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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.

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.

Goodbye Hard drives but I won’t miss you

I just read an article where experts said price of SSD will continue to fall. Sincerely that’s the most stupid statement I have read in months. It’s like saying the sun will rise tomorrow morning.

SSD, which is an acronym for Solid State Drive, is basically a bigger USB drive shoehorned into the size of hard disks so they can fit into the same compartment. It’s a means of deceiving computers that they are HDDs but just magically faster. You can read more about SSD here.

I use a Dell Latitude E6540 and a MacBook Pro (which has refused to leave its original packing, tear nylon!). The Dell is one dog of a laptop. It’s big, ugly, heavy and very slow. I was almost gearing to use it as a self-defense tool when I finally got an epiphany that maybe the hard drive may be begging to retire. So I got a Samsung (or was it San Disk) SSD and plopped it in. Whoa, never seen such a transformation. Oh, yes, it’s still big, ugly as sin and very heavy but slow isn’t a word to describe it. After all, a pig with a lipstick is still a pig, albeit a pretty one.

Enough of my katzenjammer!

I have become an unrepentant evangelist of SSDs. I now approve it as replacement drives for my colleagues because, ding dong, it’s affordable. At the last check, a 240GB SSD cost around N35K.

Now for those who have some interest in electronics, trended over a period of time, the price of devices is always inversely proportional to the performance. If this law holds true, SSD will get cheaper and cheaper until it finally supplants hard drives. I have watched this trend for a while and if things go at the rate it’s going, then by 2018, hard drives may become what people do – drive hard!
However other schools of thought think that SSD may never catch up with HDDs in performance but I know that as long as the price is reasonable, the performance of SSD will always bitch slap HDDs any day or time.

So far the consumer SSDs have been coming in the HDD form factor but why should it? New computers are going on sale with SSDs soldered directly on the motherboards which is giving rise to skinnier and sexier laptops.
And it doesn’t stop there.

The IDE and SATA interfaces are hogs, slow and annoying. A prehistoric interface protocol. So guys at FusionIO turned everything on its head – they started putting storage on the PCIe bus, right within server innards. The benefit is that the processor can reach the drive as fast as it could reach the memory. The devices are not for small children though – a typical 2.4Tb bundle will set you back about $28,000. With that kind of price, I will rather save my documents within 2B exercise books.

Back to saner shores.

SSD can transform performance of anyone. It could mean the difference between a good day or a bad one. So let’s do it!

Para-addiction is the excuse for my love handles!

Addiction kills. Slower than a speeding bullet but not less painful.
I usually talk about tech, science and other random financial stuff but then I’m free to rant about anything I want, don’t i?

So here’s the gist for today – I’m looking for a very good excuse for not hitting the gym or scorching the jogging trail. I have tried to cajole myself, bought running gears, etc. But after few attempts, I simply discard my feeble efforts and move on. I have run out of excuses but trust Íjésá man like me, I need to pin this on someone or something. Whatever!

Am I undisciplined? Maybe not: I start my meetings like clockwork; stick to proper routines; some habit are even like rituals but still I still can’t break the exercise jinx.

The sad thing is I know that exercising is good for everyone and especially for me. Fitness is very important for good health; I’m constantly embarrassed how I puff like a Volkswagen diesel car every time I run up the stairs to do my daily ward round. My colleagues must be ashamed of me.

Fitness aside, exercising tones the body; nothing beats a flat tummy. Except maybe 6 packs but then that’s even asking for too much at this age of mine.
I guess quite a lot of us can identify with my personal demon but is this unique to exercising? Probably not. It seems almost every good thing we need to do always require so much stress and it’s never easy – getting to work on time, reading for exams, self-development, saying no to Coldstone ice cream, etc. We know they are good, even necessary to keep us alive but then we can’t just do them or keep at them.

This sounds familiar! Anyone who’s read or dealt with addiction knows how tough it’s to get off a bad case. In fact some addictions are so bad that they are physiological; if you stop using the drug you probably gonna fall down and die. Ok, not that dramatically but you are gonna die painfully.
By the way, we shouldn’t confuse addiction with OCD. You can read about the differences here, here and here.

So it got me thinking that maybe the portion of the brain that gets messed up (the reward system) when you get on an addiction train could also be responsible for you not doing what you need to do. It sounds stupid but then electrons and positrons are stupid too.

In fact, the following is a direct quote from Harvard help guide:

In the 1930s, when researchers first began to investigate what caused addictive behavior, they believed that people who developed addictions were somehow morally flawed or lacking in willpower. Overcoming addiction, they thought, involved punishing miscreants or, alternately, encouraging them to muster the will to break a habit.

Many of my friends and family have pushed me, threatened me (that doesn’t work) or enticed me to pick up one or two good habits but it just never works. I subsequently get labeled as difficult or proud. One of my sisters once called me a peacock even though I only wear white shirts and black ties all because I wouldn’t do what she “rightly” suggested.
This is something I have interest in and may read more scientific papers. Trust me, some mad hat scientist may have figured this out. But for the time being, let’s call the name para-addiction and I can at least satisfy the itch to write something today.