Will AI Save the World?

 Technological advances are driven by a few things such as need.

In Product Management we talk about Jobs, Pains and Gains.

Someone has some kind of "job" they want done and will consider hiring a solution to that job such as a bagel for breakfast.

Someone has a "pain" of some kind and a solution to that pain is valuable. Such as an unstable form of high explosive like nitroglycerin causing death and uncertainty, eventually replaced by TNT, a stable high explosive.  Of course, this led to artillery shells and the massive loss of life in The Great War (WWI).

Someone has a "gain" they wish to realize such as revenue and will consider your solution to help them.

Artificial Intelligence advances are being driven by these and other reasons such as intellectual curiosity, scientific curiosity, etc. Will all of AI be of benefit to humankind?  Will all of it be to the detriment of human kind?  This little writeup, by a capital management firm (hmm, does this writer perhaps have motivations for writing something like this?) says AI will save the world. 

Will it?

You decide?

Here is the article:

/ai-will-save-the-world/

And here is a blurb from that piece:

What AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence – and many others, from the creation of new medicines to ways to solve climate change to technologies to reach the stars – much, much better from here.
AI augmentation of human intelligence has already started – AI is already around us in the form of computer control systems of many kinds, is now rapidly escalating with AI Large Language Models like ChatGPT, and will accelerate very quickly from here – if we let it.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

Decline of Cable TV

 Quick question: do you have a cable TV subscription?

If so, you are one of a rapidly declining set of customers.

I cut the cord (a term for moving to internet-only, no cable TV) many years ago when my provider sent me a notice my monthly bill would be increasing by 39%  with no corresponding change in service.

That trend is accelerating. Cable TV is nearing end of life.

Here is a recent piece on that:

cord-cutting-all-time-high

Here is a snippet from that piece:

As streaming video continues its ascendancy, cable, satellite and internet TV providers in the U.S. turned in their worst subscriber losses to date in the first quarter of 2023 — collectively shedding 2.3 million customers in the period, according to analyst estimates.

Best Regards,

J.W. Gant

PS I watched a portion of the Celtics game 7 loss to the Heat last night at a friend's who has YouTube TV. Not bad. We "tuned in" TNT to watch it. Easy. I have a digital antenna at home for basic TV viewing and just skip events that aren't on the big channels.

PPS Thank you to arstechnica.com for pointing me to this story.

The Danger of General Artificial Intelligence

 The sci-fi stories are becoming reality, becoming whispers at water coolers, becoming the nightmares of researchers at AI labs, becoming a voice in the halls of Congress, becoming a shout, and becoming a clarion call.

AI could kill us all.

That is the conclusion of the top minds in Artificial Intelligence.  Even the skeptics generally say it only "might" kill us all.

Might?

Time to hit the pause button?

Here is a Time article on the subject:

We Are Not Doing Enough to Stop General AI

Here is a snippet from that piece:

We are not prepared. We are not on course to be prepared in any reasonable time window. There is no plan. Progress in AI capabilities is running vastly, vastly ahead of progress in AI alignment or even progress in understanding what the hell is going on inside those systems. If we actually do this, we are all going to die.

Here is a recent 

AI Poses an Extinction Risk

Here is a snippet from that piece:

Leaders from OpenAI, Google Deepmind, Anthropic and other A.I. labs warn that future systems could be as deadly as pandemics and nuclear weapons.

Wow.

Then I think of The Great Filter that I wrote about in this blog and I wonder if we are really on this planet, if our purpose in life, is to create an intelligence greater than ours.  And I wonder, what happens after that?

Happy Tuesday. :-)

Best Regards,

J.W. Gant

Ills of Social Media Tech

Watch any teenager today (and younger) and you'll see an appendage with a phone and a human attached to it.

Tik Tok

SnapChat

Yes, Instagram and maybe still a little Facebook.

The Surgeon General of the United States just wrote a warning about the issues with social media and we should all be paying attention, especially if you are the parent of a child navigating these new technologies.

Here is a pretty great story about a young woman who quit social media for a year, her conclusions, and what she plans to do next:

Young Woman Quits Social Media

Here is a blurb from that:

Social media became my form of expression. I tried to authentically capture my life on my profiles, and my identity was broadcast online for hundreds (sometimes thousands) of people to see.

Things quickly went downhill when likes and comments became my validation.

Take a day to disconnect.  To unplug. You will thank me.

Now please excuse me while I turn off my laptop and go for a run outside in the sunshine north of Boston.

Best Regards,

J.W. Gant

The New AI and ChatGPT

 AI

Artificial Intelligence

ML

Machine Learning

No it is not coming for your job but will rather augment what you do today.

More on that in a moment.

Here is a quick story about a Sci-fi magazine that had to close submissions because of the swarm of AI written material:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/sci-fi-becomes-real-as-renowned-magazine-closes-submissions-due-to-ai-writers/

Here is a blurb about 

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/generative-ai-is-coming-for-the-lawyers/

... and a quick clip from that one ...

“Legal document drafting can be a very labor-intensive task that AI seems to be able to grasp quite well. Contracts, policies, and other legal documents tend to be normative, so AI's capabilities in gathering and synthesizing information can do a lot of heavy lifting.”

The strength of AI is in the performance of repetitive tasks.  You can visualize this as a machine in say an assembly line of a car. Where do we put robots today? Highly repetitive tasks of a very uniform standard nature.  Yes. Now take that to the intellectual world such as writing (see above) and apply the same concept. However it cannot fully replace the human in the task.

There is a lot of space there in the world to fill in the work with machines. It is already happening and has been happening for centuries.  Think of washing machines for your laundry. We used to do all the work washing each item of clothing by hand. Now the human manages the machine that does the grunt work of washing. The human is still present.

Tomorrow (today) we will have new jobs that manage the AI to ensure it is staying on task and target. Some jobs will go away, some will be created, some groups of people will gain, and some will lose. 

The wealthiest in the world see two solutions to staying ahead in the coming decades: capital and creativity.  All else will become tertiary.

Best,

J.W. Gant

Product Management Leadership

 Hello,

A recent experience highlighted something, again, that is worth exploring. How do we become Product Managers?  It is an apprenticeship and as such is unlike many or most other modern disciplines (higher education, are you listening?).  You can go to nursing school and become a nurse, law school and become a lawyer, but Product Management?  No.

I was recently asked by a recruiter to please speak with the Head of Product at a large wealth management technology offshoot company who wanted to hire some help.  I was immediately very skeptical as the industry is known (by me personally) to be well behind the times regarding all things tech. But the recruiter was persuasive.  I took everything said with a heavy grain of salt and went into the conversation having done some prep work.

She/him, the Head of Product, the executive at the company responsible for its products & services, has a background in economics and finance and decades with various New England wealth management companies.  I decided to dumb down my talk dramatically and see how it played.

Within 5 minutes I could see his/her head spinning.

She/he had essentially complained about the job of heading product management listing all the common areas of focus where we professional PM executives apply our frameworks, knowledge, processes, and people skills, then stated she/he had no idea what to do about it and needed help.

This executive told me she/he had no idea how to do their job. As Head of Product.

I then stated I'd had interviews where the CTO ripped off my ideas, assured this person I didn't believe it was happening today, then said I'd give these couple "for free" and listed off the basic frameworks I would use to handle the situation presented.

Head spinning.

Lesson. There really is an enormous gap between people who are in the position and what they actually needed to do to get there at a technologically modern company. If you are an executive at a company that is not traditionally known as a "technology" company, or a "product" company, you have to do more than just say it.  There is real nuts & bolts to doing it.  The first step is accepting that you have much to learn. As we all do.

Best,

J.W. Gant

BRotD Entry 0265 - The Twitter Takeover

Best Reading of the Day

 Some people believe a person who's net worth is in the billions is naturally better than everyone else.

"Drop Elon Musk down in a third world country with no money and he'd be running the place within a year," is the typical hagiography we see around these folks.

True?

Hardly.

Here is a little piece (free to read for a limited time) about the Twitter takeover by the world's (previously) richest man:

elon-musk-twitter-takeover.html

Here is a snippet from that piece:

Alicia [part of the core engineering team] wasn’t reflexively anti-Musk. She respected what he had done at his companies and felt hopeful that, as someone who thought of himself as an engineer, he would support her highly technical work. But Musk had a different interest that day. Twitter, he said, should immediately get into video.

“We really should be able to do longform video and attract the best content creators by giving them a better cut than YouTube,” he said, according to Alicia’s recollection. The infrastructure engineers in the room agreed that adding support for longform video was technically possible, but their job was building stuff — not strategy or marketing. It seemed as though Musk didn’t understand the basic organizational structure of a social-media company; it was as if a rich guy had bought a restaurant and started telling the cooks he wanted to add a new dining room. Might he want to speak with the media product team instead?

Having been in tech and product for a few decades now I can say this use of engineering time by Musk is as stupid a waste I have heard of. Engineers should not be making business decisions, rather, they relate what is feasible, exactly as "Alicia" indicated during this meeting.  Any other discussion with the engineering team is a waste of extremely valuable resources.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

2022 the Year of the Narcissist

 If you've never encountered a narcissist, that you know of, count yourself lucky.

Most are obsessed with maintaining a perception bubble around them so people view them as they wish to be viewed, and shower them with accolades for how amazing they are so the shattered vessel of a human they are is constantly being filled with validation.

I have encountered some in my personal and professional life.  The key to identifying them is to witness a lack of empathy.  They are unable to see the world from another person's perspective and feel what they feel (this is different from a person who is detached from their emotions, low EQ). For example your boss might attack you publicly and can't see how this is harmful to you.  If you reciprocate they will be quick to see the harm you are doing to them (this one is personal experience, he is a narcissist and my actions exposed his severe leadership deficiencies to leadership, limiting his career there).

This little article states 2022 was the year of the narcissist and is worth a read:

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/happy-new-year-2023-kick-trump-elon-musk-kanye-depp-rcna63557

Here is a snippet from the piece:

True narcissists self-centeredly disregard the needs of others and care little for pesky matters like consequences. They can also tend to be manipulative, arrogant, grandiose and hungry for admiration. Always busy concocting fantasies of unlimited power or brilliance, narcissists delight in reeling others in to play supporting roles in dream worlds, where they are always the stars.

Why have they gained so much power and influence? Why are so many people in thrall every time they open their mouths or fire off tweets? Are they the problem or a symptom of something bigger than their own egos? 

The truth is that our society breeds narcissists. We put them on pedestals and get a strong hit of vicarious pleasure when they act out.

Happy 2023!

J.W. Gant

New Year Resolutions, Should You?

 This topic is one of the most hated each year, right behind the year-end recap endlessly and worthlessly providing a "top 10" or whatever on any topic imaginable from movies, to deaths, to fiction novels.

However it is really worthwhile to consider what you do in January as a reset to your health.

Studies continue to show the average American gains about 1.5 pounds over the holiday, winter, season, then don't lose it.

Here is WebMD on the subject stating the gain is 1.36 pounds:

https://www.webmd.com/diet/features/holiday-weight-gain-big-fat-lie

The article emphasizes the issue is what we do, or don't do, AFTER the gain that is the problem.

Then there is this little piece about taking January off from drinking alcohol:

Dry January

Here is a snippet from that piece:

People who abstained from alcohol for a month started drinking less the rest of the year and showed striking improvements in their health.

So, what should you do?

Why not plan on a health reset every January? Enjoy the holidays.  Sip on that eggnog with the run/cognac/bourbon mix in it. Have that extra slice of cake. Then reset in January.  It really will make a difference.

J.W. Gant