Lifeboat Foundation

Innovation has real costs—monetary, psychological, intellectual and effort-based—that need to be addressed or mitigated if you want people to actually innovate.

There’s an archetype in media that destruction and upheaval brings out the best ideas and creates jobs. In literature and in society, upheaval, necessity and desperation are portrayed as the prime motivators of innovative behaviour. The problem is that outside of soap operas and medical dramas, people usually have something to lose.

Between the never-ending stream of news linking bad actors to social networks and studies documenting society’s growing smartphone addiction, it seems almost wrong today to think that technology can — ahem — help make the world a better place.

That’s why I am thankful for the annual Inclusive Innovative Challenge, hosted by MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. Launched in 2016, the IIC seeks out and awards entrepreneurs that are leveraging technology advances to reinvent the future of work. That’s right. There remains, even in this news cycle, firms committed to tapping technology’s ability to connect—and not divide—people and build—and not threaten—jobs and other economic activities.

Or, as the challenge organizers put it:

Continue reading “Some Good Tech News: Entrepreneurs Leverage Tech for Economic Inclusion” »

Just where artificial intelligence is taking us, at what pace and along what trajectory, is uncertain. The technology, of course, is raising serious questions about its potential impact on jobs, privacy and politics.

The internet is a technology of low-cost communication and connection. Everything from email to e-commerce to social networks has hinged on the internet’s transformative role in changing the economics of communication. All those connections suddenly became both possible and cheap.

Artificial intelligence is a technology of low-cost prediction and discovery. It exploits the new resource of the digital age — vast amounts of data — to identify patterns and make predictions. Much of what A.I. does today can be thought of as a prediction. What product to recommend, what ad to show you, what image is in that picture, what move should the robot make next — all are automated predictions.

Continue reading “From Agriculture to Art — the A.I. Wave Sweeps In” »

Give me my data and no one gets hurt (I’ll lease it back to you, no problem:-)

At the Gartner Symposium/ITExpo, Rometty laid out three principles for companies working ethically with AI.

China put tiny spy chips on many U.S. servers. That’s the word from Bloomberg Businessweek, whose cover story published Thursday asserts that Beijing persuaded Chinese hardware manufacturers to install a surveillance chip, half the size of a grain of rice, on the motherboards of hundreds of thousands of data servers sold around the world by a U.S. company called Supermicro, including to Amazon and Apple.

The new digital communications policy (NDCP) 2018, approved by the Cabinet on Wednesday, looks too good to believe. It has promised to create an additional four million jobs in five years and reskill another one million people in new-age skills and sectors such as 5G LTE and artificial intelligence. Six lakh villages will be connected which will eventually lead to creating jobs and several earning avenues such as managing WiFi hotspots and laying optical fibre, among others. The policy will give an impetus to the job market.

NDCP is bound to create a massive infrastructure and help the debt-ridden telecom sector emerge from its current turbulence. The policy document envisages the reduction in levies and ease of doing business, and this will help restore the financial health of the long-bleeding sector. The focus will be on the proliferation of telecom services and facilitating low-cost financing. The government’s ambitious plan of Digital India will get a booster shot. Thanks to the promise of 50 Mbps speed in the broadband connection, the consumer will be the ultimate beneficiary.

Plans are afoot to reform the licensing and regulatory regime to facilitate investments and innovation, besides promoting ease of doing business. The success of the policy will depend on the execution of the policy.

Continue reading “DNA Money Edit: Telecom sector awaits a turnaround” »

THE two superpowers of artificial intelligence (AI) are America and China. Their tech giants have collected the most data, attracted the best talent and boast the biggest computing clouds—the main ingredients needed to develop AI services from facial recognition to self-driving cars. Their dominance deeply worries the European Union, the world’s second-largest economic power (see article). It is busily concocting plans to close the gap.

That Europe wants to foster its own AI industry is understandable. Artificial intelligence is much more than another Silicon Valley buzzword—more, even, than seminal products like the smartphone. It is better seen as a resource, a bit like electricity, that will touch every part of the economy and society. Plenty of people fret that, without its own cutting-edge research and AI champions, big digital platforms based abroad will siphon off profits and jobs and leave the EU a lot poorer. The technology also looms large in military planning. China’s big bet on AI is partly a bet on autonomous weapons; America is likely to follow the same path. Given the doubt over whether America will always be willing to come to Europe’s defence, some see spending on AI as a matter of national security.

A rise in global nationalism combined with advances in technology signal trouble ahead, says the author of a new book. But there’s hope.

Surging productivity and the general rise in incomes it brings would be welcome, of course, but that isn’t sufficient. The same questions being raised about the advance of robotics in the workplace apply to machine learning. While new jobs would be created, many existing jobs — from doctors and financial advisers to translators and call-center operators — are susceptible to displacement or much-reduced roles. No economic law guarantees that productivity growth benefits everyone equally. Unless we thoughtfully manage the transition, some people, even a majority, are vulnerable to being left behind even as others reap billions.

Whether it’s for the better and for the many is up to human intelligence.