Machine, Platform, Crowd by authors by McAfee and Brynjolfsson

Machine, platform, crowd

In Machine, Platform, Crowd, authors McAfee and Brynjolfsson describe three major developments that led to the enormous economic change we have seen over the past decades.The rapid developments in technology (machine) led to possibilities of the forming of powerful new layers that bring consumers and producers closer together (platforms), and how these platform thrive through direct involvement of the consumer in the production and dissemination of the product and services provided through the platforms.

How can companies like Uber, Facebook, Amazon have become so big and influential, considering they are only thin layers? These platforms do not produce goods, and have no or little assets (at least at the outset).

In the book many aspects around these developments are brought together. The authors contrast the old world and the new world: machines versus human intelligence, platform versus product, crowd versus core (core meaning something driven by an organisational structure).

McAfee and Brynjolfsson
Picture by New America

Machines have developed that can crunch the new large volumes of data that the Internet era has enabled. Here we see that technological developments create their own new opportunities. The authors go into why these things are so hard to predict, and have no good answer. New technology enables things we can not foresee. We can dream, but technology continues to surprise us.

The developments of AI have been an important factor. But why computers are better than humans at making (some) decisions.The book goes back to the literature of Kahneman and others. Kahneman has learned us that our decision making is highly subjective and prone to errors. Fast decision making is done by our System 1 thinking, which is impulsive and subjective. Our System 2 is more thoughtful and slow, but tends not to correct System 1 decisions but rather justify those decisions.Our biases make us bad decision makers. And computers can ignore all the subjective crap that clutters our decision making. And of course they can very fast go through last piles of data.

Afbeeldingsresultaat voor kahneman
Kahneman

Though McAfee also shows that if the AI is fed with “biased” data, the computer will also make biased decisions. But, the computer can be easily corrected, while for humans that is a lot more difficult.

In the end, the computer is better at doing specific things. (The worst are Hippo based decisions: Highest Paid Person’s Personal View. A problem common in organisations with narcissistic leaders.) AI is increasingly efficient at making decisions for “narrow” problems.Scientists however indicate that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – is a stage we now even getting close to.

The authors do not go into the hypes that are created around AGI. People like Harari in Homo Deus write extensive and interesting perspectives on what the world may become when AI takes over. But these are, I believe, not based on realistic views on the state on AI, or even on what AI might brings us in the future.McAfee and Brynjolfsson do not elaborate on this humbling perspective. They even ignore it later on, where the describe their believe that when given enough data, engineering knowledge, and requirements, computers will be able figure out novel ways to do things. This statement remains unsubstantiated and even contradicts their earlier statements about AGI from an MIT scientist.It is also contradictory to the Polanyi paradox: we do not know what we know. So that engineering knowledge may very well remain buried in human brain mass.Finally, to end this tangent, the claim itself seems somewhat circular. If I rephrase the statement: if we know what to do, how to do it, and have the right inputs, we can program a computer to do it. Well, of course, I would say, because that is as much as the definition of automation.

So how come we see this rise of AI technology now? McAfee and Brynjolfsson summarize:

  • The availability of computing power. The power of CPUs and specially GPUs has reached a level that enabled and boosted the usability of neural network performance.
  • The drastically decreased cost of computing.
  • The availability of large amounts of data.

When will robots be used and when humans? Robots for Dull, Dirty, Dangerous work (DDD) and/or where Dear/Expensive resources are used.But coordination, teamwork, problem solving and very fine hand/foot/senses work is needed. These are all things computer and robot are not good at.Creative and social jobs are safe from robotisation.

Platforms have appeared that killed or diminished existing often large industries. Where products become digital, the fact that these are free (zero cost to copy) and perfect (no loss off quality when copying), economies have radically changed.Two ways are left to make money with these products:

  • Unbundle products – like iTunes sells songs instead of albums.
  • Rebundle products – like Spotify creates subscriptions instead of selling albums/songs.

Complements increase the sales of goods. Like apps increase the sales of iPhones. Free products can be bundled to make money out of them:

  • Freemium products
  • Put ads in free products
  • Add customer service (open source products)
  • Provide a public service (for public organisations)
  • Pairing with products

For platforms, curation of products and reputation systems become crucial to filter and make products find-able to clients.Characteristics of successful platforms:

  • Early – attract a crowd before others do
  • Use economy of complementary products
  • Open up the platforms
  • Guarantee experience through curation/reputation like mechanisms.

Online-to-Offline platforms have emerged. these bring together products and consumers for a market that optimises asset utilisation. When their is a 2-sided market, demand want low prices from multiple suppliers, and supplier want their products in as many consumers as possible.Both sides want economies of scale.Is a product in undifferentiated, prices will come down. Such products are vulnerable for platform destruction.What is less vulnerable: complex services, markets with few participants.

How to make successfully use of crowd-sourced information?

  • Make information findable and organise it
  • Curate bad content

Crowd sourced platforms can only be successful when

  • They are open
  • Everyone can contribute (no credentials needed)
  • Contributions can be verified and reversed (prevent destruction of the asset)
  • They are self organising (distributed trust)
  • They have a geeky leadership

The volume of the crowd knows more than a few experts.Crowd beats core.The core nowadays uses the crowd:

  • To get things done (upwork)
  • For finding a resource
  • For market research
  • To acquire new customers
  • For acquiring innovation

Distrust in organisations leads to a wish for Decentralization of Everything. But “The Nature of the Firm” describes why organisations exist and why their is always a place for them.

The cost of linking parts of the supply chain in more expensive when it needs to be done with different players all the time.In an organisation that handles larger parts of the supply chain, cheap communication drives down costs.More importantly contracts are never complete.

There is always a thing called Residual Rights of Control over assets. The concept is not further elaborated. But in a distributed model the ownership of the produced assets poses problem: who owns the right over the assets.The problem seems incomplete and drives construction of firms.

Firms drive group work and management:

  • To coordinate more complex work: transmission belts for coordination and organisational problem solving
  • Human/social skills
  • People want to work together
  • Best way to get things done

They end with the question: what will we do with all that technology – that is the question we should answer, not: what will technology do with us.

Apply technology to solve real-word problems – in a combination of technology, humans, and other resources.

The Long(er) Tail

After reading all the secondary literature on this classic book on the economic changes brought by the Internet, finally got hold of it.

Hits are no longer the economic force they once were. A large part of the demand has gone to countless niches. Today’s consumer picks hits just as easily as special non-professional content.

The past: broadcast model sends 1 show to many people. Today: the Internet makes many shows available to 1 person.

Scarcity based economics: requires hits. Only a few slots are available. Then they better be what most people will appreciate. But what is there are an infinite number of slots: The Long Tail.

Curse of the traditional retails business: the need to find local audiences. The market in the stores in only 1/3 of the total market. The biggest money is in the smallest sales.

From geographical separation consumers are now united by their interests.

Theme of the Long Tail:

  • There are more niche goods than hits
  • The cost of reaching niches has fallen dramatically – offering a huge variety of products is now possible
  • Filter now drives demand – filters are necessary for the exploring the Long Tail
  • The demand curve flattens where niches becomes accessible – hits are less frequent and less popular
  • The collective market for niches is huge and rivals the hits market

Trends: democratize production and democratize distribution.

Aggregators like Amazon, eBay, iTunes, Netflix democratize distribution. Production is democratize through availability of technology: video production, music editing, self publishing, printing, …

Aggregators make available a large variety of good, physical, digital, information, services, communities, user created content (this).

Long Tail demand requires a fan-base that is slowly build. Sudden hits become very rare. Hits can be virals.

Collective intelligence filters the content in The Long Tail: ratings, reviews, …

The Long Tail also manifests itself in culture: the Internet deminishes barriers for niche cultures to reach and find like-minded people. Geek Culture arises.

The secret of Long Tail business:

  • Make everything available
  • Help me find it
  • Marketing: focus on word of mouth: influencers, bloggers, A/B testing, gimmicks, stunts, sharing.

A classic.

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

What Technology Wants

Finally I read What Technology Wants, by Kevin Kelly.

My notes.

The technium is a word Kevin Kelly invented to indicate the autonomous self-enforcing system of technologies, machines, tools, ideas.

As such, the technium as a concept reminds me of The Selfish Gene from Richard Dawkins and Harari’s AI concept in Homo Deus.

On the latter: throughout the book I kept wondering why there was no reference at all in Harari’s Home Deus to this book from Kevin Kelly. The technium coincides so much with Harari’s ideas of a developing autonomous AI, that the lack of reference could be called an omission. (What Technology Wants was published in 2010, Homo Deus in 2016.)

A breakthrough evolution in human intelligence was the development of man’s capability of language. This made is possible to improve the food for humans, increasing longevity, which increased learning in the communities of humans, which improved tools et cetera.

Like we domesticated animals, we ourselves became domesticated with technology. Our lives today are symbiotic with technology.

Technology over time developed from substance and energy-focused to organization and control of information.

Technology is the extended body of human for ideas.

The major transitions in the technium (in parallel to the major transitions in biology)

  • Primate communication -> language
  • Oral lore – Writing/mathematical notation
  • Scripts – Printing
  • Book knowledge – Scientific Method
  • Artisan production -> Mass production
  • Industrial culture -> ubiquitous global communication

Which seems a logical development, but it begs the question: what is the next step in such an evolution? Some higher form of intelligent interconnection between societies?

Development of technology has a benefit over biological development in that it can backtrack to developments from the past and reuse those. In biology, paths that have died out can not be integrated in active branches of biological development.

The technium’s information mass is ever-increasing and growing.

The relationship with population growth: population growth drives progress. More people means more minds, these minds can be working on more problems.

Now, the question arise what happens when the earth population declines.

Evolution converges to recurring forms. Some forms have  come out of evolution through independent paths (eyes, for example).

Also for the technium, independent, simultaneous evolution is the rule.

Convergent evolution (of technology and biology) is adaptive: changes to circumstances, contingent: based of luck, inevitable: evolves in a direction.

The inverted pyramid of invention (by Daniel Hillis): everyone can have an idea, executing on it is the most important thing.

It is our fate we have become connected with our technology. Only by embracing it we can steer its direction.

Technology does not answer world issues like war. New problems will arise with tech, always.

Technology seems to eat human dignity. Is that a misanthropic view?

Infamous tech-opponent the Unabomber was right: “Machine made decisions will bring better result than man-made ones.”

But even opposers of tech don’t give it all up. Nobody goes all the way: why?

  • Because tech is addictive?
  • Because tech covers its drawbacks to us?
  • Because in the end we chose to, after balancing pro’s and con’s.

We need to make better decisions about tech. And to be able to do so, we need more tech.

Kelly tells the story of how the Amish can teach us how we could weigh the benefits and evaluate the ways of using technology minimally.

We need to make minimum use of technologies because our time and attention are limited.

But that does not mean we should minimize technology development.

My question on this subject is: could it be that technology becomes so embedded in culture that also the conscious use of technology becomes part of our culture? Are we only in the early phases of adopting technology and is this a maturing process we have to go through. And realize that addicts (of technology) may always be there?

We have to live with technology, convivial.

We don’t see the potential of technology before it becomes mature. And it’s always different than anticipated.

We don’t need to proactively approve technology. We should monitor and adopt policy to technology developments.

We have to make technology convivial, compliant with life. For this, Kevin Kelly defines a number of characteristics technologies should adopt:

  • Promote collaboration.
  • Transparency, on ownership and origins. No asymmetrical knowledge for some users.
  • Decentralized, not monopolized.
  • Flexible, easy to modify, adapt, and easily given up by users.
  • Redundant, having several options, not monopolized.
  • Efficient, impacting ecosystems to the minimum.
  • Complexity of our life will continue to increase and we will continually need to manage this.
  • Diversity.
  • Specialization: technology grows towards the long tail of niches.
  • Ubiquity. Everyone will eventually get his hands on technology. More interesting to worry about is what to do when everyone has a technology, rather than how to give everyone a technology.
  • Freedom. The more complexity, the more freedom.
  • Mutualism, the collaborative nature, dependence creates a crucial social relationship between people and technologies.
  • Beauty. Technology evolves to the beauty that people love so much in the natural world.
  • Sentience. Technology will increase sentience. Not into a super mind, but into a form of distributed specialized minds.

The technium organizes the structure of knowledge, connecting different pockets of knowledge.

The technium keeps evolving, making rapid changes possible.

So why is this all better for humans?

It increase choices, including those for the good.

Allows humans to participate in new ideas.

A good device increases choices

Napoleon Hill and public domain books

I read the already quite old book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill on the recommendation of several people. Wonderfully relevant still.

The book is public domain and can be read and downloaded from multiple sites. For example https://archive.org/details/NapoleonHillThinkAndGrowRich_201706.

Being interested in public domain books, I thought I’d make a list of sites where you can find public domain books, but of course that already exists: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvq99b/how-to-download-the-books-that-just-entered-the-public-domain, for example.

This Is Marketing

Probably the best, if not at the very least the most enjoyable and readable book on marketing in the Internet age: Seth Godin’s This Is Marketing.

The last page comprises a summary of the book. That is very cool.

Mandatory reading.

Figuring by Maria Popova, on non-conformist up-hill battles

Maria Popova wrote the extraordinary Figuring. It recounts the relationships between thinkers and doers from the 16th through the 20th centuries in a seemingly unfocused way. Beginning with Kepler, continuing to Margaret Fuller. Popova describes the personal and idealistic up-hill battles of these usually rather non-conformist thinkers—a wonderfully addictive book.

Popova has long been writing one of the best blogs in the world: Brainpickings.

4321 – mogelijke levens

4321 van Paul Auster is een verhaal over de schrijver van het verhaal, en drie andere mogelijke levens van de schrijver. Zo krijgen we viermaal het verhaal van Archi Ferguson de zoon van een naar de VS geëmigreerde

Joodse man. Geschreven in een meeslepende vorm van enorm lange zinnen, die zich van begin tot eind vullen met gedetailleerde beschrijvingen van de belevenissen en gedachtespinselen van Archie, met name tijdens de roerige jaren 60, waarvan je aan het eind vaak niet meer weet hoe ze aan het begin zijn begonnen maar die toch blijven boeien en je door deze dikke pil slepen.

Het laatste hoofdstuk vat het hele boek zelf het beste samen. Denkbare levens.

Don’t Be A Wimp. Robin Williams – The Non-Designers’s Design Books

The Non-Designer's Design Book

A guy called Robin Williams (not thé Robin Williams) wrote The Non-Designer’s Design Book. The book helps non-designer’s understand what is important in design.

There are four guiding principles of design:

  • Proximity, meaning: put stuff together that belongs together.
  • Alignment: elements should be (visually) connected to something else, consistently. Use lines to draw connections (or to identify lack of connections). Centered alignment should be avoided, and only applied very consciously.
  • Repetition: tells us to repeat elements to unify and strengthen a piece. Take a repetitive element for example and repeat it to emphasize it’s importance. But don’t overdo it.
  • Contrast: draw attention by making things (more) different. If things are not the same, do not make them look the same.

The Fifth Principle: Don’t Be A Wimp. Meaning: do not be afraid to be different.

Colors

The color wheel: primary colors + others. Complementary colors. Triads: at a third of the wheel.
Shades and Taints: add black resp white to the color.
Warm/cool colors have red resp blue in them.

CYMK vs RGB: color schemes for printer resp monitor.

Typography

The second half of the book is a treatment on Typography. When to use quotes, which quotes, spaces, apostrophes, dashes, underlining (never!).

Typographic types & relationships.
Concordant: one type family without much variety. Can be strong.
Conflicting: similar types but not the same. Avoid.
Contrasting: clearly distinct. Complementing. Can be strong when done well.

Types of types: Old style, Modern, Slab serif, Sans serif, Script, Decorative.
Type contrasts: size, weight, structure, form, direction, color.

Basic approach to improve design:
– start with a focal point, with contrast
– group the information, create proximity, strong alignment
– create repetition
– have strong contrasts

Don’t be a wimp!

The 7 Habits -Steven R. Covey

The famous book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  Great, apart from it’s occasional religious dwellings. I do not mean the fact that Covey himself is religious, but the instances where he loses factuality and swerves into wishy washy paragraphs

  1. Be pro-active.
  2. Begin with the end in mind. How you want to be remembered. Personal mission statement. What roles you have and how to fulfill those.
  3. First things first. Quadrant Import / Not important versus Urgent / Not Urgent.We tend to focus on the Urgent side (whether important or not) but we forget the not so urgent but important part (the Quadrant II as Covey calls it). Become a Quadrant II oriented person.
  4. Think Win-Win. Quadrant Consideration slow / high versus Courage low/high. Make Emotional Bank account deposits. You can not just withdraw from the Emotional Bank account.
  5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood. Diagnose before prescribing.
  6. Synergize. Trust / Cooperation diagram. Diffuse (win/lose or lose/win), Respectful (compromise), Synergize (Win/Win).
  7. Sharpen the Saw. Physical – Mental (Reading, visualizing, planning, writing) – Spiritual (Value clarification and commitment, study, meditate) – Social (Service, Initiative, Empathy, …)