Author: Adedeji Olowe

Adedeji / a bunch of bananas ate a monkey /

TL;DR

My annual vacation is rapidly winding down so with hours left to spare, I tried to catch on some reading; I love to read because I can imagine things not possible, go back over sentences, laugh, scream, and scowl; nobody’s gonna judge me.

Some good long forms that I found interesting:

Bob Henderson lost $200M and got it all back. Never say it’s over until it’s really over

Rosie and Samantha are like Gordon Gekko of the strippers’ world. I’m happy I never met them

The world has gone really mad about Digital, McKinsey weighed in on the issue
2016 may be disruptive for electronic payments


By the way, TL;DR means Too Long; Don’t Read.

Mum, AI took my job

AI’s expanding capabilities, from personal assistants to image recognition, pose questions about job security. Then there’s the scary part, the prospect of AI inventing other AIs. Will this lead to more widespread job displacements?

Recently jobless, I took to trolling the internet for good inspiring stories and I fortunate to bump into a long form on George Hotz inventing a self-driving car. George is of internet fame when he was the first to successfully hack an iPhone and then made a mess of Sony. That’s then.

There are many ways to skin a cat, at least if you can kill the cat first. But then automating self-propulsion isn’t a piece of cake. Planes have been flying themselves for over 84 years but all because danfo drivers don’t fly. Come to terra firma, somewhere around Abule Egba, and it’s a different ball game.

The best known name in the game is Google and they have been plugging away at this for years. Meanwhile African bad boy, Elon Musk recently released a patch that allows a Tesla to drive itself on the highway.

Summary, it costs zillions of dollars and millions of years to do build a working self-respecting self-driving car. Really?

George has turned all this on its head. In October of this year, he invested $50,000 ($30K of this was for a brand new Acura ILX 2016) and presto out came out a decent self-driving automobile. In 2 months? You must be kidding me.
This is where it starts to get interesting.

George’s approach is totally different from others. Instead of programming every conceivable rule and regulation of how to drive and what to expect (let Google come to Obalende!) he taught the car driving like the way I could teach my niece. Many things have made this possible – advent of deep learning, cheap computers, sensors, etc.

The bit I love is his bet against Musk.

So what has AI got to do with losing your job? Well, truth is AI can be taught to do many things. They already power simple things around you – SIRI, Cortana, Google search, image recognition, etc. What happens when it can be a perfect secretary, equity trader, physician, customer service officer, proofreader – correcting my numerous typos?

There is a lot it can do or may not do. The scariest for me though, would be when AIs can invent other AIs. Then, I’m sure that damnation would be an understatement.

Your mouse will give you up

I really dislike gbeboruns and I’m not alone. Traditionally snitches or rats have always met grisly ends in the mafia world. Ok, I’m not mafia but you get the gist?

I’m a very private person or maybe I just pretend to be but then who cares. In fact it’s so bad that most of my shady friends have NDA clauses by default (if you have such with me, now you know how you are internally classified). Ok, enough rambling.

To imagine that my computer could easily give me up, I mean my emotions, to random people is really pathetic.

Let’s cut to the chase.

Some scientists just discovered that your mouse movements can be a telltale sign of your emotions at any particular moment. It can even track the way your mood swings.

It’s not that difficult to do, the lamest JavaScript coder can track mouse x/y coordinates and with AJAX, just slip stream it to some backend services; there are well developed APIs for that.

While SEOs have always analyzed heat maps showing where mice love to play on a web page, this is the first time it’s being analyzed for the emotions of the users holding the input devices.

Like everything technology, it can be used for good and evil.

The Good
Banks, websites, 4Chan, Nairaland, etc. can track your mouse movements to determine if the pages are relevant, or just annoying. Take that mouse feeds from many visitors and you have a large data set to optimize from.
Systems may be able to know if you need assistance and push help/chat to you right away. Hi Visitor, do you want to know how doh dah works?

The Bad
Google and others may be able to develop advanced algorithms that can turn mouse movements into digital motional fingerprints to identify users. Could be used to authenticate or, em, deliver relevant ads.

Website or news could use it to filter news and content. Serve this for angry guys or that for loving lasses.

The Ugly
NSA may use that to track you around. Know everywhere you go, what you read and maybe one day just hack your brain.

The Salvation
I’m cock sure someone is going to have a software or system that can abstract or smoothen out mouse movements into an anonymous mess without sacrificing usability and then we patiently wait for the next hack.


The Beautiful
Tell a website visitor it’s a beautiful sunny day out there, don’t just read the news.

Lagos is doomed

Lagos is doomed and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

That seems a pretty harsh thing to say but hey what can I do about it?

I recently took a road trip between Abuja and Kaduna and was mesmerized with kilometers after kilometers of good road. I wished I had a grand tourer like Merc or BMW 5 Series Touring to tame that piece of asphalt. Not that there wasn’t any pot hole, in fact quite a few broke the innocence of that road but comparing that road to anything in Lagos is like comparing a decent girl with less than 5 guys on the register and a working girl from De Wallen.

Considering that the road has also suffered neglect from government, I figured out that it survived because it was never pillaged as much as Lagos roads by monster container trucks.

It seems I’m rambling. Now straight to the point.

Lagos is like a working class man who gets new cousins to live with him every time he gets promoted; he’s never gonna be successful.

Early in our democracy, Jagaban demonstrated a type of leadership not easily found around here. Although OBJ sat on Lagos federal allocation for 7 years, he raised internally generated revenue and ran this state successfully. Then poster boy Fashola took over and spent trillions on Lagos but what do we have to show for it? Next to nothing. Did they work? Yes they absolutely did.

So what happened?

Nigeria failed.

A recent stats from FRSC showed that 33% of all cars in Nigeria ply Lagos roads not considering that Lagos has the smallest landmass of all states in Nigeria.

#Trouble.

As Lagos became more secure, people showed up to hide from Boko Haram and kidnappers. When the environment became conducive for commerce, all new graduates skip to Lagos as soon as they are done with NYSC. Every company has its head office or a liaison office in Lagos. Practically everything imported into Nigeria, including the offending 41 items banned by CBN, come through Apapa ports.

Meanwhile the nation has been so sadistic to Lagos it makes waterboarding a trivial torture. While the ports bring everything in, they were neither upgraded or the road fixed. Ok, JB did a part but too small it’s of no consequence. The road to the MMA is so terrible that flying in and out of Nigeria is an exercise in depression. But then everyone, or almost everyone, must come to Lagos to fly out.

Traffic is so bad and depressing some people are giving up their homes to rent accommodations nearer their offices. And it won’t get better.

While I’m happy that Ambode has finally come around to fixing the security problems, I’m very well sure that no matter how successful he is, no matter how much he does better than Fashola, as long as the other states in Nigeria are failed or semi-failed, Lagos will never be the place we want it to be.
Olówó ní àrín àwon òtòsì…

Digital "Fluffy" Banking

Digital Banking seems to be the new buzz word these days. I love buzz words; they are necessary distractions in the agonizing world we live in.

But what’s digital banking? Nobody seems to know. Just like those mischievous boys in the bible – customer service we know, value for money we know but what the heck is digital banking?

A thousand definitions exist but basically everything points to a fancier electronic banking services.

Maybe people need to understand what we customers need.

We don’t need pretty names or fancy titles. We don’t care if you are a tier 1 or tier X bank. We don’t care if you are a boutique bank and cater for some fancy niche. We don’t think about innovation. We just want the damned services to work and you not to fleece us while at it. When things go wrong let us know. When our money is missing return it before we squeal. When we visit your branches or call, treat us like royalty.

You want to know what customers really want? Check here.

Damn it! Do you guys get it now? To hell with electronic and digital banking.
My bed has 3 wrong sides and just a good one, which incidentally is the side against the wall. I couldn’t get off from that good side this morning.