Who would bell the cat ?

Current State of Affairs

An era of rapidly changing technology, virtualization, SDN/NFV, advent of 4G LTE technology is redefining businesses across the globe. This wave has brought artificial intelligence, natural language processing, analytics, big data into the foray making it possible for for the machines to emulate humans and humans to vociferously quote it!!

In some senses, this is making and would continue to make most of the ways of doing things exceptionally well in the past invalid . At its peak, we expect the traditional operations replaced with operations driven by speech recognition, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, analytics and machine learning.

There are talks where we are looking towards the rise of a new-collared employee, an employee that knows these algorithms, his brain is genetically wired to work with these machines to create harmonious cognitive work environment (Under no circumstances does this mean genetic engineering. The idea of a genetically wired employee refers to the new age Millenial who in some senses is a super power user of technology). One wonders, if the workings of Neural networks would continue to elude them as well. :-) I like to call this person a Neuro-Linguistic Programmer.

The era of the customer reaching out to the product is diminishing. It would be the service that must seek out the customer and that too, through peer influence and not through conventional media. 

The word "convenience" would take an all important role in the new world .The word ‘convenience’ would assume an all important role in not just discovering a service but also in delivering and managing it. 

Product life-cycles have become short and would continue the downward trend placing a very high demand on the traditional ways of creating and delivering products. More often than not the very nature of time required to release a product makes it obsolete or is unable to deliver the R.O.I (return of investment) and this trend would remain the same. Time would be the elusive dimension in the new world as well.

This is where convenience would attain the role of personalization or hyper-personalization, and this would require home-bred Data and science on that data to extract a meaningful representation of the same

Question is Who would bell the cat ?

Would you Bell the Cat?

The world today sees a lot of chatter on the web and social media about AI and machine learning. People put out twitter feeds and share articles. Some tend to love it and some appear unfazed with these changes. Some quote Elon Musk (the prophetic end of the world) and some others the new age data scientists like Andrew Ng, Andrej Karpathy and the likes.

About 90% of this chatter originates from a community who actually does not know Machine learning or AI, but have been swept by this sudden change. These are also the folks who would love to get their hands dirty again with AI but are constrained by time and other circumstances. Then, there are some who try and impose products and frameworks and that's what I call "Belling the AI Cat".

You cannot bell the AI cat by imposing frameworks and products. It has to be a customized an a personal way of doing this for a specific problem I have. Just like each child is unique and so are her needs and demands, it is essential we recognize that each bit of data and it's optimization is unique and no custom solution fits the bill. A custom solution does give a heads up on the plane but the needs of curation, pre-processing , relearning and unlearning of data are very very personal. My first humble request is "Please do not bell the AI cat with the same available noose"

Being a coder all my life (and I intend to be because every piece of software code has a creation value attached to it and I believe I am a creationist and a futurist) , the world for me started with the proverbial "hello World" program. Be it "C language" with "printfs" or "C#" with "System.console.writeline" or "Python" with "print" statements. I was a little taken aback when the world for me in machine learning started with the "mnist algorithm". For those of you who are not familiar with Mnist can actually go and read about it. Mnist is a database containing a lot of handwritten images of digits and the ask is to ensure a machine learning deep neural network learns these images.

By the way, did I mention that in order to reach the stage of neural networks, I had to cross across the stages of traditional statistical algorithms as well. Algorithms which still are valid today but are slowly being countered by the neural network breed of algorithms.

Step 0 of AI and it is my sincere belief that each one of us in the technology world should actually go through the above exercise . It is only then can we set some goals and parameters for things we are trying to do

What does this Belling entail as a future ?

It is imperative to add what is the future an enterprise should look towards in order to bell the cat and also what might that future entail

Digital Information coupled with personalized perception, learning and even prescription is the future we are looking at. Today we are at a “scale 1” where organizations have realized or are realizing the story and pushing towards automation and scripting. The next level we call as “scale 3” sees hyper-automation and then “scale 4” where we see Cognition

The range is so vivid and infinite that some of the models are unfathomable today. These models would show up once the machines start operating. Some that I see as future going forward :

1. Fluid operations using Natural language processing
2.  Onset of a lot of bots in day to day operations. It doesn't matter if these bots are not AI or machine learnt. They help gather data at-least
3. Onset of Bot frameworks to manage and control bots
4. Onset of Reinforcement learning in coding (trying to be better developers).
5. Onset of robots in homes

The future is AI driven but we are not there yet!! We are still at a stage where machines are taught data and they try and form patterns of data to replicate and optimize the task at hand. Deep neural networks go one step further in learning and forming patterns, patterns which are not yet seen by human beings and they are considered as the harbingers of true AI.

While this happens, the task for each one of us in the technology world is to actually Bell the Cat by going one step further down from the massive vapour ware in terms of PPTs that is out there !!

Happy Coding :-)