I Covered the Last Technology Revolution. Here's What It Taught Me About This One.

I wrote about MCX fifty times.

Fifty posts about a payments consortium most people have never heard of. Forty-four more about CurrentC, the app it was building. Sixty-nine about beacons, sixty about iBeacon specifically. Sixty-five about Apple Pay. Between 2013 and 2019 I published nearly a thousand posts on this site, and a large share of them were about how you were going to pay for things in the future.

Almost none of it happened.

I'm not bringing that up to be clever. I believed a good deal of it at the time, and the record is right here — you can scroll back and check. I'm bringing it up because I've now watched one technology cycle run the whole distance, from the launch announcements to the quiet obituaries, and I wrote it down as it went. That turns out to be a useful thing to have done, because another one is happening right now and it rhymes.

What everybody knew

In 2014, here is what everybody knew.

The physical wallet was finished. Within five years you would pay for everything with your phone. Retailers would know you had walked into the store before you reached the second aisle, because small Bluetooth transmitters — beacons — would be stuck to the shelves, talking to an app in your pocket. Your coupons would find you. The checkout line would dissolve.

This wasn't a fringe position. It was the consensus of an entire industry. Forrester published on it. Business Insider published on it. I published on it, constantly.

And the biggest retailers in America were not going to let Apple own it. So Walmart, Target, Best Buy, CVS, Sears, Kohl's and about fifty others formed a consortium — the Merchant Customer Exchange — and built their own payment app called CurrentC. It used QR codes instead of the NFC chip in your phone. It drew money straight from your bank account instead of a card, which cut the card networks out of the transaction and saved the merchants the interchange fee.

Some of the participating retailers signed exclusivity terms and switched off the NFC readers already sitting on their counters. You could not use Apple Pay at those stores. That was the point.

Meanwhile, the wireless carriers had their own entry — ISIS, which had to be renamed Softcard for reasons that became obvious in 2014.

Enormous companies. Enormous budgets. A genuine strategic rationale. Years of runway.

What actually happened

Softcard was bought for its patents and shut down inside of a year.

CurrentC never made it out of a pilot. MCX — the combined weight of the American retail industry — wound down without shipping a product at national scale. Paydiant, the company that built its technology, got absorbed by PayPal.

The beacons mostly came off the shelves. Walk into a store today and count them.

Apple Pay survived. So did the other phone wallets. But not in the form anyone described in 2014 — they became a slightly faster way to use the same credit card you already had, running on the same card networks that MCX was formed to escape. The revolution shipped as a convenience feature.

And here's the part that took me longest to see: the failures were not total either. Walmart shipped Walmart Pay in 2016. It uses QR codes, runs through the merchant's own app, and it works. The proximity technology behind beacons didn't disappear; it dissolved into store apps and order-ahead pickup, where nobody calls it a beacon and nobody writes think pieces about it.

Nothing was transformed. Nothing collapsed. Everything got absorbed, quietly, in a smaller and less interesting shape than either side predicted.

Three things I'd tell my 2014 self

**One: ask whose problem it solves, and then ask who is being asked to adopt it.**

CurrentC existed because merchants wanted to stop paying interchange fees. That is a real problem — for merchants. It was then packaged as a consumer product and handed to shoppers who were asked to link their checking account to a QR-code app in exchange for approximately nothing.

Apple Pay solved a customer's problem, badly and marginally, but it solved a customer's problem. That was the whole difference. Not the technology. Not the money.

When the party that benefits and the party that has to adopt are different people, the adoption doesn't happen — no matter how much capital is behind it.

I would now ask that question of every enterprise AI deployment I read about. A tool sold as productivity for the worker, purchased by an executive who has been shown a headcount projection, is not a productivity tool. It's a CurrentC. The person asked to adopt it can generally tell.

**Two: a consortium is a tell.**

I read MCX as a show of force. The largest retailers in the country, aligned. How do you beat that?

I had it backwards. Companies that are winning don't form consortia. They ship. A consortium is what happens when a group of incumbents is frightened of the same thing and would rather coordinate a defense than compete. It's a lagging indicator of fear, and it moves at the speed of its slowest committee.

I now read industry alliances, joint standards bodies, and shared-principles announcements in that light. Sometimes they're substantive. More often they're the sound of large organizations trying to slow something down.

**Three: the honest forecast is boring, and nobody rewards it.**

The two loud positions in 2014 were "this changes everything" and "this is a bubble." Both were wrong, and both were more fun to write than what actually occurred, which was: *some of this gets absorbed into ordinary practice over about eight years, in a form that isn't very exciting, and the interesting question turns out to be who captures the money.*

Nobody clicks that. I know, because I mostly didn't write it.

What I got wrong

I want to be specific, because a retrospective where the author turns out to have been right is worthless.

I gave beacons far more coverage than they earned. Sixty-nine posts. I was persuaded by the demos, and demos are designed to persuade. I did not ask often enough what a shopper actually gained from being detected.

I treated the MCX-versus-Apple story as the main event for years. It was a sideshow. The main event was that payments are a network business, and the networks were never in danger from any of it.

And I mistook activity for progress. Pilots, partnerships, press releases, conference keynotes — I covered all of it as though motion were the same as traction. A great deal of what I wrote is a record of an industry talking to itself.

So what does this say about AI

I want to be careful here, because the easy move is to say "AI is CurrentC" and collect the applause. I don't think that. Something real is happening — I've written about the job numbers, and I don't think they're noise.

But I'd ask three questions before accepting any confident claim about where this goes.

**Who benefits, and who has to adopt?** Where those are the same person, expect it to stick. Where they diverge, expect friction that the projections don't include, and expect the people making the projections to describe that friction as resistance to change.

**Is this shipping, or is this being announced?** Pilots are not deployment. Partnerships are not revenue. I spent years failing to make that distinction and it cost me most of my accuracy.

**Who is telling me, and what do they hold?** In 2014 the loudest voices about payments were the ones with balance sheets riding on the outcome. That is at least as true now, in both directions — the people forecasting total transformation and the people forecasting collapse are, in the main, positioned.

The one thing I'd bet on

Not that AI fails. Not that it transforms everything.

That the technology question resolves faster than the distributional one, and that the distributional one is the whole thing.

Mobile payments got sorted out inside a decade. The card networks kept the interchange. That was never a technical question, and no amount of engineering was going to change it, because it was a question about who had leverage.

The AI conversation is currently being conducted almost entirely in the language of capability — what it can do, how fast, how soon. Capability will be settled. Who absorbs the cost of the transition, and who keeps the gains, will not be settled by capability at all.

I watched an industry spend five years and an enormous amount of money arguing about technology when the argument was actually about money. I'd rather not watch it twice without saying so.

 J.W. Gant

The Dangers of Plastic, Microplastics, and Forever Chemicals

 Hello,

I am going through a personal experiment with plastics, and microplastics (and nanoplastics) as I write this. Three weeks ago, after reading a medical study showing strong correlation between levels of microplastics in those suffering from inflamamtory bowel syndrome, I eliminated the heavy hitters of plastic from my personal use and have seen a dramatic improvement in my symptoms.

What are microplastics?

Why are they a concern?

You have probably heard of 'forever chemicals' and these are in that category. Plastics do not break down into other chemicals. Rather, they shear off to smaller and smaller pieces of the chemical bond until they are nano in side, and that is small enough to get into every part of the human body. The human immune system (and every animal on earth) attacks these but cannot break them down so inflammation results, the immune cell dies, then another tries it again.

We have been running a massive experiment, on the scale of billions of people, for decades by exposing our bodies to these chemicals--shown to cause cancers in lab animals--and now we are seeing the result.

And they knew.

The executives at 3M chemicals knew in the 1960's. 

Here is the ProPublica article on that:

https://www.propublica.org/article/3m-forever-chemicals-pfas-pfos-inside-story

Here is a snippet from the piece:

Decades ago, [3M scientist] Kris Hansen showed 3M that its PFAS chemicals were in people's bodies. Her bosses halted her work. As the EPA now forces the removal of the chemicals from drinking water, she wrestles with the secrets that 3M kept from her and the world.

...

[when found in horses she asked why]

She found an answer in data from lab rats, which also appeared to have fluorochemicals in their blood. Rats that had more fish meal in their diets, she discovered, tended to have higher levels of PFOS, suggesting that the chemical had spread through the food chain and perhaps through water. In male lab rats, PFOS levels rose with age, indicating that the chemical accumulated in the body. But, curiously, in female rats the levels sometimes fell. Hansen was unsettled when toxicology reports indicated why: Mother rats seemed to be offloading the chemical to their pups. Exposure to PFOS could begin before birth.

Here is the study on inflamattory bowel syndrome:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c03924

Here is a snippet from that piece:

...we conclude that the plastic packaging of drinking water and food and dust exposure are important sources of human exposure to MPs. Furthermore, the positive correlation between fecal MPs and IBD status suggests that MP exposure may be related to the disease process or that IBD exacerbates the retention of MPs. The relative mechanisms deserve further studies.

Be sure to understand correlation does not show causation. We do not yet know the cause of increased microplastics in people who suffer from IBS, however, I have seen an extreme reduction in my symptoms since reducing my intake of MPs.

The Washington Post did a great article about plastics in the air.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2024/microplastics-air-human-body-organs-spread/

It is a firewall article but worth the read.

Basically, we are breathing in micro and nano plastics constantly.

Here is an article telling you how to reduce (we cannot escape them completely) forever chemicals:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/06/06/avoid-forever-chemicals-food-water/

Get rid of plastic containers to store food in your refrigerator. Get rid of multi-use plastic bottles, swap to the metal canteen style. Get rid of microwave popcorn, and don't buy non-stick cookware.

I think this issue is going to be an increasing one and massive lawsuits will ensue. 3M is facing an existential crisis of its own making. I for one will line up to sue them given what I've seen from my personal experiment.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

PS What does this say about capitalism? The free market folks say the market will correct for this. But, the CEOs of 3M who have already taken their millions, while they knew of this and hid the results, are likely never going to hurt in any way from this (some are already dead, their money passed to their estates). How does the free market prevent executives from making decision like this, harmful to the public and the world, when they get away with their money? The answer is, it doesn't. And that points to the limits of capitalism and the need for something else.

Billionaires to Say Thank You To.

 I love the premise of this article.

In short, it is hard to applaud billionaires but these deserve recognition.

Wow.

Yeah, true. When we see Elon Musk shooting his mouth off and throwing away $44B on Twitter, (I won't have anything to do with 'X') it is easy to think less of these poor humans.

Here is the article:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/29/opinions/melinda-gates-mackenzie-scott-philanthropy-filipovic/index.html

Here is a snippet from that piece:

There is something irrefutably broken about a global system in which a small number of people are able to amass staggering amounts of wealth, a huge number struggle to simply survive (and many don’t) and then we applaud those among the uber-wealthy who bestow some of their largess on the suffering masses.

But this is the global system we do have and, within it, some billionaires are behaving much more generously and ethically than others. 

The opinion article goes on to talk about the wives of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos as exemplars, as well as Warren Buffett. It should be thought-provoking.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

AI Coming for Professional Jobs

 Coming?

Recent reports show it is already happening but we can't measure the impact yet. Those benefitting, meaning the money interest behind it, will minimize the numbers to ensure complacency. Those worried about it might inflate the numbers through ignorance.

What happens next?

Here is a little story that wonders about that, with an informed view based on past experience. It has a paywall.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/29/ai-professional-class-low-skill-jobs/

Here is a snippet from that piece:

As a Bloomberg News headline put it in February, “AI Is Driving More Layoffs Than Companies Want to Admit.” And though the numbers aren’t enormous — Bloomberg cites one source that found 4,600 AI-related layoffs during the previous nine months — that’s a pretty big number considering that ChatGPT was released to the public only in November 2022. It’s going to get bigger still.

...

But if so, we are also likely to see a revolt of the educated people who are losing ground, similar to the revolt that led the working class to embrace protectionism — and Donald Trump. Or at least that’s how it seems to me when I try to imagine the upper middle class offering their own kids the advice they’ve so liberally dispensed to working-class men: “I’m sorry, but the jobs your parents had aren’t going to be around, and it’s time to face reality and look for steady work in food service or a warehouse.”

“I’d be fine with that!” some educated parent will inevitably write me, “as long as they have good health insurance and a strong social safety net.” I applaud those public-minded people, but, realistically, I doubt they’re the majority. For most upper-middle-class families, I expect there will be a lot of outrage and fear, and demands that the government do something to help them maintain their position and pass what they have onto their children.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

PS The world's richest man recently declared all work will be eliminated for AI.

Empathy is Contagious

 I found this to be very interesting, hopeful, and concerning.

Empathy is the ability a person might possess to put themselves in the shoes of another person (or animal or other) to feel what they feel and experience what they experience.

New science says it is contagious. Being around or witnessing empathy tends to increase empathy in the witness.

Here is the full story:

https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/48962/20240228/empathy-contagious-change-depending-reaction-others-study.htm

Here is a snippet from the piece:

"Depending on whether empathic or non-empathic reactions were observed, empathy ratings increased or decreased," per neuroscientist Grit Hein from the University of Würzburg in Germany.

A troubling part of it is the assessment that empathy is on the decline overall. Also, lack of empathy is also contagious. That tells me this could be used as a tool for desensitization--a necessary component of conquest and dominance.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

Tech Sector Job Bloodbath Continues

 The head economist at Moody's was recently quoted in a Washington Post article as saying, roughly, "The American form of capitalism is ruthless in how it reallocates resources."

That means layoffs. Means lives destroyed so shareholder value can be maximized.

Since the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates to battle inflation the business calculation to invest in tech and speculate has shifted and now the companies who employed those workers have to adjust to meet the numbers Wall Street expects of them. Executives, heavily incentivized to meet Wall Street demands, are culling the work force at these companies to cut costs--the only avenue remaining when growth options are limited. The U.S. lags behind other western democracies in protecting workers--read, people who don't hold enormous loads of capital, money--so these kinds of wave layoffs are only possible in this country.

The bloodbath started early in 2023 and continue.

Here is an article detailing how ex-Googlers are handling it:

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/tech-workers-layoffs-job-cuts-careers-rcna141735

Here is a snippet from that piece:

“There was a time when working in tech seemed like the most stable career you could have,” said Ayomi Samaraweera, who was laid off as chief of staff at the content creator platform Jellysmack in December 2022. After about 10 years in the industry, she said, “tech does not seem safe and secure.”

Here is an article announcing yet another round of layoffs at Google:

https://siliconangle.com/2024/04/17/google-announces-second-major-round-layoffs-year/ 

Here is an article tracking the major layoffs in tech:

https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/07/tech-layoffs-2023-list/

Here is a snippet from that piece:

The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the first months of 2024. Smaller-sized startups have also seen a fair amount of cuts, and in some cases, have shut down operations altogether.

If you are fortunate enough to have a chair during this gigantic game of musical chairs, where more than a half a million are outside looking in trying to survive, please consider others.

The society we live in is a choice. We can choose to stay on the current path, or deviate. The evidence strongly suggests the current path only benefits a very small portion of society and is creating waves of destruction for the majority of society. We should consider the alternatives.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

The End of Neoliberalism May Be Dawning

The market should be trusted and knows all.

That has been sold to the people of the U.S. for decades, half a century or more now, since at least the Reagan revolution.

How has that worked out?

The middle class has been squeezed almost out of existence, the wealth gap has grown incredibly high, CEOs now make more in a day than the average employee makes in a lifetime, etc. The list goes on.

One economist writing for the Washington Post says our democracy requires a change to our economics.

captialism-economics-democracy-book/

Here is a snippet from the piece:

We’ve now had four decades of the neoliberal “experiment,” beginning with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The results are clear. Neoliberalism expanded the freedom of corporations and billionaires to do as they will and amass huge fortunes, but it also exacted a steep price: the well-being and freedom of the rest of society.

Interesting read. His opinion is growing massively in this country.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

BRotD Entry 0268 - The Looming Social Upheaval from AI

Best Reading of the Day

The article frames the discussion as a lack of preparedness by politicians for the coming AI revolution, that some refer to as the third industrial revolution.

The U.S. is a democracy with a system of laws for governing. Free market people will say it is as it should be. Keep politicos and their regulations out.

What will come of it?

Here is the complete article:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/13/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html

Here are a few snippets from the piece, that is a lengthy interview with economist Glenn Hubbard.

Glenn Hubbard is worried the United States isn’t ready to accept the disruptions that come along with [the coming AI revolution] 

...

Over the past three or four decades, technological change and some globalization has caused a slow-mo disruption of the job market and communities around the country. Now look at AI, we’re going to have that same disruption except it’s going to be much faster. We’re talking about five years, not 30.

...

Social support for our system is unraveling and it’s been unraveling for a while. There are many communities and many groups of individuals who don’t really feel like contemporary capitalism is serving them well. And the longer we let that go, we’re really running the risk of killing the golden goose.

That last part really struck me.

We have literally seen the populace of the U.S. rise up with pitchforks and torches to overthrow our current system (January 6 Capital Riots). Income inequality and wealth disparity, inherent in capitalism, have been growing rapidly for decades and is well-known to be a source to destabilize a society. 

When will the people of the U.S. wake up? The younger generation is already moving rapidly anti-capitalist and pro-socialism because of where we are. A sea-change is coming. I see tumultuous times ahead.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

BRotD Entry 0267 - Major League Baseball and AI

Best Reading of the Day

 Data is the currency of sports in the modern era. 

We have seen the major leagues transformed over the last two decades--moneyball in baseball--and the effort is ongoing and continuous.

The latest is AI-driven analysis of extreme video footage of baseball players: both pitchers and hitters.

This story is eye-opening:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/10/op-moneyballai/

Here is a snippet from the piece.

Boddy [the owner of the data company] and his engineering team now rely on AI to blend dozens of data streams to create customized coaching regimens. I cannot emphasize enough how little this is like your weekly personal training session. Video analysis breaks down individual muscles and movements by the inch. Hardware (bats and balls) is equipped with software (sensors) that tracks every baseball action and renders them into equations that measure force and torque. Like all data-gobbling AI software, the process gets smarter as it goes; Driveline has collected enough historical performance data that it can correlate five non-baseball related physical tests into dead solid predictions of fastball velocity and bat speed.

Even in its infancy, Driveline helped Bauer become one of baseball’s best pitchers. 

The most shocking part of the story? This is coming for all of our jobs yet almost none of us will be able to afford to protect our data from our employers. The conclusion of this piece is telling:

“I have friends who are lawyers and prop traders, and it’s shocking to me how far ahead sports is when it comes to these technologies,” says Boddy. “A lot of them don’t see what’s coming.” 

Got your attention yet?

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

BRotD Entry 0266 - AI Deepfake Scam for Twenty Five Million Dollars

 Best Reading of the Day

Oh boy.

A sophisticated phishing scam hit a Hong Kong company - as yet undisclosed - and convinced an employee to move HK$200 Million, or about $25 USD Million, to a variety of banks.

Deep fake technology, including accurate voices, on a video conference call simulated the Chief Financial Officer and a number of other employees and convinced the real life employee to make the transfer.

Phew!

The days of shootouts in banks are way behind us.

Here's the story:

arstechnica.com -first-of-its-kind-ai-heist/

And here is a snippet from that piece:

The scam was initially uncovered following a phishing attempt, when an employee in the finance department of the company's Hong Kong branch received what seemed to be a phishing message, purportedly from the company’s UK-based chief financial officer, instructing them to execute a secret transaction. 

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

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

AI and Beethoven's 10th

 Yes.

His tenth.

But he only has nine you say.

Yes, but he had many sketches for his tenth at the time of his death.

So what?

Yes, we can never know exactly what he would have created had he finished it but we can gleam something from it, through Artificial Intelligence.

AI works through a process of cognition through a hero sketch and repetition, followed by an execution effort.

So we might take a very clear photo of a person, teach the AI system who that person is, then run thousands of video files through it to find instances where a person is in the frame who looks like that hero photo.

With Beethoven we have nine completed symphonies to teach the AI and a sketch of the tenth.  Why not finish it?

Here is a brief history of the 10th as it was prior to AI:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._10_(Beethoven/Cooper)

And here is a story about he completion of the 10th using AI:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-artificial-intelligence-completed-beethovens-unfinished-10th-symphony-180978753/

Here is a snippet from that piece:

The task at hand eventually crystallized. We would need to use notes and completed compositions from Beethoven’s entire body of work - along with the available sketches from the Tenth Symphony - to create something that Beethoven himself might have written.

This was a tremendous challenge. We didn’t have a machine that we could feed sketches to, push a button and have it spit out a symphony. Most A.I. available at the time couldn’t continue an uncompleted piece of music beyond a few additional seconds.

Best,

J.W. Gant