And Vijay Says…

My guess is as good as yours on how AI will influence the world around us in the long term. All possibilities from solving world hunger to we becoming Cyborgs remain on the table. However, I do have some thoughts on where this field is headed in next few years – say the 5 to 10 year window. As we wind down 2017, I thought I will share four of my thoughts on this topic – enjoy it with your favorite holiday beverage 🙂

 

Invisible AI vs AI face-offs every second

Several big companies have invested in personal assistants powered by AI – with varying technology maturity. Some of the hottest startups across the world are working on giving the big companies a run for their money. Given I am not an impartial observer given my day job, I will resist the temptation to predict a winner. More and more money and time is being poured into this category across the industry.

Personal assistants will be a part of everything we routinely do going forward. And the change it will bring profound disruption all around us. For example – we might outsource our routine grocery purchases to a personal assistant. The logical next step is for grocers to stop sending us coupons and loyalty cards, and instead market to our personal assistants. That does not need TV advertisements or glossy news paper inserts or targeted emails. That communication is on some machine readable form – say JSON or perhaps even binary. The best Ad agencies will need to hire best AI experts, not (or at least not just) the best creatives.

When customers outsource buying to personal assistants, vendors will need to resort to AI to respond as well. And working backwards, the entire supply chain will need to get redesigned to be a lot smarter. Both consumer and enterprise tech will face a fast faced evolution.

The interesting aspect will be that most of this profound disruption will happen behind the scenes without us realizing what is happening – there will be an AI vs AI face-off (hopefully of a good kind) every second as we go on with our lives blissfully unaware.

AI Safety frameworks will emerge 

As Spiderman said “With great power comes great responsibility”.

This takes many different forms in the field of AI, and might never get fully solved even in long term. Also, vast majority of these smart applications are probably never going to be actually harmful, even though they may become super annoying ( I am looking at you , Linkedin algorithms favoring double spaced god awful posts.) . 

1. Since fast iteration is the norm for most AI initiatives, it is important that we have some way of proving safety of such applications mathematically before deploying in production. Today, we can already prove somethings – but this needs to improve big time and become mainstream.
2. We need consistent hardware level protections. Most interactions generating data for AI to work on will be between machines , or between machines and humans. Software cannot be the lone line of defense – hardware level security should become a given. That will need a lot of standardization, which is not a term our industry particularly likes.
3. Ethics and law needs to be taught to all AI practitioners, and need to become part of the curriculum in early education. Awareness of the distinction between good and bad usage of AI need to become a minimum requirement.

AI Project team structures will change

Math and coding skills are not enough to do AI projects well. This is not new – we have already known this for a while. I think we will start seeing teams organized in four overlapping specialized groups going forward.

Most AI roughly follow the same cyclical sequence .

1. Understand ( language, sound, vision, smell, touch etc) and Organize information from the environment
2. Reason using math and logic , and make trade-offs and come to decisions
3. Interact with humans and/or machines to convey decisions (UI, psychology, visualization etc) and collect feedback
4. Learn from results on how the decisions worked and tweak how the problem will be solved from now on

Today, we try to do all of this with very little specialization – except perhaps in the math/logic side, and industry domain knowledge. But that won’t sustain going forward to cope with the scale – each area will need specialization and a lot of collaboration with each other.

Academia and Industry will become indistinguishable

There are two things an AI team needs to stay cutting edge – quality of AI talent , and quality/quantity of data available to make the solutions smarter.  No surprise then that most of my time gets spent finding and retaining such talent. This is true for all my peers across the industry too . If there is one set of people who are under even more stress than us in the industry – that would be the leaders of top universities. Industry and Academia has generally had a good working relationship historically , but the war for AI talent has Industry aggressively poaching AI talent. This might be great for the short term – but absolutely horrible for the long term. Who will teach the next generation if industry keeps poaching the best teachers and researchers ?

Academia has started great initiatives to let professors go to industry and come back – but not in a mainstream way as far as I can tell. And industry has not – in a mainstream way – gotten into the habit of thinking of academia beyond special projects and consulting. This is not an AI specific problem – AI will just make it painful enough for both sides to get to a solution quickly. I think what will happen is a de-facto working arrangement where there is little to no difference between academia and industry in the field of AI with experts just wearing different hats as needed.

Happy holidays !

Fair warning – this is a rant ! You should probably stop reading now .

Every year, I read 15 to 20 non fiction books. For last 5 years or so, the trend is exactly the same. I get to about 5 books by end of September…and then pick up speed and read 3 times as more in one third of the time. Also, I only read physical books – I don’t use an electronic book reader. Its an “old world” habit I am incapable of kicking. Its one of those things for which I have no rational explanation 🙂

Any way – this year I also noticed one more thing making reading harder for me. I started reading Satya Nadella’s auto biography and its not really a long read. I should have finished it in one day. Instead it took a week or so. The reason – every time I settle down to read, I want to put a song on my phone, check email, see the cricket score, play 2048 on my phone or something. It was ridiculously bad – and it took me a week to realize I can’t read a full book if my phone is anywhere close to me. So I started switching it off and leaving it on a charger in a room as far away as possible to where I was sitting. In planes, I started putting the phone into a bag that I shove into over head space. Pure magic – every book again returned to a one day adventure !

And then I realized the second problem. I have no patience left for long form prose. Thanks to micro blogs, blogs  and bulleted emails that I deal with all the time, beautifully written prose no longer looked beautiful and I was getting irritated. Thankfully couple more books in, life returned to normal and I started enjoying the good prose like usual.

Twitter does not take much time for me – I scan it about three times a day and very rarely have quality conversations on it. Thanks to carefully choosing who I follow, twitter has become a great news feed for topics I like. Any time there is an election, I mute a bunch of handles to keep the noise down. In general, I have no complaints. And strangely, the number of followers keep increasing all the time.

Similarly, I have no big issues with Facebook. I have a lot of friends and family connected on FB. Quality of conversation is extremely high and a lot of topics which used to get debated on twitter has moved on to FB now – and not really to linkedin which is what I expected.

Linkedin on the other hand has become a major pain in the rear for me. For a while, it was a nice place to use as my address book, and even more importantly – it surfaced some amazing content for me to read every day. There are two primary annoyances for me these days on linkedin – 1. God awful job recommendations ( including Catering, Truck driving, divorce attorney etc )and reading list recommendations and 2. People typing up double spaced single line sentences ad nauseam on HR and sales topics.

The double spaced thing looks like this

I interviewed a young man today.

He had no experience.

Looked like he had not showered in a week.

He never went to school.

He was not getting hired anywhere.

I skipped the interview process and hired him on the spot.

Because that is what leaders do.

Now he is the Chairman of a $20B business

My coping mechanism is straight forward – I block the people who post it, and also the people who share/like/comment such things and makes the linkedin algorithm put it on my feed.

And then there is whatsapp – which is supremely useful except for the flood of forwards and “good morning” messages from friends and family. Again the solution is simple – warn the folks who do it, and block repeat offenders. I think half my contacts are now blocked and I am guessing I won’t be invited to several Xmas parties this year 🙂

Every year I have taken social media sabbaticals for a month or two from multiple channels. That has been plenty to keep me sane these last ten years. But clearly that is not enough today. These channels are quite useful for many things – and filtering only goes so far. For now, I am planning to take longer social media sabbaticals . I also need to find/read about the latest greatest tips on how to not get overwhelmed by my social channels and phone. If you have good tips – pls do share.

End of rant !

Although I have spent a lot of time with lawyers reviewing contracts and stuff, I have never set foot in a court room in my life.  But, I have always loved court room drama in movies. I love the debate between opposing sides, with a judge providing guard rails and taking a decision based on evidence, laws and consistency.

The first line I picked up as a child from the Malayalam movies I grew up with was  “Objection, your honor !”.  This usually involves one lawyer jumping up dramatically from his seat to register his objection to what the opposing side is saying. The judge would then make a determination via “Objection sustained” or “Objection overruled”. The beauty of the system – at least as shown in movies – is that all sides agree and move on once the judge makes a determination. Worst case, one side presses on after the judge ruled, and a strict warning gets issued which returns the situation to an equilibrium.

I have not seen a movie yet where the lawyer who is asked to stand down then throws a fit and leaves the court, and sends in his resignation from his phone :).

For a long time, I consulted to a client who had this culture in their DNA. They called it “Disagree and commit” and practiced it religiously.

Literally anyone in the meeting can – respectfully – challenge any prevailing wisdom that is  being discussed. As long as the eventual decision was not opposed to company values, and did not have ethical/legal type issues – people who originally disagreed with the decision also commit to make it successful. Decisions were not always democratic – sometimes it was just a leader taking a judgement call . Having watched it play out for a long time – they largely followed through on that promise. That company went from strength to strength. It also helped shape my philosophy early on about stellar team performance in a big way.

“Disagree and commit” is EXTREMELY HARD ! . And it only gets harder as you take on more senior roles . A lot of things need to fall in to place for this to work well.

To begin with, you need some conviction that the rest of the team is at least as smart as you – if not smarter. If you consistently think the rest of team are dumb asses who just don’t get it, you will only ever disagree – you will never commit ! .

The resolution varies from you getting coaching to get a fresh perspective, the team getting redesigned (perhaps by excluding you) , or you finding a team where you fit better and trust and respect the folks around to you.

Since decision making needs to happen frequently in any team – its usually too late to resolve this dilemma post facto. The smart thing to do (whenever you can) is to be very careful where you choose to work, and who you work for.

It is quite possible that you are the smartest person in the team and the rest of them truly don’t get it. This is a true test of leadership. The make or break here is empathy – whether you can put yourself in their shoes, and reframe your point of view to change their thinking. Its also a test of your own ability to make trade offs. Can you live with yourself if the mission fails ? Is it better to not rock the boat and risk losing your job with a mortgage to pay and two kids in school ? Can the team course correct if you succeed to show them half way through that the original idea was not the best ?

One tactic I have used with better than modest success, to commit to something I have disagreed with, is to get the team to set up a few early milestones as check points.

This is not always possible – some times they are “all or nothing” commitments . Yet, whenever possible, it helps to minimize potential damage. I readily admit that some times such check points have proved me wrong ( so much for my strong belief that I was the one who was smartest in the gang) .

What if you truly can’t live with yourself with the decision that the team agreed on ? You wholeheartedly disagree – but you just can’t commit. Hopefully these are few and far between scenarios (If they are not, most certainly you should quickly take help from your coaches and mentors).

The first thing to do here is to make a determination whether you can let the team do what they agreed to do without causing any additional roadblocks yourself actively or passively. When we are experts in an area – we tend to think in extremes. Everything that could go wrong, we will assume they will go wrong, and horribly so.

The truth is that only very few risks have high probability to occur and high impact if they actually do occur. So perhaps you can help the team identify those, and provide ideas to mitigate – as opposed to just dismiss the whole idea summarily.

There is also the idea to resort to “policy by lapse”. The idea is like “If you don’t like the weather, just wait a bit and it will change”.

This could also work, if used occasionally. Unfortunately I have known many who choose this as first and only way – and they become a boat anchor on their team’s neck. The first chance they get, the team will get rid of you from their midst. Ergo – use with extreme caution !

If none of that work,  the next thing to explore is to find something else to do – in your current team, or elsewhere. While you are searching, you need to find a way to minimize spreading negativity. By spreading negativity, you will continue to be miserable, make others miserable, and earn the kind of reputation that will be hard to shake off.

It is never easy to go find another team if you just realized you need to do it and you have only 3 days to do it. Unless you are on par with Elon Musk – You should assume throughout that you need Plan B and Plan C at all points, and keep them refreshed periodically.

All those things like having an active network, keeping your skills sharp, letting the world know of what makes you special etc – they are essentials in your career for a reason !

I will make one last point before I sign off. If you are miserable and are looking for your next adventure, don’t just go looking for what open opportunities exist in your network. A focused “This is what I would like to do, and here is why. Can you help?” ( being careful to not come across as arrogant) will trump the generic “Here are my skills and experience, is there anything open that suits me?” most days.