Category / Web/Tech

by jcuene

Humans and Sentience: What We Talk About When We Talk About AI

There are three great write-ups about the perils of near-intelligence found in Bing’s latest advancement. All three were the result of messing with the tech, trying to get it to do stuff that is outside it’s core purpose.They’re pushing the edges to see what happens. It’s the researcher version of asking Siri to swear or tell dirty jokes. In the case of Bing, it got weird fast.

But all three of these articles are getting at sentience: Are these chatbots actually thinking? They’re expressing feelings, and personality, too. How is that possible? And, the writers are exploring what happens when our normal relationship with computers – where we assume tech/computation is always correct – is being challenged and, perhaps undermined. Through almost all our experiences to date with computers, we’ve sort of trusted the data coming out. But, now, as tech moves beyond math, calculations and reproducing images, we are seeeing that we can’t always trust what the processor makes for us.

There are a lot of dumb, weird, inconsistent, humans that are being embodied by these large language models.

We want to believe Bing is right and smart, so we humans find a weird fascination when the “artificial” intelligence is not all that intelligent. We’re surprised and maybe a little outraged when Bing is wrong.

And we’re freaked out by the implied personality inside (which is a result of all the human generated content consumed to make the interaction model).

We’re projecting onto the tech the same thinking and decision making patterns we might assume a rationale, experienced human would use (which, as we’ve all probably learned through experience, is a bug in the human OS, not a feature).

AI will always be iffy. Because humans are iffy. And we can never trust the “judgement” of AI, because they’re using probabilistic models vs actual human intuition.

All that being said, it’s really important to remember that almost all breakthrough, world changing technologies look like toys at first. It’s easy to dunk on stuff when the tech demo goes wrong, but don’t mistake the first iteration for the last iteration.

Even though it’s hard for humans to get better over time, the tech always does.

First, the unbelievably productive Ben Thompson wrote about his long chats with “Sydney”, the chatbot inside of Bing. Turns out Sydney has a bit of a personality. Actually, a couple of them (Riley is the nicer, more free personality whereas Sydney is a little more quick to judge and plays by the rules. And, according to Thompson, sort of seems female.

Thompson did what we all will do when we encounter something new. We’ll look for patterns that seem familiar, we’ll see “faces” everywhere, and try to match the experience we’re having to what we’ve experienced before. We spend a lot of time with humans, so we attribute human characteristics to the stuff we pay attention to. Dogs, cats, boats, pet rocks, and now our computer interfaces. It’s all normal, of course. But, it’s going to get creepy when the tech seems sentient.

Simon Willison’s take on one Reddit users experience is really illuminating, since Curios Evolver’s interaction got even weirder. Bing/Syndey didn’t like the line of questioning and chat, and got a little icy. Maybe even a little Minnesota passive aggressive?

And, finally, Kevin Roose of the New York Times offers his take on the strange interactions with Bing. “Sydney”, the personality behind the curtain of Bing Chat, expressed love for Kevin. Then, tried to convince Kevin that he’s not happy in his marriage:

And finally, after some back and forth between Kevin and Sydney/Bing, Sydney/Bing brought the conversation to a close:

These articles and write ups remind me of the stories from a couple months ago (feels like years ago!) about Blake Lemoine, the google engineer that was fired for arguing the Google’s AI was sentient. We all sort of laughed at that article, then. But, now, with broader access to “consumer” versions of the tools, we can see why he might think that.

All of these tools are being released too early, in my opinion. They are leaving the labs without fully testing what they’re capable of or what might happen if we use them in unintended ways. There are obviously very large commercial interests pushing to deploy tech before it’s ready. Damn the people, there is money to be made.

by jcuene

The Synthetic, Infinite Conversation

My whole life I’ve been a tech optimist. I’ve always believed that, over time, culture and society improve when the tools for learning, understanding, doing and making, improve.

I’m not an optimist about synthetic, AI driven “content”. I’m very worried about the long-term cultural and societal impact of a never-ending stream of stuff to put into our eyes, ears, and bodies. When visuals, words, sounds and, soon, code and digital tools are being generated by algorithms, our attention will be frayed even more. We humans won’t be able to make meaning out the world because the inputs won’t be real.

This project is a harbinger of what’s to come. It’s a toy of sorts, a provocative example of the synthetic content stream we’re going to be swimming in over the next 10 years. It sounds sort of real. The words almost makes sense, but the “uncanny valley” effect might trigger careful listeners to understand this is fake.

For those of us who have lived through this first era of digital (i.e. from the late 90’s to now), what’s our responsibility to try to warn the rest of the culture about what’s coming at us? It’s going to seem fun at first, but then it’s going to be hell . Is it too late?

 

Source: The Infinite Conversation

by jcuene

Complicit in the Chaos Machine

I’ve been an advocate of technology, the internet and social media throughout my career. I’ve been a tech optimist my whole life and I’ve spent pretty much the entirety of my career helping organizations do more with digital tech to invent or grow their businesses. I’ve seen it as creative work, a mostly positive project. It’s been fascinating, grueling, thrilling and rewarding on a number of levels.

But what if the work I’ve been doing has, in a teeny tiny way, been part of the rewiring of America’s brain? What has been my little role in driving America nuts?

I’ve listened to this episode of the Rich Roll podcast, twice now. There’s a lot of conjecture going on, some smart, but hipshot analyzing. At the core, though, the Max Fischer argument resonates with my own experience.

Fisher argues social media is at the core of the divide in the US. It’s eroding our brains and attention, creating (indirectly and directly) polarization and undermines the sense of community (in the IRL sense) we need to keep functioning. I don’t really want to read this book, but I think I have to. And, I have to take it seriously enough that it might force a rethink of the work I do for the rest of my career.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World 
via Amazon

I can’t help but think about how I’ve been a small part of this. In my role as an agency leader, on the client side, as an investor. More importantly, now that I’ve got a deeper understanding, what can I do? And, can I keep doing my current work?

by jcuene

What Comes After Zoom? Video everywhere and Then What?

I’m on a bit of work break right now and that means i’ve not had an online meeting in over 10 days. So, no Zoom, Hangouts, MSFT Teams, Slack video, WebEx, Skype, UberConference, GoToMeeting or Facetime (all of which i used in the two weeks leading up to my break for work).

You won’t be surprised to know I haven’t missed the meetings at all. At least, not the work part. I miss the social interaction of course. But, i don’t miss the small task of figuring out which tool to use for each of my meetings or fiddling with the equipment to make sure it worked and i could hear and be heard.

Zoom seems to have emerging as the leader because it’s easy, relatively simple, and reliable. It just works. But my time away has me wondering what’s going to come after Zoom?

I tend to agree with Benedict Evans, that video eventually just be a feature that every app has as part of it’s core offerings. Your project mgmt app will enable video interactions, your commerce apps will have video for customer support, etc.

But, in the meantime, there will be really interesting innovation ahead as, Evans says, “There’s lots of bundling and unbundling coming, as always.” Until, “Everything will be ‘video’ and then it will disappear inside.”

I’m curious about the way video is going to reshape the way we design our apps, once we make it a core feature. See, for instance, the vision of the Makespace team, where video is the interface for collaboration in realtime and more. I’m also curious how video gets used to support formal networks at work (think: Business unit conversations, meetings, projects, etc.) and informal networks (i.e. – peer groups, networking groups, etc.). I hope we see more than updated takes on House-party for work.

by jcuene

Data Leaks: Doc Searls, Facebook data and what’s about to come

Are you you one of the folks in the digital/ad tech world trying to answer your friends questions about the “what’s going on with Facebook and all that data” situation? It’s going to get worse when everyone understands how thoroughly widespread the data-leaking problem is. Give this article a read. It’s from OG/Cluetrain guy Doc Searls, one of the best thinkers about the open web and what advertising has done to it. It’s a little over the top, but the underlying story is one we (“we” being humans on the internet and perhaps also in the digital business) should understand.

 

by jcuene

CEO’s & CMO’s: 2017 Strategic Planning Questions for Your Digital Team

While the rest of us are enjoying the fall weather, football and the changing seasons, most CMO’s and CEO’s and their leadership teams are elbow deep in 2017 planning and budgeting. In addition to all the normal business challenges, most leadership teams are probably spending a significant amount of time talking – one away or another – about digital and/or their digital transformation. Maybe its a question of how to allocate the capital budget for digital capabilities, or it could be a culture question (“How do we get more digital talent?”). Or, more urgently, it could be an existential question (“how do we compete against X and the disruption they are causing”).

Eventually, those boardroom conversations and plans will make their way down to strategic planning discussions with the VP’s of Digital Marketing, the Chief Digital Officer, Head of Digital, or Directors of Digital. Here’s what we hope those lucky leaders are getting asked in those strategic conversations:

  • What’s our strategy to use data to develop a competitive advantage? We see a lot of C-level leaders who are missing the strategic opportunity to plan for, collect and analyze data in unique ways (not just the obvious stuff) to give themselves a competitive advantage. We know of one company that bought a couple large Instagram handles from their owners, just so they could get the day to day data on likes and use the comments section to gain unique consumer insights that their competitors wouldn’t have
  • How are we using digital to create a unified experience over the whole  customer journey? Smart companies are moving on from digitizing their functions (Sales, Service, PR, brand Management)  to looking for ways to integrate and unify the whole consumer experience. They are going from good/great execution at the functional level to managing the whole customer journey in a holistic, integrated way even though there’s not an immediate ROI and dramatic changes in short term results are rare. Not only is it better for consumers, it positions companies to collect unique, potentially proprietary data along the way. It’s an easy concept to grasp, but it’s incredibly hard to execute internally unless there is a multi-year commitment from the top to keep investing ahead of results.
  • What capital investments and resource allocations do we need to make to get better data across the customer journey? See above. A dramatically improved customer experience will generate incredibly valuable data
  • What must we do to invest enough in both incremental and transformation innovation? No good leader says “no” to opportunities to invest in innovation, but few leadership teams are disciplined enough to balance short-term, functional innovation (i.e. incremental) with the willingness to pursue transformational opportunities.or instance, we know of one company that is generating a surprising amount of revenue from advertising on their digital platform; enough revenue to pay for a larger, more advanced digital team. It’s almost guaranteed that the directors and managers and coordinators on the digital team have ideas for both, but they may not be getting the support to pursue both due to a heavy prioritization of short term results.
  • How do we need to evolve our brand position and actions to be even more relevant to our customers? All leaders should by now understand how digital is transforming consumer expectations of brands. But even after years of watching brands like Dove drive great results by moving the brand to a higher, more aspirational space (and creating amazing digital content that’s getting shared all over the place), too many leaders are still(!) focused on the result (“get me something that goes viral”) instead of the characteristics of a soap brand that millions and millions want to connect with. In other words, you have to do the work to elevate your brand and your company in order to be relatable, digitally.
  • What do we need to do culturally to create the conditions for more agility and innovation in our marketing? Most good business leaders have read up on Agile, Lean Startup, and “working like a startup”. It’s thrilling to see courageous leaders try to change their companies actions. But, smart C-level folks will listen to the digital teams about what needs to change culturally to create the conditions for more flexibility, agility and innovation in their marketing model (or their business, overall). The behaviors are one thing, but the attitudes and beliefs and values and incentives are another. Most importantly, CMO’s and CEO’s should be asking: Have I created the right incentives to unlock true innovation (or  will my team still get penalized for taking risks)?
  • Are we being aggressive in looking at business model or product innovation opportunities? This is something that any sufficiently paranoid organization should be asking itself every six months: “what would a potential disruptor do to come take our business away?” Or, put another way, “how do we not get Blockbustered?” And, as part of the same exercise, CEO’s should be asking their digital team “what opportunities are we missing to use digital for  new revenue, new products, or serving our customers more effectively”? It’s easy to get a false sense of security that “we’re on it!”.
  • What do we need to do to help our employees work at the pace and speed of our customers? As the proliferation of tools and technology accelerates, it’s imperative for customer-focused companies to enable their front line people – the sales folks, the community managers, customer service – to work with the same tools and platforms that their customers are using. So, whether it’s instagram or Snapchat messaging, chatbots or Kik, CMO/CEO’s will make the hard policy changes to stay connected with their consumers

If you’re the VP or Sr Director of Digital, the Head of Digital or the Digital Transformation leader and these questions aren’t coming up in the annual operating plan discussions, you should set up time with your CMO and CEO and push these issues forward. It’s your chance to lead “up” and push the thinking of your organization and, ultimately, position your team to drive even greater impact in the organization. And, to make life a little better for your customers in 2017.

by jcuene

BitTorrent wants to change the way the web is built | The Verge

In this vision, web publishers could publish, distribute, and update an entire website through the BitTorrent protocol, and others visiting the page would automatically help share the site’s content, just as anyone downloading a file over BitTorrent would also start sharing the file with other peers.

via BitTorrent wants to change the way the web is built | The Verge.

by jcuene

Lessons For Marketers in the NYT’s Leaked Innovation Report

The New York Times 2014 Innovation Report is an extraordinary document. Extraordinary in that it  exists at all, for one thing. But, also extraordinary for the honesty and candor in the analysis provided by the authors.

We’ve all watched the news business getting transformed over the years by blogs, the web, Google, etc. Now we can read the report from inside a pre-eminent news organization, written by a handpicked group of leaders given the mandate to tell the truth to power (well, their bosses).

But, at the same time, it’s an exceptionally useful document for marketing leaders who are struggling to thrive in a time of rapid, seismic changes. Digital, however you want to define it, is creating almost unlimited opportunities to create new growth, reach new audiences, and work in different ways. Call it creative destruction, transformational innovation, or just reinvention; we’re all going to have to deal with it. The news business is at the front of many of these changes, but eventually all business, from cars to cereal will have to deal with them. So, we can learn a lot about what to do (and what NOT to do) by reading this report carefully.

While it was unfortunate that this document was leaked, we nonetheless have it as a story of a great organization at the mid-point of a life-or-death struggle. Here are just a few lessons  brand builders can take away.

Be Honest With Yourself, First – One of the more remarkable things about this document is that it doesn’t seem to hold many punches. It calls out specific projects, departments, etc. Its a seemingly honest assessment of what’s working and not working. Not self-flagellating, but also not overly optimistic about what’s really going on. Marketing leaders should take on this kind of assessment every other year, at least. A hard look, done by trusted mid-level leaders, those with enough understanding of how things really work on the execution level but also have a broader strategic sense about what the organization can be and needs to get there.

Understanding how Disruption Works is the First Step to Disrupting Yourself – With everyone talking about innovation all the time, you’d assume everyone understands what “Innovation” really is. But, wisely, the writers spend a couple pages outlining Clay Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation process. And, they even provide a cheat sheet for their new competitors. As leaders, we should understand that disruptive innovation actually is kind of predictable and it will hit every industry at some point. Get your teams to understand this, and it’s the first step to creating the kind of innovations that disrupt the business on your terms vs. waiting for someone else to do it to you.

Reconsider What You’ve Always Taken For Granted – The report advocates a recommitment to audience development strategy, to re-examine how they are getting the news in front of people.  For generations, the Times could assume an audience existed, was reachable in a predictable way, and cared about the product. But, that audience is easily swayed, distractible, and, in the end, not so easy to reach. Now, the Times has to re-learn how to reach it’s audience, weaving a news set of skill into the newsroom. All leaders should be rethinking the parts of the model they’ve always taken for granted.

Digital First is Much More than a Buzzphrase – For the times, it’s a flip from “a newspaper that also produces a rich and impressive digital product” to “A digital publication that also produces a rich and impressive newspaper”. That’s over-simplified, but that mental model flip is one that most marketing organizations need to make if they haven’t already made. A mobile, digital way of building the brand that is amplified at scale by traditional media is  “digital first” for most marketers.

Culture Change is a Mofo – This is really a document describing wrenching culture change in slow motion. The capabilities, the technology, the tools will all be relatively easy to update. But, the talent, the leadership, the skills, the mindset needed to thrive in a digital-first world at the Times will be incredibly difficult to weave into the organization. The leaders will have to remake their culture from the inside without losing the best of what got them there.

Finally, the real story here is that the leaders of this organization recognized they were out of synch with their times and they turned to 8 trusted insiders to figure it out. That’s courage. We can all learn from them.

There are dozens and dozens of smaller nuggets in the document. It’s so rare for a business leader to get a peek into another organizations’ strategy development process that i imagine this will be a document i go back to and re-read multiple times.

Here are a couple other great writeups:

by jcuene

Managing Startups: Best Blog Posts of 2013 | Platforms and Networks

Managing Startups: Best Blog Posts of 2013 | Platforms and Networks.

This is about everything you need toread for the next couple weeks. Tremendous resource for anyone thinking about working in a “lean”, “agile”, “fast”, “iterative” or whatever mode.

Meta comment: Eisenmann’s blog is a great, living reminder of the power of blogs. With all the focus on shorter, faster, more ephemeral media (i’m looking at you Snapchat, instagram, Twitter), it’s very worthwhile to reflect on the core idea behind blogs, blogging, great posts and the whole concept of publishing for an audience.

 

by jcuene

True Big Data / The Atlantic Wins Journalism

If you want a good example of what “Big Data” really means, it’s this. “Big Data” isn’t just “shit ton of data”, it’s “amazing and proprietary insights that could only come from very creative analysis of a shit ton of data that only we can get our hands on”.  So, stop referring to your little facebook data project as “big data”.

And, for what it’s worth, the Atlantic just showed you what’s possible when you cross a curious journalist with a hacker’s mindset. So very cool.

 

Using large teams of people specially trained to watch movies, Netflix deconstructed Hollywood. They paid people to watch films and tag them with all kinds of metadata. This process is so sophisticated and precise that taggers receive a 36-page training document that teaches them how to rate movies on their sexually suggestive content, goriness, romance levels, and even narrative elements like plot conclusiveness.

They capture dozens of different movie attributes. They even rate the moral status of characters. When these tags are combined with millions of users viewing habits, they become Netflix\’s competitive advantage. The company\’s main goal as a business is to gain and retain subscribers. And the genres that it displays to people are a key part of that strategy. \”Members connect with these [genre] rows so well that we measure an increase in member retention by placing the most tailored rows higher on the page instead of lower,\” the company revealed in a 2012 blog post. The better Netflix shows that it knows you, the likelier you are to stick around.

via How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood – Alexis C. Madrigal – The Atlantic.