Alexander Chalkidis

Category: Technology

  • Energophobia: a very modern disease

    (This article was written in 2013.  Since then a lot of manufacturers have followed my advice and batteries have indeed got bigger.)

    It is pretty rare these days to find something that a Google search cannot.  I mean zilch. Nothing.  It immediately guessed I was looking for agoraphobia.  But I am not looking for a fear of  places that might make you feel trapped, helpless or embarrassed.   I am looking for a much more common fear which affects most of us.  You know when you sit down and your first thought is to charge your phone?  When you drive and plug in “just in case”?  Energophobia (ενεργοφοβία) is the fear of running out of power on one of the many devices you carry around.  Usually your smartphone.

    This condition remains a mystery to me.  Because it seems so easy to solve.  Most phones’ batteries have a 3000 (don’t care what the units are) battery.  Even ridiculously expensive new iPhones can hardly last a day.  They keep talking about improvements here and there for battery life.  Why not just give it a bigger battery?  I can buy a phone with three times the battery (10000) or twice the battery for less than 150 dollars and go for days.  Hell, they support USB on the go, so I can even charge your iPhone for you!  And OK, Apple is weird about doing multiple phone models, why don’t Android phone makers, give the damn things bigger batteries?

    The only obvious answer is that people don’t want to pay for it.  Which makes even less sense.  You want a slim phone so much that you prefer to live with a constant anxiety about running out of battery?  You prefer to carry so many accessories, which probably weigh more than a second phone in total,  instead of a very slightly heavier phone?  I would love for a major manufacturer to just try out my hypothesis.  Make a flagship model with a bigger battery.  Not double, just enough more power so that you can easily get through a working day without even thinking about having to charge.  Without worrying about being an energy beggar anywhere you take a break.

    In any case, please think about it.  Talk to your shrink and let me know.

  • Notifications chaos? Across platforms, devices and the Universe. Solved!

    I was looking at the new and improved YouTube when it came to me.  Check out all the new bells and whistles, the polls and the posts you can make in a tool that is more and more like a social network, and it will notify you…  I  just kept thinking “wow, how will users handle all the extra new notifications from this app?”  And then I logged in to Google Local Guides connect and thought “I wish this sent me notifications more often without me needing to log in”.  I keep forgetting about it.

     

    There is no easy solution.  No magic bullet.  Oh, wait a minute.  Yes there is!

     

    It is currently chaos.  Every app tries to dominate on my phone and my computer and everywhere it can.  AirBnB sends me text messages just to make sure I have read my emails about a place I am staying in two months.  When I get a new phone or reset my old one, Google does an excellent job of bringing back all sorts of settings.  But not notifications.  Because that is a job bigger even than Google.  Here is how we could  it:

     

    1. Start a service which picks up from your phone and computer as many as possible of whatever apps and services you are connected to automatically.  No easier way around this, you need to authorize it to know your Twitter, Linked in, Gmail or whatever else you want it to handle the notifications for.
    2. You then get a master notifications center.  I am talking about all your apps and all your devices.  Here is where the magic starts.  Because you tell it that you want your cell phone, any cell phone you connect to the service, to always notify you if something happens on Twitter.  Or to never notify you about anything on Facebook other than someone tagging you.   Or to always tell you somehow about stuff happening on Google Local Guides Connect.
    3. Obviously some apps and services won’t comply.  My notifications platform isn’t just another app.  We are now the gold standard, the international bar to reach for everyone.  We are consumer rights!  Heck I can do it as a panEuropean initiative or something, go all political and make any company that doesn’t comply look bad.  We will advertise with slogans like “works with all apps apart from those nasty people at Instagram that won’t let us access their API”.
    4. There is nothing stopping us from creating a service for non compliant devices or software.  You will tell it what you want your connected microwave to do and we will bust the balls of the manufacturer to get on our platform until it complies.  This isn’t some sort of “if this then that”, this is only notifications and specifically notifications.  This is your life!  Who gets the right to interrupt you? (You see how I go all philosophical and touchy-feely, eh?)
    5. Eventually my platform becomes the go to place for all apps and devices to get their notifications settings from.  Cross platform, cross countries, across the Universe.  A Russian cosmonaut with an iPhone will return to earth after 18 months, throw away the damn thing because it drove him nuts and get his Android phone set up the same for notifications within minutes.  Elon Musk will return from Mars after 3 years and fly his new Tesla home without interruptions from any app he hasn’t chosen.

    Notifications are a problem which is not going to go away.  Google is the only company anywhere close to a chance of making the world better in this respect but only for those of us that use and love their products.  But even if you only use Android, Chromebooks and full use of all Google apps, devices and services, there will be other companies creeping in to annoy us with their notifications.  We need something bigger than Google in a much smaller way.  A vertical.  A fine layer of control on the last mile, the last inch of space between the world and anything that comes to interrupt me with a notification.

     

    The business beauty of the proposal is that you don’t need to include everyone and everything from day one.  Even if this platform handled just notifications from 3-4 apps and services it would be useful.  Think about it.  Never having to set up your phone regarding what can ping and ding from Facebook or Gmail or whatever.  Not even Google offers this right now.  Eventually our protocol becomes the global standard for notification control of course, we pay ourselves mega bucks and become more important than the United Nations.

     

    Any developers up for making this?

     

  • Facebook just fired your marketing department and made me invaluable

    What a shock.  About 60-70% of your marketing plan has just been made obsolete by Facebook’s changes.  It’s not their fault.  You are idiots to have ever believed them.  The signs were always there.  First they said “everyone make pages!”  So you did.  Some companies even forsake a website and make the Facebook page a main hub of activity.  Now it sits there almost useless, collecting a few likes from your employees if you are lucky.  Then they said “do video!”   So you obeyed and pumped money, changed teams, bought equipment for that too.  Guess what?  Now they are saying video is no longer what they want.  Less than a year later!   You paid for special advisers, you paid for adverts, you went to training, listened to podcasts, followed the “developments”.  What “developments”?  Let’s face it.  Nobody has a clue, they are just running after Facebook and paying for it.  Those clever clogs that said “we will handle your social presence” just got royally screwed.  They are now officially useless.   And clueless.

    I hate to say “I told you so” but, no actually, I love to remind you about it.  From day 1 of it’s existence, I have written that Facebook is a scam.  Mark Zuckerberg has the mentality of a hacker.  Not the cute ones you see in films helping the hero by remotely opening doors and getting information about the enemy.  No, Facebook is the largest organization ever built to perpetuate a completely selfish attitude to business which can be summarized as:

    Grab what you can, when you can.  Who cares about everyone else?

    This sounds like a line from a film about Wall street and many would even justify it possibly.  But not in the way Facebook implements it.  Facebook systematically changes its rules and ecosystem to screw everyone else.  It starts with the user.  It’s only purpose is to keep you on the platform.  It doesn’t offer anything useful, just a semblance of a real tool.  Remember those?  Real tools, like the ones in your CRM or your ERP.  Things you actually do work with.    While some idiots were getting excited and promoting Facebook groups as “better than old fashioned online forums”, people at Facebook were laughing, knowing it was just a scam.  They had put it together in a couple of weeks and were already on their next thing.  You were promoting a duck long dead.

    The entire industry of Facebook watchers is now proposing workarounds.  It is their way of not admitting the problem.   “Stick to live video!” they say.  Fantastic.  Heck I work for a company that sells equipment for this, anything from a 5,000 euro small set up for a school or company to a 5 million studio for a TV channel, we can make a killing.  Only it would be completely stupid to let you do it for Facebook.   Of course you need a better plan, one that keeps the assets in your ecosystem and only uses Facebook as, when and if it is worth it.  Until they change their minds again next week.  “Turn to Messenger!” they say.  “Use bots!”   Sure guys, anything you say.  Let’s all use an infantile messaging system with no decent API, no decent search and lacking all the great tools we know and love in serious tools for business.  Business hasn’t changed.  You still need a database with your data somewhere you can control.  Something like a CMS, or a web front end or anything that won’t change next time Zuckerberg wakes up on the wrong side of his bed with a new best idea.

    The only thing I will agree on with Facebook is the need for long comments and deep discussion.  I am an excellent online troublemaker.  Kicking up a fuss with long comments and causing a commotion is what I enjoy best in my free time online.  So far I thought of it as a disadvantage, something to keep away from business accounts.  But my time has come!  Despite Facebook’s idiotic commenting technology which makes following an argument rather difficult, it seems the universe if finally in need of my natural calling.

    If nobody is seeing that business page and nobody is commenting on your posts feel free to contact me for help.  Oh by the way I just tripled my prices but you shouldn’t worry about that, after all Facebook is much worse.   At least I am honestly telling you about it up front…

  • True gamification: What Google Maps has to learn from Supercell

    I am in San Francisco battling jet lag, trying to sleep at the local time. But not so far away from me a group of kids is blaring out music.  It is an international bunch of kids in their twenties and they are playing from their phones what they think the others will like.  You could call it “party classics” in a way.  But Spotify will never know these songs.  These are the ones someone chose because he thought a bunch of strangers will like them.  The good ones you know because they all sing out of tune and slightly drunk.  Either the boys are heard more or the girls, depending on the appeal.  Sometimes both together, boy, they must be too shy to get on to sex so they keep listening I suppose.  The failed songs are changed after the first chorus when they see lack of traction with the audience.

    It is vitally important to really listen to what is going on in the world and your target market.  “We are gamifying the platform” they say in software with conviction.  They mean you now have a goal, some medals or some levels to complete.  Whether it is Google Maps, a school or some old fashioned application with a face lift, the story is the same.  Way too little, way too late.

    It is called “gamification” for a reason.  It is meant to be like games.  Modern games though.  Stop looking ten years behind and look at the games that do well today.  How do they motivate users? I have my kids to thank for Clash Royale.  So I know the difference.  It is hard to explain when you don’t play and when you don’t see kids reacting to the opportunities and changes in the game.  But I will try.

     

    First of all with the onboarding.  It doesn’t just run an intro to get you going.  Clash Royale maintains a learning culture in players but constantly introducing new challenges and incentives to learn tools.  They know that if complexity increases and players don’t follow, they will be disappointed and leave.  For example these days they made a new “touchdown” way of playing.  So there is a simple version for you to get into it gradually in a consequence free environment.  Nothing to lose.  In fact you can’t go to the “proper” game until you have taken off the training wheels here.  Now think how many GUIs “upgrade”, “update” or generally get more difficult and lose customers.

    The most common mistake of so called “gamification” plans is in fact the opposite of this.  They make the changes complicated but the rewards too simple.  Clash Royale allows you to feel you are the best on many different levels.  Maybe you have the most donations to clan members this week.  Or you are the only one with the new cool weapon, the highest level troop or some other unique category you can brag about.  You might be really good at a particular challenge.  Everything you do gains you something, but it is never simple.  Gold is useful, diamonds even better, experience points help you gain levels and it is all connected.  (Won’t go into how exactly, too nerdy, you have to play it.)  The rules of these rewards can be as complex as you want, in fact the more complicated the better.  Just stay on top of it.  We are online after all, you can adjust them dynamically depending on how people are reacting or not reacting to them.

    Supercell, the creator of Clash Royale, is fast to fix things like that.  They take each new character as it’s own franchise.  With pre promotion, videos on youtube, it’s own introductory events to get everyone to know and use it and then new challenges to help it get back into vogue if we are not using it much.  Maybe it costs less elixir this week or it does double damage the next.  This is an economy which is centrally controlled after all.  Just make sure it is fun.

    It can all be done with any platform.  It could be done with Google Maps.  After all the single biggest problem is how to get people involved and contributing.  You can’t map the world on your own.  I am a level 8 Local Guide.  At 15.000 points, all I get is the information that my next milestone is 50.000.  It is like looking at a very tall mountain from the bottom and not wanting to walk.  It would be like going through fifth and sixth grade together without any school report along the way, just a “well done!  You made it!” at the end of two years.   If you want me to tell you about wheelchair access, tell me that I am the hottest contributor this week or in my area this week.  Or that I did the fastest first ten contribution this week.  Anything.  In Clash Royale everything is always moving you ahead …somewhere.

    The other important aspect of effort is community of course.  But here again, Supercell show the way ahead.  Because you can’t force community down anybody’s throat, much like you can’t force modern people to be sociable in the same way.  Some like to play with friends, to collaborate.  Others prefer to play with strangers or against strangers.  Sometimes we like to spar against friends.  At times we want the buzz of risking but then we like to just slog away in mindless torpor to relax.  It can’t all be at the same level all the time.  Clash Royale offers all these different ways of playing almost all the time.  Because as central dictator of their universe, they make sure that things are never permanent or too stable and boring.  Clan challenges appeared for a while, then disappeared while they decided on the initial data, then reappeared with gusto.  Now they come mainly on the weekends when all my sons’ friends (and me!) can play together and try and win clan chests which we all share.  Some of us like playing like that.

    So by all means gamify your platform.  Gamify work, gamify learning.  But do it like Supercell or call it something else.

  • Apple will never produce the best technology: here’s why

    I have been branded an Apple hater a long time ago, so I don’t bother to worry about that.  Since 1981 I have lived and breathed technology and Apple insults the very essence of the world as I understand it with its behavior.  I don’t use the word “like”, it is not aesthetic and it is not subjective.  Apple can never be a positive force in the world of technology.  Admirable marketing maybe.  Amazing reality distortion for sure.  Machiavellian trickery when it can.

    Technologically speaking, the world is not an unknown, magical place.  There are only so many electrons that can whiz around in silicon at a specific speed.  Apple can’t change that.  They can’t magically make any major breakthrough.  Not only because they hardly spend any money in Research and Development.  Because nobody makes such amazing leaps on their own.  The world of scientific innovation is one of collaboration and open platforms.

    That is of course the exact opposite of everything Apple stands for.  It is no surprise that a Unix derivative in the form of Android now powers 90% of the planets smartphones.  Here’s what Apple can never do:

    1. Be open about its plans.  Absolutely vital for innovation to happen.  You can’t build on something if nobody tells you how it works.
    2. Experiment more freely.  Apple produces an absolutely terrible product such as the first iWatch but insists on selling it as the next big thing.  They don’t seem to be able to give away something in order to learn like Google does so often.  (With mixed results, but the principle is correct, tried and tested in innovation)
    3. Make more.  Why only three iPhones?  I can get an Android with a battery that lasts 3 days, a rugged Android, an Android for 100 dollars, etc, etc.  If you don’t try market niches, if you don’t allow others to explore them, you will never discover something really exciting.
    4. Stick to global standards.   Apple costs the world economy billions in lost productivity.  Why on earth can’t they just stick to standards?  How hard is it to have a “normal” USB for power, or to avoid tweaking Bluetooth?  Standards in technology are the bedrock of innovation, the firm ground from which we fly to the skies.
    5. Collaborate.  It seems silly to even write that it is so obvious to everyone in business these days.  You collaborate even with your direct competitors when it makes strategic sense.  Apple never seems to be able to last long in any sort of collaboration, a slave to its Steve Jobs’ inspired image of the lone genius.

    There is no such thing as a lone genius in technology.  Some amazing people have made great leaps and provided us with inspiring moments and ideas.  But the actual products?  They are always the result of extensive team work spanning the globe, companies, universities and every kind of kid playing with something to finally achieve greatness.

    When Cook took over I hoped he would change some of this.  It seems he can’t.  Apple is a prisoner to its old “rules” and too afraid to go for the real innovation of changing its corporate selfishness.

  • The best monopoly the world has ever seen

    The amount of complete gibberish I am reading about the HTC-Google deal is phenomenal.  You don’t need particular insight to see what is happening.  Nor do conspiracy theories help or those “grand scheme” type wackos that explain how it is “just the first step” of something enormous we all don’t understand.

    Google is keeping the Android ecosystem healthy.  Google is doing what no government is fast enough or decisive enough to do.  Bailing out a company with something good to offer the world.  Much like Motorola before that.  No, the plan is not to “kill Apple” with some super phone.  Quite the opposite.  Pixel phones will continue to be in short supply.  They are not meant to be iPhone killers.  They are simply tools to show the way ahead.  Not light years ahead, just the next year.

    Being a monopoly, much like being a dictator, is not an easy job.  You have to make everyone look good and take a back seat even when minor things don’t go your way.  Wait for everyone to get onboard instead of issuing marching orders and killing them off.  AndroidOne is an excellent example of the “try, try again” approach.  Sure, they could force everyone in a number of ways.  When you own most of the searches on the planet, YouTube, Google Maps and other prime everyday tools, it would be easy to force people.  But Google isn’t Facebook and it isn’t Apple.  “Do no evil” means “wait until they all think they want what you want them to do.”

    Google isn’t “challenging its partners” as some ignoramous wrote in the Verge.  Selling off Motorola wasn’t an admission of failure.  The Android ecosystem looks much healthier with Lenovo and Motorola and Nokia in it.  In essence they are all Google, all marketing and selling machines that make money for Google.  Google learnt from Microsoft’s mistakes: Never make it too obvious that you control the whole technology platform.  Microsoft and Apple are welcome diversions in this respect, making Google look like less of a monopoly than it really is.  They kick up a big fuss about whatever silly little project they are launching all the time, keep press and people busy thinking about something else.

    Google is an awe inspiring monopoly.  It controls most of the answers to the planet’s questions.  Never in history has one institution had such power.  I ask it if it will rain tomorrow, how to get to my next appointment and why Hitler didn’t attack in Dunkirk.  Google knows how many iPhone Apple will sell in Indonesia better than Apple does.  They have probably correlated it to search queries on peanut butter or something.

    So if some idiot journalist wants to wax lyrical about it’s “failure to make a feature phone and grab market share” just do what Google does:  smile and ignore.

  • Apple: We burn Pentiums to the ground

    If you don’t remember that slogan, let me remind everyone.  Because in a rather strange way, it has been wiped from Google!  Seriously, Google it.  “We burn Pentiums to the ground” and toasting Pentiums was a major Apple promotional campaign, aimed at convincing us all that their proprietary Motorola (IBM) processors were “better” or “faster” than the Intel alternatives.  It is an extremely educational story to take to hearth as Apple goes down the same rabbit hole with the iPhone today.   Back then it took users a couple of years to figure it out.  Graphic artists were trying to ignore that benchmarks of actual task performance was showing a huge disadvantage.  Back then, Apple was the tool of choice for creative professionals in the visual design.  So it was a matter of pride.  You applied a Photoshop filter and it took twice as long to render it as that guy you made fun of with the cheap PC.  In video it was ridiculous.  Apple did its best to make sure that there weren’t many applications running on both PC and Mac, but Adobe After Effects slipped through the net.  Benchmarks there were off the chart, with the ultra expensive Apple machines trailing by whole minutes in everyday tasks.

    So what did Apple do?

    They lied in your face!  The “we burn Pentiums to the ground” campaign, much like a lot of Steve Jobs’ presentations, were 100% lies.   He used vague graphics and charts showing an X percent advantage, or stating the new processors were 22% faster than…something.  And then they got personal claiming they “toasted” the Pentium processor.   But you won’t find it easily.  Here’s a video:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE6aKeK61A4

     

    Where are the ads now?  I am a long time Apple hater so I know very well how I used to find them with an image search…..gone.  Zilch.  Almost no digital footprint of them left!  Either Apple or Intel, or both of them, got Google to make them disappear.  And this is where it gets interesting.  Because Apple is heading the same way today.  I wrote a short article highlighting the many things about the iPhoneX.  Quad DAC, GigabitLTE, MQA, Log and lookup tables for video…it is a long list of useful high end features other smartphones have already.   I post it on Facebook and an Apple fan friend (I still talk to them) starts going on about the “all mighty A11 Apple chip”.  Obviously he had no better response.  But allmighty Apple chip?  Really?

    The company is in its classic rabbit hole.  It needs to “think different” but instead it is focusing on “being different”.  Not the same thing.  When the whole world has Bluetooth, the whole world needs Apple working on a safer, faster, better standard.  Not to just tweak it a bit and call it iBluetooth, making its AirBuds “proprietary”, “more expensive” and “not compatible”.  (What their tag lines should have been in the first place.)  When the world agrees to use USB type C we don’t want to carry around custom Apple dongles and dangles.    Siri is a joke and new Apple “features” are usually just copied from Android.  If they are not, they are a bad idea.  Like getting rid of the home button.

    I still remember holding the very first iPhone and asking “where is the copy-paste” function?  They laughed.  Like they laughed when I asked where the right click was on their mice.  Guess what?  The iPhone got copy and paste eventually.  And the Mighty Mouse had a right click.  Even now, Apple products are not as good as others in these two respects.   In Android we have built in advanced clipboard features and multiple windows to play with.   They copied too little, too late.  And made a mess of the reality distortion necessary to cover up their tracks.

    Much like the old days, someone is going to have bail Apple out.  Not talking about cash this time.  It will be Google that will run to the rescue and they won’t even tell us about it.  Suddenly Siri will magically get better, Apple Maps will work around the world instead of the rather limited version they have now and other Google power features will trickle through in various ways.  Just enough for Apple to pretend it is the innovator.  Which it is.  Just not in technology.  In technology it takes R&D, persistence and number crunching to get to the top.   Apple is better at getting money off people.  Some call it marketing, some of us like to call it as it is.  Especially since most of us aren’t making any money from this mass dellusion.

    Don’t let me spoil the party though, enjoy looking at your shiny iPhoneX until it unlocks.

     

  • In praise of fake profiles

    If you are in sales or marketing and above 25 years of age, you are probably wrong.  The assumptions you base your decisions on are severely limited.  We often thank our kids for ideas, for keeping us “in touch”, but it is much much more complicated a matter.  And extremely important.   I have hundreds of fake profiles.   Not sure if “fake” is the correct term.  I pretend to be someone I am not as a form of market research.  In fact it is often the first thing I do when presented with a new project.

    It starts with a fake Google account.  This is vital.  Search results are personalized.  You will never get it all perfect, but if you at least persuade it that you live wherever you are researching and then make sure you do Google searches logged in from this fake Google profile, the world you are seeing will be a little more like your target.  Sign up for whatever products and services you are looking for from this signed in Chrome browser.    You have to try and live the part.

    With Facebook things are even more dangerous.  That person in marketing you think is “up to speed with all this new stuff”, well, just isn’t.   If I have a really successful Instagram account, or a very active personal Facebook profile I only see what that particular profile’s take on the world is.   Some days I might whiz through multiple profiles to check up on them, just housekeeping.  Hard to describe just how different it feels to be in each newsfeed.  Some are simply based in different locations, with friends from a particular island or city.  Age differences are even more stunning.  The same political event which fills your friends’ timelines when you are 50, doesn’t even appear when you are 16.

    It isn’t fashionable anymore, but I always make sure my fake people have a website, blog or other public trove of information on whatever topic I am researching.   This gives me unique insights into what people are looking for.   It is the “honeypot” approach.  In content marketing it is easier to just start testing ideas like this.  And when the first organic google searches land my way, it is like Christmas day!  Somebody wrote what they wanted to know in Google and came to me, fake me, this particular person.  Why?  How?  What cyberspace hole did I fill with what I just did?

    If anything, building a fake profile is a humbling experience.  Because you realize just how complex a web social beings like humans create.  We earn trust.  Slowly.   A “follow” by a 13 year old is a very, very, very different action to a “follow” by a 60 year old.  He then posts what he just had for breakfast without thinking about it, while the senior citizen is carefully crafting a comment as if he is writing to the Economist.

    Marketing people are often fooled by their own brand.  In the case of social media they are also sidetracked by their personal profiles and habits.  These are extremely dynamic, immature new mediums, still jostling for position, changing architecture and interfaces.   There is no agreed way to assess them, no specific assigned meaning to what we all do with them.  So get off your high horse and mingle with the natives.

  • The fallacy of collective brainpower

    I was 12 or 13 years old when I came across “The crowd”.  It was in Greek and must have belonged to one of my many intellectual cousins.  The subtitle reads “a study of the popular mind” and I couldn’t put it down.  We were guests at my aunt’s house and I read it all before we left.   No matter it was written in the late 19th century; this was fresh and relevant!   While other kids listened to Simon LeBon of Duran Duran, I thought of Gustave LeBon’s amazingly relevant book.  Had never seen it again until recently when I got a copy in English.   And I juxtaposed it with “the Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki written more than a hundred years later and full of examples about Wikipedia and crowdsourcing and how 100 bricklayers can make a better decision than a consultant that gets paid 20,000 per hour.

    But Gustave was right.  I grew up checking his conclusions against my reality.  I could see it at my school.  When enough kids get together, they turn into animals.   I could see it across the street in the early 80’s, as Andreas Papandreou, that master of deception, spoke with simple slogans while stealing billions.  When you get enough people together, they lose their capacity for critical thinking, they “go down several rungs in terms of civilization” as he says.  There is no sense of personal responsibility.  Simple slogans, repeated again and again.  Music, images, emotion.  There is no wisdom in this sort of crowd.

    I love what companies like Google are doing with our collective data.     I gladly give them access to almost everything I think and do in exchange for their amazing tools.  They make my life much much better.  Yet it is clear that this is not the product of evolution in our civilisation, nor the inevitable course in technology developing.  It is a fortunate respite from a kind dictator.   All these great ideas about the collective wisdom we could develop with technology depend on a kind central hub allowing them to work.  Or, as Surowiecki puts it, we need independence of opinion, decentralization and diversity before we even get to the matter of aggregation.

    Our current tech boom is to a large extent an acceptance of failure.   Companies that establish massive followings define the terms, give away stuff and up the ante in terms of infrastructure.    You reward them by buying their stock.  Or by making small companies whose sole aim is to be bought out by the giants.  In the words of LeBon ” every civilisation is the outcome of a small number of fundamental ideas that are very rarely renewed. (…) At the present day the great fundamental ideas which were the mainstay of our fathers are tottering more and more. They have lost all solidity, and at the same time the institutions resting upon them are severely shaken.”

    Couldn’t have said it better myself.

  • English uber alles: the language digital divide

    Google assistant is fantastic.  Unless you don’t speak English.  In which case it is almost useless.  The whole “Artificial Intelligence” vogue is rather misleading.  Because when I speak to Google Allo I am still using all my experience in computing.  It works great for me because I think like a computer.  I break down my questions into chunks the way I think the computer wants to hear it.  I add qualifiers, words to help the machine understand with more accuracy.  I use terms that are more likely to work.  When we say “natural language” hey, there are classifications.  I use “natural language more likely to be understood by Google”.  It drives others crazy.  They blame my perfect accent.  “But I said the same thing!  Why doesn’t it work for me?”  

     

    Here’s the problem.  Google and pretty much everyone else in Silicon Valley, they are all only thinking in English.  Your Amazon Echo is designed for native English speakers.  (Pun intended.)  All your gadgets are.  Worse still, the intelligence is designed around people thinking  in English.  All the structure, the concepts, the way it is set up.  It is rather entertaining how some people get caught up with the fact that slang and tech words are conquering the world.  That is the tip of the iceberg.

     

    Silicon Valley is moving ahead of the rest of the planet with leaps and bounds.  Light years ahead.  We don’t have local information.  We can’t use amazon like you do.   We can’t pay for stuff or call a self driving car.  Amazon will not be able to deliver to the trunk of my car either.  The United States are a test bed for new tech and the gap with everyone else will grow exponentially.  And only in 2030, when computers are smarter than humans, maybe, just maybe, those computers may decide to develop all these wonderful tools for the rest of the earthlings.    And even then it will take a lot of work.  Because English is the language that provides the structure and concepts.  More likely that you will have all learnt to think like Google by then. 

     

    2030 is still material for science fiction.  Today, now, it is clear that we all have to move to the Valley or fall behind.  We have neither the data with which to develop such advanced tools, nor the number crunching power.   The entire planet sends their thoughts to Google every day  Out position, habits and preferences.  It is no conspiracy theory, it is simple mathematics.  Not impossible to catch up, just really really hard.