Category / Futures

by Ajinkya Pawar

OpenAI is not enough: On why Elon Musk must also disrupt the education system and ignite utopian imagination

Elon Musk is one of the few powerful people in the world who actually cares for the world, has a vision and has the ability to steer the world in conscientious directions. And Elon Musk is worried. He is worried about our probable future overlords – Artificial Intelligence (AI) , and rightly so. (“Not all AI futures are benign.“) And his response to that threat is characteristically ambitious and well targeted. He has started two new ventures in that field – Neuralink and OpenAI. Neuralink hopes to create ‘neural lace’ that removes the middleman of hardware between our thoughts and computing power. OpenAI hopes to democratize research about AI so that the advances of the technology are evenly distributed.
I am interested in this promise of OpenAI. Access to technology gives one power. And the currently powerful people, can buy access for themselves and create false barriers of access for others to technologies that are powerful. And OpenAI hopes to subvert that dynamic. The wish to democratise access to knowledge is at the very source of the Open movement. But for the wish to be fulfilled, much more needs to be done than OpenAI.

As it stands now, the two companies, by design, will only contribute to acceleration of AI adoption among elite without actual democratisation. OpenAI stops short at making the advances public, without ensuring that the public has the capability or intent of using those technologies. The current educational infrastructure is tremendously inadequate to educate enough people who could take the research at OpenAI and do something with it. Also, there is the issue of convenience and intent. Look for example, the promise of ‘sixth sense‘. Its been 7 years since that technology went open, but we don’t see people leveraging it widely. Or take the case of 3D printing. It was supposed to revolutionise manufacturing – but it didn’t.

Secondly, look at the world – everyone is building walls. To an extent that is inevitable.What happens to technologies in a world full of walls and xenophobia? Technology gets weaponized and secretive, not open.  

Like I said, there are two key issues here – capability and intent.

First, we need people to have skills in applied sciences with capabilities to leverage AI tech. Second, we need to show people the positive future that they can be a part of. We need people with imagination to dream of positive futures, before we can make the positive futures true. This will help in making it convenient and desirable for people to be part of this open alternate system for AI knowledge.

In both the cases of sixth sense and 3D printing, there simply was not enough public will to disrupt their existing lifestyles in favour of a more empowering tech that is less convenient. They were not emotionally moved by these tech’s promises. In absence of emotional will, people always choose convenience over empowerment. That is the great threat that Aldous Huxley warned us against in his ‘Brave New World’.   People will choose Soma that is detrimental over inconvenient though beneficial changes, because that is in service of prevalent power structures. Status-quo must be maintained, until it becomes unsustainable – That is the rule of the game. People and the power centers are geared for this behavior.

Musk understands the power of convenience well. His wealth is built with his ideas that made transactions convenient (Paypal), alternative fuel convenient and desirable (Tesla). So he is well positioned and capable to do the things necessary to make OpenAI’s promise a reality.

So Elon Musk, please invest in world’s (not US alone, since the promise is that of equality) educational infrastructure.
And secondly, propagandists/ strategists like me can help in making OpenAI a part of our cultural fabric, so that its adoption becomes easy. We need utopian ideas that people get motivated with – ideas that people want to be part of, to participate in. And this is where the strategy would be very different from any of the Elon Musk companies before. You would actually need to do propaganda/ marketing for this to work. We need utopian ideas that ignite people with imagination, for this to work.

by Ajinkya Pawar

Fight for your tomorrow

A generation working against its own interest

It’s been 7 years since I entered the world of advertising. It’s been longer than that with the attempt to understand world and power – by reading Chomsky, Ambedkar, Amartya Sen and so on. As you can imagine (if you have read these people that is), there was a certain heaviness of heart with which I worked in my early years in advertising. How to reconcile with the utopia of a non-consumerist worldview where humanity is undivided and equal, with the reality of consumerist culture that not only perpetuates but glorifies inequality? Working in advertising meant perpetuating this reality, against  the utopia that I must work for. I am working against my interest!

And I see around and see so many people doing the same. They can’t articulate it, but they know it deep down. That unease, that momentary recklessness.. We all feel that discomfort but we can’t name it. Here’s you name for it – its the pain of severing ties with the world that nurtures you – your family, your community, your ecology. It’s the pain of severance for an imposed injunction to enjoy. We are working against our future to make our present a little more comfortable.

How did the ‘powers that be’ convinced us to live and work against our own interest?

We rationalise it in the interest of certainty of today’s livelihood. We rationalise it in the face of apparent overwhelming global consensus – ‘YOLO’, spend your way to happiness; “only today matters, for tomorrow may never come”. This philosophy  is convenient for the global capitalist power. Since this philosophy has no conception for tomorrow.

It is the commercialized version of ‘American dream’. It is ‘Id’s dream, imposed on the ‘superego’. It is an empty dream of excess. It is a childish dream of narcissistic joys, now! It has no conception of a realistic tomorrow – of where we are going and where we should be going. That is what the capitalist ‘system‘ (not particular people, but particular interests of power webs) wants us to believe. “Fuck the planet, fuck your family, fuck your community, fuck everyone else. enjoy NOW. for those empty pursuits fund our ego massages.”

The globalised world  creates a sense of an opportunity, an opportunity to escape from the mess one creates. Global mobility is your passport to the dream of remorseless enjoyment… of an eternal escape to ‘better places’ with impunity. Hence the profusion of travel pics on facebook. It creates a distance between one’s acts and its effect. Oops! I did it again. and i hope it will be taken care of by the time I come back. Or not. We have nostalgia in its place anyways. which is even better. it is like reality, but better.

How did I get here?

By not fighting against the flow. You just go with the flow – school, college, MBA, corporate ladder, increments, cars, loans etc. and if you have no clear conception of an alternative, you just go with the flow. The media and education system doesn’t exactly prepare us to ask the right questions, to work together in formulating and working towards a utopia. You just do what is seemingly working for others.

So what now?

Like every good plan, mine looks ahead with a sound (i hope) appreciation of reality of today; a realistic vision of utopia you want to work towards while earning honestly in service of the future. This blog and this one is an attempt to articulate that utopia, to plant / support that meme of the utopia we need. I plan to do more in ways of content and engagements in service of a tomorrow built with cognizance of reality seen from a compassionate perspective.

The second part is about survival today. I hope to do that by honestly helping businesses grow through my skills in strategic choice making, in the present tense. There is a time to fight the system and a time to work with the system. Earn within the system to fight the system, essentially.

by Ajinkya Pawar

Future of work

In response to a quora question – Future- How will the future of businesses and management look like and what changes should we expect?

1. Jobs for the Hyper-specialised

2. Second economy = computers transacting, interacting with other computers. the economy that is completely run by computers and algorithms, with little human support. Read this excellent article from HBR. I have taken inputs from it liberally to answer this question. Second economy will be worth $7.6 Trillion by 2025.

2. Future of robots replacing the workers – 100 million workers to be replaced in US alone by 2025, where the total workforce today is 146 million.

What this means is, the world as we know it will have to change – culturally, economically, physically for a peaceful future. The second economy is inevitable to a certain extent. It will replace jobs and no new jobs will be created. The prosperity created would be accessible to fewer and fewer people. Most of us will lose out. For a peaceful future, perhaps the governments would have to consider a golden mean of expanded social security + lifestyle allowances for the vast majority of people, and high taxes for the controllers of the vast systems.

3. Very high rates of change – As it is, we find it difficult to keep up with the changes affecting our work – may it be managers or workers – newer systems, newer softwares, newer ways of doing things. The rate of change will only accelerate here after.

This poses problems not only for the employed (increasing pressure to keep up. besides how many would be ready to compete in such a scenario?), but more so for the unemployed. There simply would not be enough jobs for unskilled/ semi-skilled people.

CEOs and CXOs shouldn’t be too smug. Even managerial positions would very likely be occupied by algorithms and servers. There will be an app for everything.

4. An Alternative to central bank money – Globalisation and intelligent algorithms = consolidated control in the hands of a few people. Which means concentration of money in a few pockets. Which means, for the vast majority, for their lives to have a meaning, their lives need to divorce from the current currency of money. P2P, bitcoin money could actually be the spiritually and technologically relevant form of money for future.

5. Media and communications will become the most important industries – To control perceptions, mass trends, mass opinions.

In the immediate future..

1. Importance of Social media influencers – directors of curiosities. Makers of sense of ever burgeoning mass of choices and information.

2. Loss of ‘security’: high churn and abrasive growth of ‘Human resources’. Social security weakened.

3. Predatory giant corporations:

a. Amazon started it. Their policy of pricing for a loss to edge out the competition has become the mantra for most big corporations. Before internet, this would have affected a retailer in a city. Now, such policy affects business across industries across the world. Amazon is making retailer businesses insecure across the world. They hope for retailers across the world to shutter down in a few years so that they could enjoy monopoly later on. Same strategy is used by Flipkart, OLA and so on.

Look at OLA for a second. It under prices local taxi drivers. OLA Taxi drivers get subsidy over the fare earned. This unfair advantage is pushing out local taxi businesses. In the short term, it is good for the consumers – with low fares, good cabs, good service… but in the long term, who is stop the monopoly of OLA to charge consumer thrice the amount of a normal fair? The payout to drivers too is not consistent. In a short period of a year, the payout policies and amounts have varied tremendously. (according to a few drivers I spoke to.. apparently it was a healthy sum a year ago, 6 months ago they stopped paying subsidy.. ad hoc opportunistic policies).

Essentially, we are encouraging assholes to run 21st century businesses.

b. Qualities such as kindness, consideration of human life outside of their job role are already absent from much of the work places. The newer breed of startups such asapple, Uber, Zomato have a terrible moral compass. They see nothing wrong in hiring and firing indiscriminately. They see nothing wrong in finding loopholes in policies and laws to earn more money at the cost to the wider world. They see nothing wrong in being ridiculously selfish. This has spawned a new culture of impunity and apathy in the search of rapid growth of riches.

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Originally published here
by Ajinkya Pawar

‘What will our life be like in 2065?’

This entry is in response to a quora question – What will life to be like 50 years from now?

Future gazing is tricky because, we can affect it to an extent. And ‘we’ don’t act unilaterally, and ‘we’ don’t comprehend the ‘extent’ of our acts and our limitations.
Having said that, here are some trends, in no particular order, which might continue for the next 50 years.

1. Climate change
Humanity has dug its own grave with 2 of earth’s 9 ecological boundaries in the red zone. Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet.
There is no doubt that our efforts of survival against climate change will shape our life in future. Again, since there is no unified ‘we’, we humans compete against each other. So there will be winner and there would be losers. Rich have an upper hand – escape from shrinking shores, access to machines to compensate for toxic weather (Air purifiers and ACs for example), money to buy scarce resources (water, food etc.). The poor will undoubtedly suffer the most. The next big wars would be fought for survival.

So if you are rich, your life would be lived in well-defined cocoons of some sort. If you are not so rich, a major part of your life will be spent in hospitals/ working overtime to pay the bills/ being an eco-refugee.

  1. Globalisation

Globalisation has far reaching consequences. It is now irreversible and entrenched. The power is increasingly getting concentrated in the hands of fewer people. ‘Interests’ of a few corporates, financiers and nations now dictate global flow of money and events. Many of today’s events (rise of ISIS, middle class’s rising prosperity, disenfranchised aboriginals across the world, weakened labour forces, secret global deals and so on) are directly an effect of Globalisation.

Read Noam Chomsky for better appreciation of what has been happening. Start here.

Effect on life: Your life will be affected by people and events far removed from you. For example, the economic meltdown in US had a direct impact on my paycheque six years ago. This trend will only strengthen.
You might have to go farther and farther in search of jobs, as disparity between wealth of people from metros and non-metros widen.

New technology is being continuously created in service of the richer class. The benefit to the poorer people is largely accidental.

Read ‘A brave new world’ by Aldous Huxley for a taste of the world we are heading to. It is a bit dramatized and extreme vision of the trends, but a good indicator of our life in future.

  1. Rising Inequality

Globalisation enables the middle class to prosper on one hand, while making the workers/ labourers more vulnerable. It is easier for the rich to get richer, quicker. The access to tools (such as internet, public transport) while democratising to an extent, is leveraged more strongly by the more powerful. (Internet was a haven for minorities and persecuted in its infancy. Now it is the eyes of the big brother governments and worse, the giant corporates.)

Effect on life: Disaffection with life. Rise of media, drugs and such other opiates to keep the masses from revolting.
If you are from a marginalised community, your identity will be eventually ‘sanitized’. The future is one massive mass of homogenous people.
Read here to understand who will succeed in the rat race of survival in the future.

  1. Loss of privacy
    Prism surveillance program

Ever present and larger powers (governments, corporates) will control individuals and know about your thoughts, actions, routines, interests and so on. If you are inconsequential, then this might not bother you, but if you are in some way annoying to the global system, then the lack of anonymity will be the noose around freedom’s neck.

Check out the excellent, albeit dark, TV series ‘Black Mirror’ that paints a grim picture of our lives in future.

  1. Rise of the machines
    a. Humans will rely more and more on machines.
    b. Humans will become redundant in most of the workplaces. HBR’s article on AI
    c. AI will be integral to the system of the globalised world
    d. Reduction in human dignity, empathy

    6. The Culture is dead. Long live the culture.

Most likely new interactive technologies will be leveraged by the powerful to homogenize identities and your experiences. What I mean by that is, cultures will be flattened, and there will be less number of languages, customs, and rituals. You will belong to either of the handful of religions. You will be speaking in one of the few hundred languages. You will share the same holidays with the rest of world. (Bye bye gudi padwa, hello Christmas.)

New immersive Medias and interactions will create new global rituals and experiences. People across the world will live in identical cities, eating identical Mcburgers, dying of identical cardiovascular diseases.

False identity markers must be created to give a sense of solid identity to individuals. And this is where brands and marketers will come to play. Supermarkets are the new temples. And brands are the chosen gods of affirmation. My career as an advertising guy has a bright future. (Well, almost.)

Here’s something to read about the future of ideas.

7. Connected and opiated mind

These days we are most fascinated with advancement in Interface technologies… touch screens, virtual reality, 3d printing, and tactile sense transmission and so on. The sum total effect of it will be for you to be ever connected to your job, your government, and your brands. You will be inured to the experience of bondage. You will expect and want your thoughts being governed by these large gratifying forces.

  1. Man will be root-less.
    Globalised world is corrosive to simplistic myths and beliefs that help men make sense of their world. He is reminded every day that what he knows is incomplete and wrong. His heroes, customs, symbols are under threat. To protect his sanity, he will either fight or become root-less – adrift in the all-consuming vortex of globalised despair.
  2. Health

Rich will live healthier and far longer. The poor might live longer too, but pollution, lack of public support will run down most poor people of the world. Rich people will have AI enhanced bodies and minds.

10. Powerful Corporates subverting national structures
Corporates will become more important than nations. Few billionaires would have outsized impact on policy making through either direct interference (what is called ‘lobying’) or through philanthrocapitalism.

  1. Demographic spanner in the wheels

    Read this excellent article from WSJ about demographic trend of the world through 2050.
    My broad stroke implications from that work :
    a. Rich countries will have elderly people living with robot assisted services. Indians and Africans will make up a sizable chunk of labour for these advanced nations.
    b. Poorer countries such as India and African nations will face demographic pressure – large population, inadequate infrastructure, low productivity of labour. If education and skill building becomes a priority, then perhaps these countries might grow in influence, with improvement in lives of people. Otherwise, the under prepared young would be ready fodder for sectarian/ identity/ resource based skirmishes, wars, agitations and what not.

So in sum,

You will be root-less, consequence less, in search of meaning. You will be heavily under the influence of opiates of some kind – either concerns about sport teams, music, movies or buzzfeed listicles. (And drugs too, obviously. A root-less (spiritually bankrupt) man must dissolve himself in spirits.) What this means is, you will most probably find purpose in abstractions, the finer things in life, while your actual life is being completely out of your control.

You might enjoy a few technologically advances, but the more powerful will always have a stronger leverage on that technology than an individual.

But all is not lost. What one needs to appreciate is the fact that we now have the power to define the course of our future, to an extent. Fight the forces NOW for your right of privacy, of dignity, of access to good health and education. What you must do for a better life tomorrow is fight today.

There is hope in democracy 2.0. With digital technology, let’s empower democracy and thereby empowering individuals.

by Ajinkya Pawar

Future of ideas

An idea is.
and we are its vehicles. (see the ted talk below) We are the replicants at the employ of ideas. An idea does its best to spread no matter what we want to do with it.  Tomorrow it will find a better replicant than us in machines. And right now, it is rewarding people who are doing the most to accelerate that shift. Hence the big payouts for apps,  .coms,  automations and all sorts of work that serves automation.

Future of service economy
Indian pundits have hedged their economic bets against agriculture and with service economy. Against creation and with impending obsolescence. Indian service economy is not cutting edge, it is largely a job shop for work that is too mind numbing for actual willing humans to do. So the industry hires smart young people to waste their time (not learning skills beyond the immediate task) on cleaning data/ writing reports/ analysing markets/ making numbers/ writing algorithms and so on.
All these tasks are in the service on making temes*.

*gene – genetic info replicant(?),
meme – info copied from person to person,
teme – info replicated with the use of technology

What happens to Indian service sector jobs when most data in the world is cleaned by it, ready for smarter algorithms to take over those jobs. How can humans remain competitive in spreading ideas than machines? What advantage does human consciousness have over machine intelligence?

 Future of apps and e-commerce
Digital is the playground of creation. and the possibilities are endless.  Ideas are finding their BIGGEST EXPRESSIONS in this medium. It essentially is an industry of making better and better temes. and hence is rewarded. But how long will it need human ingenuity, human consciousness?
What advantage does human consciousness have over machine intelligence? Google and facebooks of the world are merely competing to be the future rent seekers of access to the temes exchange. The access to global consciousness. Enriching that consciousness will always remain a lucrative opportunity – rewarded in some way or another.

Future of advertising and Oil
Both the industries are in service of globalisation. They were rewarded in the last decade because they were the best soldiers in the relentless march of globalisation. However, that project is nearly over. The world is global and open now. (almost. or atleast as much as it needed to be).
The current project is to build systems to employ this globalisation in the service of efficient teme replication. (So more innovation in form than innovation in content.)
The future project is to streamline the world in service of temes. (Content over form) Advertising and Oil might have a role here.
In the race for relevance, humans will renegotiate the relationship with machines. The illusion of control will vanish.

Ofcourse none of what i said today is original. So I think I should write down some memes that are making my brain their home these days.

1. Kurt Vonneguts ‘Breakfast of champions’  – hence ..machines.
2. Philip K Dick’s ‘Second Variety’ – hence dystopian robots taking over man.
3. ofcourse Susan Blackmore’s idea of temes
4. Facebook showing me articles about tea/ coffee/ sleepiness on a friday afternoon – apt content for everyone. we are so fucking predictable.

by Ajinkya Pawar

What good are Google glasses? OR How tech companies can choose not to be evil.

Why invent Google glasses?
Here’s Sergey Brin trying to answer that question.

Doesn’t his argument seem a little unconvincing – a weak reason to deploy the best of the brains on the planet and 3 years worth of efforts.
The primary pivot of his argument is the glass’ ability to improve social posture (?). He talks about how when interacting with your cell phone, you look down, away from the rest of the world. How when nervous, one fiddles with cell phone to escape the real world.
So how is Glass a solution? It is an even more ‘evolved’ tool to keep the outside world ‘out’!

Ok, so Glass frees your hands. for what? for better documentation of our narcissism? These series of innovations (social media, smart phones, glass) are answering the most base yearnings of our narcissistic behavior.

When you look down, at least there’s that bit of honesty – ‘yes, I am looking away from you. Sorry for my awkward inability to be social.’ With Glass, how honest are you with your interactions in the real world, if you are constantly mindful of the online world at the corner of your eye. (Social media is the magical mirror for the narcissists. Google glass makes the narcissism even more intimate.) Obsessive Facebook users know the urge to check notifications. Imagine that with Glass.

Watch ‘Black Mirror’s this episode for another perspective of how this tech might evolve. (Must see the whole series. work of genius.)
More importantly, I feel that technology giants like Google and Apple can’t really prioritise well. The world has stepped back and given the mantle of technological progress to these few companies it seems. There is this unfortunate tendency where excellence in one aspect is taken to mean a general quality of excellence – cricketers as politicians, businessmen as policymakers… wrong wrong assumption.

Human ingenuity can certainly do much better than what Google or Apple have done. Well, to begin with, we need to get our priorities right.

The starting point should not be ‘what can technology do?‘. Because, it is with questions like these that Google Glass gets created and one has to see Sergey Brin trying to force fit a weak reason for its creation after the product idea had already been thought of.
Perhaps, the starting point should be ‘what do we really need right now and how can technology help us get it?’

We don’t need more ways to shut off people, we need more ways to be confident in our social interactions.
We need to be able to protect what is sacred & personal to us. (Hence always opt-in as default, not opt-out option as default.)
We need control over what we say, do, hear, see.
We need a better understanding of what we consume and how it affects the world.
We need technology that doesn’t eliminate another human being from interaction/ work/ jobs.
We need technology that  doesn’t increase the gulf between the haves and have-nots.

We need a non-Luddite, but a realist, humanist manifesto for technology companies to follow. To not be evil means eternal vigilance of the effect of one’s own actions.
Companies are eager to ‘lead the change’, ‘make a dent in the universe’, but with what effect? with what cost?
Apples and Oranges of the world need to think not only of the superior interface designs, but also about how the ones who cannot afford these elitist fruits would react to this new exclusion? How is it making obsession about trivial material issues fashionable and what does it mean to our ecology, social interactions, our economy?
If you do not want to be evil, be a little more circumspect.

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Originally published here.