 documents in 1994, when India’s economic liberalization was well underway, and global consultants were breaking down boardroom doors to advise the Business Maharajas of the day. Here are 3 things that stand out for me, and 3 thoughts on how we live, work and play in the near future.

The list of what stands out:

1. Internet is Freedom: I still remember the first day I met the internet, which was soft launched among university campuses and all Indian users had to dial in through a squeaky modem to UIUC (University of Indiana, Urbana- Champaign). A green dot cursor on a black screen took me to the search for a lost cat in California’s Bay Area via Craig’s List. Geography had become history!

The same year, mobile telephony was launched, and I still remember the brick I would carry around later that decade because the software company I worked for those days had gone IPO and had provided me one. The size of the phone shrank, and somewhere in the middle became a ‘smart’ piece of Gorilla Glass, plastic, and other materials. Today, mobile is part of the ubiquitous connectivity, universal access, and uninterrupted bandwidth that techies and futurologists had not dreamt about- they were obsessing over hover boards, and teleporting. Others go about watching full length movies streamed on their phones and have replaced their wallet, cash, camera, and music systems, not all in that order.

However, more tech and connectivity did not guarantee safety. Starting the new century, as it did with the twin towers and other landmarks almost being taken down, (there were four planes remember?) the two decades brought out more low- tech ways of causing horrific harm to unsuspecting masses across the world. Later, that decade instant messenger platforms were used to coordinate 26/11 terror attacks, and now social media applications for hate crimes, fake news, and other such nasty business.

• Extreme weather is now a Climate Emergency: Whether you believe the Nobel prize winning and later questioned findings of IGCC or not, you are now more aware of extreme weather through your own personal experience. I remember a few decades back when the whole world got together and banned CFC gasses (Then a critical component of every air conditioner and fridge), so much so folks went and bought the CFC-Free versions as advertised by manufacturers, because science had linked the gas with a widening gap in the ozone layer. And yet, despite teenage student activists and global conventions, no roadmap for reducing greenhouse gasses to combat climate change and extreme weather is visible. This has now, as it did over millennia, started having an impact on human behaviour and migration. The nineteenth century concept of a nation state is under threat from now economic migrants and soon political migrants, because of extreme weather like perennial droughts as in Syria or flooding as in Bangladesh. Unfortunately, unless tech and science provides an answer as it did earlier, when organic chemistry saved the day for the mismatch on population growth and food production, human behaviour is unlikely to change without that one coherent ‘call to action’ like the CFC ban.

• Investment and imagination are not related: Three decades back, economic books taught students about India’s mixed economy model and an almost self-congratulatory Hindu Rate of Growth (3.5%) that India chose for itself between the 1950’s and 1980’s. The credit crunch of the late 80’s followed by the IMF bailout in 1991 with the consequent opening up of key sectors controlled by the government created new open spaces in aviation, media, technology, telephony (the last two now have Indian corporates in the global Top 10). The doubling of economic growth created new industries and competencies. In fact, the entire Indian BPO and IT outsourcing revolution happened because those businesses needed skills and imagination more than capital investment in equipment. Competency areas like HR, Corporate Communications emerged and evolved. Starting the millennium, as the tech world did with the dotcom bust, followed within a few years by the global financial meltdown, what stands out is that innovation happens irrespective. All the giants of tech today (Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook) either grew through the various downturns or started with it.
• That brings me to the core point- Knowledge is free, learning is not: While the world wide web has grown and grown, an increasing phenomenon prompted by user profiling via algorithms is the lack of deep search. For instance, if the search engine knows you browse car sites the search term ‘driver’ will have different results for you than if you browsed golf websites. With so much easy access available, more time is being spent by young and old consuming than creating, in finding than searching, the overall impact is showing up in auto- corrected and auto- translated messages, which makes learning a new language a dilletante’s dalliance rather than a career option. Similar scenarios exist in math and computing, and with data sciences making major break throughs in almost every sphere through usage of AI and ML in the workplace and through robotics and IoT- linked factories, the way work, life and play happens is headed for a re-invention.

So what happens next? I remember asking this question as a journalist of a bureaucrat, in the early nineties,  then busily amending the nth version of a list which allowed open imports, into a land deep soaked on import substitution, self-reliance, and swadeshi. Change is the only constant he had replied, though qualifying it by saying the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The status quo has been ante-d, a new generation of Millennials are saying, “OK Boomer” to old ideas, preferences and philosophies. Whether that will propel us into more nature aligned, equitable, inclusive society is the BIG question.

Hello World- Welcome to Data-ism

Photo by Simone Acefalo on Unsplash

If there was one definitive book I read in 2018, which I want to refer to in 2019, it was Yuval Harari‘s ‘Homo Deus‘. And as I read this page-turner, a few thoughts stayed with me.

Q: Why do we Gen X’ers and our previous guiding lights ‘BabyBoomers‘ make such a big thing of Privacy?

Because we started and lived a large part of our lives without access to data. If we went to a public library and thumbed through a well thumbed through encyclopaedia ( few Millennials and Gen Z’s will relate), it was our research, our experience. Our physical mailboxes delivered magazines like CSR (Competition Success Review), Science Today, and the almost ubiquitous Reader’s Digest. We would borrow and share within our circles and finding others who were similarly informed was serendipity. That today, is Google, Twitter and Wikipedia, and all show signs of age.

Q: Why do Millennials and GenZ’s share selfies, multiple times a day, when the previous generations would be happy to shoot nature, family, and monuments?

This is where Data-ism comes in. Among the Millennials and Gen Z’s, if it isn’t on social media, it hasn’t happened. It’s almost as if creating data is the sole object of the 2.5 Billion souls using connected devices storing away their lives, emotions and ambitions in the cloud.

And of course, there’s a perverse take on privacy, it’s easier to shoot oneself than ask someone else to pose for a Nat Geo style portrait.

Q: So, where do we go from here?

Let’s face it! People are far more adaptive to technology that is easy to use. Notice the war stories of deals, cash backs, promo codes, offers encashed by folks who don’t know how to negotiate in any language, but are adept at calculating on the fly the best deal on whatever e-com platform, and using the digital wallet of the day.

Q: So what do businesses do?

I remember when ‘Neutron Jack’, the legendary Jack Welch of GE fame, rebooted that organisation and became champion of ERP, BPR and other such acronyms that placed the previously unknown CTO on the boardroom in the nineties. The Noughties belonged to keywords like ‘knowledge management’ and ‘information economy’ and the CIO who had a brief reign, before being ousted by the CDO wielding words like ‘digital economy’, ‘disrupted purchase cycle’, ‘social media’, ‘reputation management’. But that’s so last decade!

As we prepare for the 2020’s, new winds of change are blowing. Much more disruptive than anything we have yet experienced, and a stark divide between people who are shaping tomorrow, and people who will follow.

Q: What the heck are you babbling on about?

Counter question- when was the last time you spoke to someone whose stated known languages are C++, PHP, Java, compiler and ML? If you don’t know this idiom, you won’t know what drives demand, adoption and change. Every new innovation first breaks ground in the tech world, and they aren’t looking for ‘look and feel’ and ‘bells and whistles’, what reaches you is ‘functionality’ that has been dumbed down to work among non-tech. So where does it leave advertising, marketing, PR? Isn’t the whole story about demand generation and reputation management all about people talking to people? It sure is! Except, opinions have already been made, people who know what’s under the hood have already seeded an opinion, and she’s not the ‘influencer‘ you hired for that promo campaign. These ‘dark hats’ are programming your newsfeeds, and writing the algorithms on which your ‘creative communication campaigns’ get discovered at the RoI you set.

And guess what, nothing gives these guys a greater high, than letting their algo’s and bot’s access to neural networks, read your social media, and attempting to create self- learning algorithms- AI, for short!

Q: So what can we expect?

Look at that WhatsApp forward again. That one about someone trying to teach Alexa/ Siri/Cortana/ Google Voice/ whatever else, a new language or a playlist. Notice that 2-year old, or 20, and know that ‘intelligent systems’ are almost ready to provide ‘serendipity’. And many more ‘Wow’ moments when you found answers you didn’t even know you were seeking. As the story goes, Apollo moonshots had less computing power than a ‘smart fridge’, now think of all the connected devices- at home, work or play, and the algorithms all around gathering data about everything.

Now does that give you a hint about what’s brewing and cooking? And if you want a glimpse of the future, and a role if any, in it, find the nearest coder, statistician ( now known as data science guy), market researcher ( now behavioural scientist) and learn. It’s better if they are Millennials and Gen Z’s, you’ll get a hang of their preferences and idioms.

And a hat tip to Harari- Whether I agree or not, Data-ism is here, and all those folks who wrote ‘Hello World’ in their first line of code probably have a ringside view into it. Have a great 2019!

‘tween the devil and the deep blue sea

The devil mentioned in the President’s executive order on preventing online censorship clearly is the advertising and trending algorithm which is now being targeted by powers inimical to democratic systems– “They have also amplified China’s propaganda abroad, including by allowing Chinese government officials to use their platforms to spread misinformation regarding the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, and to undermine pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.” The order expands on examples without naming companies.

The Deep blue sea is Section 230, almost like Section 66, of the Indian IT Act, which holds people responsible for the content they share on online platforms. India’s first debate around rights of aggregation platforms vs. content creators was cast in 2004 around the arrest and jail term for the CEO of an online auction platform for allowing upload and possible sale of pornography on his website. But the jury is still out!

So, what does this mean?

Since Cambridge Analytica, blew open the role small campaign firms have played in influencing election results on social media, , and EU’s GDPR guidelines adoption, the days of using silent monitoring of users browsing habits via cookies for marketing purposes and otherwise are now permission based. On the other hand, with countries like Germany enacting their own Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) to enable and enforce the rights of citizens to monitor and remove offensive content, opaque algorithms embedded by social media companies for promoting and hiding content for profit or bias are facing increasing scrutiny and censure.

On the back of Covid19, and vicious political attacks on social media either amped or hidden in pre- election periods, currently on in the US, and visible in India pre- Delhi elections, the question on responsibilities of these online platforms are now center-stage.

A quote from the executive order is telling; “When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power.  They cease functioning as passive bulletin boards, and ought to be viewed and treated as content creators.”

The urgency, in the US, as in India, comes from the clear pro-authoritarian regime leanings of these platforms, possibly hoping to score an entry into China, the one country that has banned them from its population, ab initio.

China, on the other hand, has allowed and enabled its tech sector to acquire global presence with a caveat coming in force with its 2017 National Intelligence Law. Article 14 of the law mandates that Chinese intelligence agencies “may ask relevant institutions, organizations and citizens to provide necessary support, assistance and cooperation.” That this has had a signaling effect on Global Telco’s and governments for slow pedaling orders to prominent Chinese 5G hardware makers is no accident.

In India, a spoof on China and Coronavirus was pulled off TikTok, a Chinese promoted video social media platform, on the verge of censure after videos sharing content exhorting youngsters to commit gender atrocities was discovered on it. Twitter, on the other hand, pulled down a popular butter brand handle briefly for sharing a spoof cartoon on “made in India” which lampooned Chinese imports. Authoritarians, whether they are censoring content or running countries, usually cannot take a joke!

In my opinion,

This is simply a chain of events unfolding on a path to community and global responsibility. No longer will “Opaque Algorithms” and IPR’s around them be accepted, as data localization becomes the norm around the world. As nations realize the worth of their citizen’s data, more scrutiny into what is being published, by who, for what effect, will be asked. And certainly, global platforms which owe no explanation to anyone but their own engineers and funders, will be under constant scrutiny, as they will try to hold close what they have promoted or censored for what purpose.

Social Media is, at the end of the day, a public square, and all platforms must make sure they ensure they transparently follow a universal code of acceptable human conduct, even if business gains are compromised.

Parts of this post appears as a column in Voice& Data magazine June 2020 issue.

With Social Distancing, try #SocialMediaDistancing

Have you noticed how quickly you ‘like’, Retweet, Quote Tweet (Retweet with comment), comment and share posts on social media?

Yes! I understand this #lockdown, with its warnings on #SocialDistancing have brought you to consume more streaming media than ever before. I also understand that platforms like WhatsApp are wonderfully suited to share one rumour, fake news, meme, and prejudice from one group to another.

What do you end up doing then? While keeping your body from catching the contagious #COVID19 ailment, you’re letting your mind catch every virus of hate, loathing, bigotry, racism, chauvinism out there. There’s a reason “Virality” is a benchmark for digital and social media marketing.

And yes! I have found myself also sharing half-truths, unverified rumours masquerading as news, outright #FakeNews, as well as unfounded biases and narrow-minded xenophobia.

To what end? Notice the mob lynching of monks and assaults on doctors in the same neighborhood as of now attributed to WhatsApp rumors of them being child snatchers and traffickers.

Notice also, an international outrage on xenophobic hate speech which almost resulted in a diplomatic row. Not to mention, callous allegations and whatboutery that were exchanged when another bunch of preachers became identified as ‘super spreaders’ with a malevolent design, instead perhaps, of being ignored and confined as folks who didn’t comprehend or understand and follow instructions.

Here’s what I propose! Just as in following #COVID19 compliant good health practices, might help you from catching the virus, here’s what you can do to keep your mind healthy and your emotions unaffected by the social media “negativity” virus in these trying times.

Social Distancing Vs. Social Media Distancing

Let me explain. Just as you are supposed to avoid physical contact, wear gloves and masks when outdoors, when on social media, avoid social media arguments, wear your smiley face emojis on your replies. Similarly, just as you don’t touch your face with your hands, avoid touching your mouth, eyes, nose, you should also refrain from hitting the RT, like, share, comment buttons.

The global health authorities have gone to great extent, to show you how to wash your hands for at least 20 seconds to keep them clean. I’d like to suggest that you watch an inspirational biography, meditate, chant for at least 20 minutes, at least once a day, to cleanse your senses.

And just as they advise you to avoid crowded places, even if you have gloves and mask on, maybe you could also avoid hate filled #Hashtags which are trending, and stop the share/ like/ engage reflex.

How about a 6-minute reaction rule? As they say, standing 6 feet away from the next person is the physical distance you need to maintain. How about witnessing your reactions to something provocative you saw, read, and heard? Remember, that 6-degree separation thing about social networks, and 6 seconds instinctive ‘friend or foe’ response? Take deep breath, count to 10, exhale and then react, if at all.

Of course, remember to clean and disinfect all common surfaces frequently. For social media, that means Unfollow and block all trolls especially those with blue ticks from your timelines. You don’t have to report them, the business algorithm of the platforms might do the trick.

Your mind and body are always in sync with each other. Your mental strength makes you flex your muscles and build your body. It’s about time, you spend some time building a mind which is adaptable, flexible, and resilient. Ask yourself just one question: what would I do if a person I hate on social media, and I are the only two survivors from a major disaster and we have to paddle together to reach a safe shore? Your answers will tell you what you need to do and think. Survive, Adapt and Thrive, and while you’re at it start practising Social Media Distancing.

In Pursuit of Excellence

Nadia Comaneci- World’s 1st Perfect 10 gymnast at Montreal Olympics

I remember many years back, my first front page by-line story in the country’s leading business daily was an anchor piece. The last news article below the fold flashing across the page was about a bunch of aviators flying across the world in a World War 1 vintage aircraft. That, on the day I joined the daily, was a big boost for a cub reporter hacking it in the world of business journalism.

After the round of congratulations in the news bureau the next day ended, the photo editor took me aside and remarked “I loved the story, but you didn’t mention the project cost.” In an economic daily, where numbers are everything even a colorful piece about magnificent men and their flying machines needs a business rationale. And you are only as good as your last by-line story.

That lesson continues to reverberate in me. Many years later, when I received an email from a report which failed logic, and in its formatting lost the reason to be a piece of communication, I called the person in and mentioned the above story. My point- if you are signing off in your name, you’re only as good as your last draft.

Cut to present day, and an article I read about Millennials stressing about perfection. I think the moot point which is missed is, if you are signing off your piece of work, and it has errors, gaps, and glitches, it is your responsibility to fix it.

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In the 80’s, when Japanese car makers changed the Indian auto industry, concepts like Poka- Yoke (avoiding inadvertent errors) came in, as did practices such as Get it Right First Time (GIRFT). Yet, in the space of digital platforms, marketing and advertising, these concepts which one would assume to be closely linked with creative output are present mostly in their absence.

While concepts like creating customer WOW (hat tip to Tom Peters) are thrown about, scant attention is visible in putting out a product or service that works for the user from get-go. Call it version control, but a generation that has grown up with glitchy phones and laptops with ‘over-the-air’ software updates, the incentive to generate an actual WOW has slid into oblivion.

In fact, the entire software experience of social media platforms is glitchy, slow, prone to outage, not because the coders didn’t do their job, its just because the job was done to fulfill the ‘minimum value proposition’. That’s geekspeak, for something that somehow works, and can crash each time some other coder builds or force fits bells and whistles onto it.

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Now contrast that to real world problems and solutions. You can iterate building a bridge in simulations, but you need to stick to the plans and compensate for errors everywhere before laying the first steel girder, or the first concrete block. Else you have consequences like a canal getting washed away hours after inauguration.

And why shouldn’t the pursuit of perfection be a goal? Excellence is a by-product of the creative pursuit of perfection. Could the ability to cope when faced with deadlines, and work pressure, or even come up with creative solutions under stress be a part of the way people live and learn?

I have come across managers explaining their stressed workday with the phrase, “Fire Fighting” till I witnessed what fire service departments do when there is no fire. They simulate fire drills, mock test their response times, and create simulations for the team to be battle ready when the eventuality arises. Is the stress around excellence then to do with lack of preparation?

In other words, have colleges and schools where the Millennials and Gen Z’s have spent a better part of 15 years or more of learning, failed to teach the ethic of planned learning and practice? And finally, has the culture of ‘don’t fix what isn’t broken’ created a global ‘chalta hain’ attitude?

In a world full of problems waiting for creative and effective solutions, the lack of personal commitment to excellence is an ethic that must inspire the new generation at work. For out of that churn will emerge the next generation of leaders equally competent to handle AI at the workplace, and encourage their teams to put in their personal best.   

Of Chili Chicken, Airplane Flights and the chase for Budget Papers

It all began with a box of chili chicken

My personal connect with India’s annual Union Budget started when Manmohan Singh was the Finance Minister who was tasked to try and “kick-start the economy.” That was the headline in 52 point bold that ran across the financial daily I was working at those days.

India had then started taking fledgling steps to open up its economy under supervision of the IMF and the sweeping changes that followed would ensure the ‘quota-permit-license raj’ then prevalent, would be brushed aside.

Youngsters like me in the newsroom would look forward to the free food, a neatly packed box of fried rice and chilly (as in cold) chicken, along with the ritual of putting the paper to bed, that night at 4 AM. I still remember quipping that the chicken tasted like some one had cooked a dinosaur in “Jurassic Park,” and packed it for eternity.

The following year, in a different newsroom, I was tasked to fly down to Delhi to pick up the budget papers. Those were days of print, while floppy disks were around, they didn’t store reams of data, or 30 Kgs worth of printed material. The CD’s, the websites, the cool graphics and social media were all years away. I still remember my bureau chief doing the hustle with me with the lines, “ I trust only you, and last year our budget documents were waylaid by competition.” Yes! That was a thing too. Competition always played dirty with the largest business paper and things like reporters’ notebooks, budget papers would often get pilfered or held up somewhere.

When I reached Delhi, I realized that the editor of the group had gotten folks from each publishing centre to fly down. There I was with a gaggle of cub reporters, some of whom are now heading the news business, and some leading other enterprises, learning from a senior about the nuances of where and how the budget papers were to be collected. And the planned dash to the airport to catch the last flight and make it back.

The last part was tricky as the budget papers were not shared till after the Finance Minister’s speech, a practice that continues till date. And to make matters worse, the session would start at 5:30 PM, a leftover colonial ritual as the Indian budget would be debated at noon in London. That part has changed to 11:00 AM India time.

What followed was a bus ride to Parliament House. And then making deals with the house staff, first for a peak -in on the proceedings, we got as far as outer chamber and a Doordarshan crew relay, private channels was only for entertainment, TV news was still a few legislations, and technical developments like satellite uplinking away. And then, the quick getaway with the papers, rush to the airport and catch the flight.

Needless to say, the bus that brought us was nowhere to be found and lugging a 30 KG set of budget papers wrapped in newsprint to throw off competition, we hitchhiked our way to the airport. Luckily, one of the seniors knew someone at the airport, and somehow  I found myself in an airline jeep rushing across the tarmac and then climbing up a ladder into the airbus. The frowning air hostess, told me I had held up the flight, and when I apologized and asked for her help to stow the pile of documents, she decided to let me sit in an empty seat in first class with the pile next to me.

 By the time, we landed and I reached the office it was almost mid-night, with the paper in place except for the front page. And though I had hurriedly keyed in a colourful anchor piece on the quest for the budget papers, it didn’t make the edition as the editor decided to carry an opinion piece instead.

For many years thereafter, Budget days always got me going. At the business magazine I worked next, I was flown in to Delhi again, this time to help with getting all the interviews in place and then play fastest fingers first with the copy.

Decades later, as an entrepreneur when the opportunity came to do something around the Union Budget, I suggested and then helped create an omni-channel experience for the Union Budget with a rating agency client, connecting the dots from social media to TV to news headlines. It’s now become a best practice, for all significant events. And this time, each year, I get hit by a hankering for Chilly ( as in cold) Chili Chicken and an adrenaline rush to do things I haven’t done before.