Are YOU worried that Robots will take your Job?

With the rise in AI, amidst the cheers that hailed the new arrivals, there were few that suffered some anxious moments wondering ‘will I be out of a job?’ Finance fuels the journey of life. Disruption had a negative connotation but the perception has altered peculiarly in the parlance of information and Technology. More so in Robotics.

Image source: telegraph.co.uk

So far humans have been in the control of machines. What happens if it reverses? Automation in large-scale, like manufacturing wherein a robotic arm could effectively handle the operations of many a skilled workers and in effect replace them. Public didn’t panic then other than sympathizing with the misfortune that befell on the displaced workforce and largely embraced the change and went about their lives. If robotic arm wasn’t artificial intelligence that failed to give the jitters, why is that the, a superior and smarter robot of the present makes us feel weak and vulnerable?

Could it be the ‘thinking aloud’ of the leading lights about the advent of AI and its impact on humans affect our composure or we become too complacent by ensconcing in the comfort zone? It’s a rude jolt or a rough wake-up when a technocrat and an economist point in the same direction and almost articulate alike.  The imposing power of artificial intelligence “will eliminate a lot of existing types of jobs” by Bill Gates and former IMF Economist Rajan raising reservation about the “anxiety in middle class” because of the technology progress can be unsettling. It sure doesn’t send the shiver down the spine, though apprehensions are shared by profession about the doomsday.

What made us worry?

“Occupations most at risk including administrative, clerical and production tasks” was opined by Bank of England’s chief economist Andy Haldane. The possibilities that Jobs from customer service to security analyst might be replaced in two decades are dictated as real by some pundits. But quoting Bill Gates, who famously quoted that the “shelf life of Intellectual Property is that of a banana”, two decades must present the timeline for you to draw and discern the postulation. Some say ‘possible and some ‘preposterous’, and it remains to be seen what will be your stand in this scenario.

Look at the possible scenarios:

Chatbots: customer service will turn out to more effective with computers answering customer calls. It could send customer call executives reeling, but some employees given the stress and at times toxic exchange and environment seems to embrace the change – even before arrival?

Some even speculate the ‘most at risk’ opportunities in employment would be

• Anyone working in telemarketing
• Anyone stitching by hand
• Maths technicians
• Watch repairers
• Insurance underwriters

And the recently introduced Betty of Milton Keynes who actually joined as ‘trainee robot manager’ engaged in a trial run for months, which can discharge several duties from monitoring personnel on work to welcoming guests.

And some statistics as well:

The author feels fear is misplaced. What happens in the breakdown of machinery? What about malfunction or virus attack? Despite numerous attempts are made to insulate from the onslaught, immunity is far cry. 

Everyone seems to be engrossed with Bots , Taco Bell announced the TacoBot, Microsoft Tay , Facebook AI Assistant “M” and the list can go on.

Are you worried?

There were instances when Robots failed and dismissed from service.  In a recent occurrence, two restaurants in China were forced to shut down due to the faltering Robots which couldn’t pour water or take orders from customers.

Another occurrence worth mentioning would be Microsoft’s Tay which malfunctioned and retired from service. Microsoft subsequently offered an apology and admitted that despite factoring many scenarios, it wasn’t prepared and made a critical oversight for this specific attack.  Microsoft Tay was pulled offline and will be featured once ready in address all possible human misuses. For now it’s not possible to predict all ‘all possible human interactive misuses without learning from mistakes’.

So we would be unduly worried to fear professional prospects robbed by robots. Even in the worst case scenario, human will upgrade themselves. The author took this survey and responded in the negative. The result depicted as under reflects that the majority negate the worry factor.

(source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11994694/Heres-what-will-happen-when-robots-take-over-the-world.html)

Artificial sounds so artificial – shouldn’t that be ‘Incredible’ Intelligence

image courtesy: http://eng-cs.syr.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Artificial-Intelligence01_Web.jpg

Information is wealth and knowledge is power.

Mankind has underscored the importance in its time and today data reigns supreme. Hereon and hence forward, the challenge would be to ‘challenge the supremacy’. With a data now and digital is future, the internet will influence a whopping 50% of purchasing  decisions. In the world in which we inhabit, there is an information avalanche or a data deluge, and what all that amount without application will be just data dump. From core computing to commerce, it’s all about data points. Business is driven by numbers. Message is strengthened with statistics lest it lacks in substance and becomes an opinion. If its fact, then furnish data.

Google, in its inception, was driven by the mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," and did anyone gave much thought about its ability to market and monetize back in the late nineties. There were many search engines at that point in time that have disappeared or probably obscured by the numero uno status held by Google today. Websites apportioning real estate for advertisements to milk money as a strategic revenue stream didn’t hold weight for all despite their might. Publishers started studying traffic and the one that gained more traction in terms of attention and active participation proved pivotal in assessing return on income.

This report acknowledges Mary Meeker’s 2016 internet trends as key inputs to arrive at different inferences and interpretations.

Some highlights from the presentation more pertinent to this passage:

• Internet advertising in the US has grown by about 20% since last year, reaching $60 billion—two-thirds of that growth has come from an increase in spending on mobile ads.
• Facebook’s yearly advertising revenue (up 59%) grew much more than Google’s (18%) last year.
• Online video ads are ineffective: 81% of people surveyed mute video ads, 62% are annoyed by pre-roll ads, and 92% have considered using ad-blocking software.
• Internet sales have increased from less than 2% of all retail sales in the US in 2000 to about 10% in 2015.
• The rising Snapchat generation: Millennials communicate with text, but Generation Z prefers to communicate with images.
• The average Snapchat user plays with sponsored lenses for 20 seconds.
• There are now over 3 billion images shared daily between Snapchat, Facebook, Facebook 
• Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp—all but one of which are owned by Facebook.
• 55% of Pinterest users use the site to find products they want to buy.
• Messaging apps are moving from simple text tools to communicate with friends to platforms for commerce.
• There are 10 million business accounts on WeChat, and about 80% of all users follow one.
• Generation Y is the first generation to prefer chatting over the web or social media to talk to businesses, rather than over the phone.
• Computer recognition of speech has gone from about 70% to 90% accuracy in the last five years.
• 65% of US smartphone owners now use a voice assistant.
• By 2020, at least 50% of all searches online will be through voice or image search, according to Baidu’s chief scientist Andrew Ng.
• It’s time for self-driving cars: The average urban US worker spends about 42 hours a year sitting in delays on their commute, and the average person’s car is only in use about 4% of the time.

1.   Intelligence driving computers is not something we stumbled upon. It was a given. ‘Search’ engine started with a search by returning results that’s near about or no way near to the ‘search input’ and a distant to the expected ‘result’. Then search engine pushed it way and propelled itself to the way forward, by retrieving ‘right’ result with minimal iteration. You don’t have to be brainy or super smart to string a nice ‘search query’ – the system should be able to fetch you the search ‘result’. How did it do it? Intelligence reared its head up – defying logic, reason and rationale. Over time, Google has amassed a wealth of information to mine and monetize – using Big Data and Artificial Intelligence.

artificial intelligence like voice interaction, personal assistants and automation take center stage.

With advancement, where we did we witness the acceleration of intelligence? Try the search engine. The accuracy in the search results has gone exceedingly high and to the cycle or attempts taken to locate the result has reduced way below. The machines are able to recognize through images and words used. How? Check the newsfeed in Google news section. Or observe the image results. Or the X-Box that feeds body movements as inputs to read and respond. Personalization is not the pinnacle of AI. It’s just warming up.

Next cars will drive and diagnosis can be more specific. We see more players actively engaged in AI as direct line or dotted. Ford is not a player in AI but its investment in AI for its vehicles has risen manifold. Google came out with ‘allo’ and Facebook launched ‘DeepText’ and startups mushrooming by the hundreds in this space.

The Trends 2016 put forth by Meeker

Search Engine

Try hailing a cab from your office corridor or the home confines, and check your device with the app and study the screen up close. The GPS fueled intelligence is just compelling or at times, breathtaking by the sheer spectacle of the number of vehicles traced and screened in the smart device with the possible time to reach in minutes. Perhaps the details complemented with depiction dazzles. This is a common and known scenario that happens in our daily walk of life.

Now Google is a well-known search engine. Facebook, given its information capital wants to leverage and launched DeepText for better engagement. The conundrum with regard to privacy is an admittedly complex. It’s the ground breaking development that’s fascinating. Google search and DeepText have ‘search’ as common and still exist as chalk and cheese as the domain is different for both.

AI-driven messaging Apps

Microsoft has one - ‘Skype, while Facebook has two:  “whatsapp and messenger” and Google joins with its own AI-based app “allo”. The apps have built-in ability to enhance and enrich user experience. AI enabled assistants have been in the news lately with one or the other behemoth rolling out their product. Times have witnessed the launch from Google, Facebook, apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and even as this article is penned, the buzz in the industry is Robot Betty joins office as a trainee office manager.  One wonders with this evolution of Artificial Intelligence and the looming threat of people’ interest superseded by machines introduction into the workforce – cases as in chatbots which can automate repetitive mundane handled by humans cutting on the cost and drastically enhancing the productivity.  

Image Recognition and Voice Software

The advancement is alarming that machine can think like man, act independently and intelligent enough to communicate to another robot.   Google image recognition can be amazing study and awe-inspiring in its implementation. Powerful algorithms can read from millions of pictures and map with the face scanned by the camera and throw a result – the identification is another break ground in terms of innovation, especially the high-level abstraction in data and multiple processing can be mind boggling.

Voice-function enabled search is another incredible innovation. We had voice software but enabling search with voice is so powerful in its enablement. You speak faster than read or type. So the ease and comfort with which the user is empowered is unbelievable till you do the search yourself. For instance, if it’s an android phone, you can experiment by simply asking “Ok Google, what is the temperature outside” and within second you hear the answer. Try any other question but make sure your question starts with “ok Google’ because the system understands this command. The voice and image have undergone incremental changes to arrive where they are at present. The voice recognition when complemented with image and retina can become dominant in determining user identification.

Summing up, the progress of AI is exponential that it entwines in our daily life. As we resort to AI for almost anything – reminders, communication, travel, sports, entertainment and what not, even the skeptics will forced to look harder and question their own beliefs.

It’s no longer the distant future.

Deep Blue and the AI

image courtesy:https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_4506VV1001.html

And its not another chess game.

Way back in 1996, a super chess power named Garry Kasparov agreed for a match with IBM’s Computer [it was still ‘computer’ without the intelligence aspect amplified] named Deep Blue. Was the name an inspiration from Deep Throat?Or is just the phonetics?

The incredible then happened. Deep Blue won the first match. History was created. Unbelievable! If it stunned the world, the chess champion shattered would be an understatement. Kasparov would recollect later about playing with computers but none like Deep Blue. 

Kasparov, as the reigning champion, was so confident about his strength that the might of the machine that made its move in the chess match was no match. It wasn’t just the champion, but the pundits and public never for once doubted. No one doubted. Just the same no one expected. Computer to dethrone the champ? It happens in the time when google was probably in incubation and software was limping its way in to our lives. The impact was limited, restricted to few and used by fewer. Times when people remembered phone numbers of their contacts and reliance on ‘hardware’ like computers was confined to space, defense and research. All things around too hardly smelled anything close to ‘software’, and programs was yet to be synonymous as software just as search with google. It was in this exciting backdrop, the fight between a human brain versus a relatively unknown machine was pitted. It might sound Ayan Randish, but there is no such thing called a ‘collective brain’ and should it exist, then it will not be mortal but machines, and rightly positioned, Deep Blue was a result of many a mind with innovations and inventions. Chess is an amazing, sophisticated and brilliant game where the mind is really placed at a premium. Its philosophical too ‘you cannot reach the white square without stepping into a black’, and game is a strategic one, just like wars fought with ‘horses and bayonets’. A great tactical move or act of blunder – whichever way, that’s the game of chess.

So imagine Kasparov moving a pawn, what should Deep Blue do in response? Defense or offence? So the machine had to think of all possible scenarios and also think further about the countermove. Its about preempting and predicting to an accuracy that’s alarming, and even freaking IQ. A normal mind cannot fathom as much, and hence Kasparov was deeply respected for his intelligence and ability to look ahead – way ahead that he could do the mental math to break all barriers or detect a breach from a distance. That was baffling. Even more would be Deep Blue, for it shocked not just the millions of multitude, but Kasparov himself was baffled by the way the system battled “But a computer, I thought, would never make such a move. A computer can't ‘see’ the long-term consequences of structural changes in the position or understand how changes in pawn formations may be good or bad.”

So when he conceded, rather, Deep Blue won, Kasparov would acknowledge the brilliance and the intelligence “I GOT MY FIRST GLIMPSE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ON Feb. 10, 1996, at 4:45 p.m. EST, when in the first game of my match with Deep Blue, the computer nudged a pawn forward to a square where it could easily be captured. It was a wonderful and extremely human move.”

Kasparov will go on to win the next game and eventually the championship, and we all recall  that near to impossible win of Deep Blue and cheered the challenge posed to the champion. Today the odds are reversed as we almost revere AI to the point of ubiquitous in our lives. There is no aspect in our life that AI has not penetrated. All along we lived without the knowledge of its existence. And our dependence on data is almost complete for even simple and mundane chores are reflective in our inability to store data in a machine than carry in person.

Why call it artificial? We have seen advancement exceed advancements in AI. We have seen job creation to job destruction by the very intelligence. It works both ways. Automation and robotics disrupted human lives by replacing their services and unseated their position and unsettled their lives. That’s the typical trade-off for change. Its not the cry of a luddite but all things come at a cost and technology today is the most powerful inclusion. Kasparov would state “my instincts told me “. So a celebrated chess champion still relies on his behavioral response.  Till that day, artificial will be artificial. Then again, wasn’t it a terrific wake-up call that made us stand up and salute. We owe as much to Deep Blue in enabling us to deep dive in AI.

And what the future holds…… machines might rule but will never master the creator.

Can Artificial Intelligence ‘alert’ Project Managers?

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This blog is written in the backdrop of Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai heralding “Artificial Intelligence’ as “We will move from mobile first to an AI first world." in the recently held Google I/O 2016.  Science becomes spectacular in its endeavor to make possible the deemed impossible, reminding Robert Kennedy “There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”

Sometimes it’s so surreal. When the movie ‘Minority Report’ , a concept conceived in the late nineties and hit the silver screen by 2002, the reviews about the sci-fi was superb and many wondered what could the world be in 2054  as set as timeline in the movie. It was half-a century away. Everything can be put in place past the event or outcome but possible to predict something to happen with precision? Plausible? From a technology perspective, the spectacle that dazzled us with 3-D, touch screen depicting data on-demand, transportation and logistics, the movie ported us to a scientific space of sophisticated software and advanced intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence as the key driver

The breakthrough in AI is simply breathtaking. and going places that Mars may not be the final frontier. Today you can key-in or just use voice for search – any kind of search. Different people have different needs and the system is so intelligent and efficient to identify the ‘searcher’ to serve customized results and also recommendation on the screen.  IBM is working on digital advertising screens that can play advertisements best suiting the consumer’ preference using the RFID technology, picking their shopping flair and taste from their payment cards and phones that use RFID chips.  

A Japanese company has created digital signage that can organize through The customer facial recognition software and cameras helps to identify the gender, age and range in displaying advertisement best fitting the democracy - Typical customer-centric campaigns to promote products and services.

If anything, AI is growing from strength to strength. Look no further for evidence – just search for something in Google and check how soon and swift the results came through.  Does it rain or shine? The forecast for the week?  Or check the kids play Mariocart or Xbox where simulations or gesture-based gaming to the  driverless car. In the movie Minority Report, the newspaper will update itself for latest news. Today, why don't you   check the Google news page which is almost there with its updates, though not auto-refresh.  There is much more than that meets the eye. This is an era of information overload and hence developments sometimes are overshadowed or even go unnoticed.  Impressively, human’s pursuit to make ideas to realities is relentless.

Artificial Intelligence and Project Management

What’s the probability that the lead programmer in the team will show up for work tomorrow? Will the server hold up till the end or tank all of a sudden? Will the project meet its deadline and deliver?

Your guess is as good as anyone.  

For the scope of this account, let’s confine to human resources and hardware. If Big Data is growing powerful with predictive analysis as a powerful and potent tool, what will happen Artificial Intelligence is employed to study and predict personnel about presence and performance.  Can the Intelligence available alert about the impending change(s)? Can we leverage on behavorial biometrics for human identficiation and expand its scope to mine data?

In Seoul, AlphaGo, an AI system created by Google, crushed Lee Sedol, an 18-time world champion who is regarded as the decade's top player of Go - an abstract strategy board game. The victory meant that "AI-calculated-faster-than-a-human”. Agreed, but the AI-calculator was again created by human mind and its very unfair to state Seedol lost, rather collective brains won that day.

So if Big Data can do the imagined and beyond, can it rise up to the challenge is by providing statistics and information about human behavior, more from human physiology and psyche? Efforts are underway and research is ongoing, like ‘social character’ , or ‘Human Genome Project ‘providing insights into genes, which hopefully can wade into rough waters to understand the incredibly complex human system. Though the goal of this study of Human Genome is to create personalized medicines, use analytics to check a cure is within a particular timeline, can it not encompass behavioral traits as well? 

The if-only theory that a Project Manager applies in analyzing team’s composition and hardware infrastructure – “if only the server didn’t shutdown without warning”, “if only the programmer didn’t fall sick”, “if only the architect didn’t drop his papers ”, “if only there was a backup before the power failed”…….all these can be written as useful Use Cases with alternate scenarios. From a Project Manager’s desk, Technology in the form of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence can empower at arriving at informed decisions – especially about health reports of both men and machines, then risks can be mitigated to a greater extent and the assurance of the success of any undertaking will be expectedly high. Artificial Intelligence, in this context of human understanding and analysis,  is extremely challenging given the multi-layered, multi-dimensional and multi-faceted undertaking that’s complicated in its complexities. Many doubt its possibility, but then so did the skeptics when “Minority Report’ was released.  Spielberg views sounds psychic “I wanted all the toys to come true someday. I want there to be a transportation system that doesn't emit toxins into the atmosphere. And the newspaper that updates itself...”

Mankind shares the same sanguinity that Artificial Intelligence arms the Project Manager with the ability to view way ahead in predicting scientifically about a project holistically - the entire ecosystem.