Abhi Shah's blog

There is a chance that you discovered this post because someone “liked” it. A seminal development in the history of consumer internet products, the “like button” was first created on Vimeo website in 2005. You probably already know that on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram etc. it has been all rage ever since. Originally designed as a better option than favouriting content it has become the norm of social approval, and engagement.

Step back a minute and understand why. Human mind is wired in such a way that it craves for affirmation and it also craves for social approval. Like button is the simplest form of affirmation that one can provide or receive.. In people’s mind it creates the perfect dopamine hook. They post content, and it gets likes and comments. Moreover there is variability in the likes and comments driven by the social graph. The person doesn’t know how many or who will like their post. Given this variable incentive, we are drawn in more and more. Our brain loves variable reward (Las Vegas anyone?).

The jury is out on the data sharing practices of the social giants however this addictive nature of their platforms gets little attention. We know about misinformation on the internet (hopefully) however the like button has contributed significantly to the addictive nature of the internet and smartphone. The mechanism is exactly same as getting hooked to a narcotic. In fact, studies highlight that the areas of brain that light up due to dopamine hooks of Facebook and Instagram are not different to the areas of brain lighting up when a drug addict takes a hit. So in a nutshell you are being hooked on purpose in order to increase your engagement levels and therefore profitability of these companies.

There are other effects that need attention including amplification of confirmation bias. Likes lead to algorithms showing you similar content amplifying what you like or sometimes reaffirming what you don’t. I have seen my parents take extreme political positions thanks to Facebook and WhatsApp. Surely it is not healthy for democracy?

Through this post I only wish to increase awareness of this subject. I for one have deleted the Facebook app but I still like and favourite content on Twitter and LinkedIn. What can I say? I am hooked.

My kid loves a storybook by the name of “The Gruffalo…” A mouse walking through a jungle meets a series of predators. He escapes each and every one of them by making up stories of a non-existent creature called a “Gruffalo” and scares them away. There is a twist though – creature is for real!! The mouse manages to pretend his way and get out of the pickle – the little brat outsmarts his own creation 😅

I wonder sometimes if AI / ML is like a Gruffalo! Frankly most of the hype around it seems make-belief. The biggest disservice to the field of machine learning is actually this word called AI. It promotes fear that AI will trounce humans or will one day take over the world. We at least today seem to be far from such a dystopian scenario. Almost all science community agrees that we are far away from achieving AGI or Artifical general intelligence or what is also popularly referred to as the ‘singularity’.

Let us extend the Gruffalo metaphor a bit – while most agree about the wrongness of fear mongering on AI, we should be open to precaution. Perhaps the creature is not make belief after all! Very recently I have come across 3 things that have given me the creeps when it comes to what machine learning can become!!

1. Reinforcement learning agents learn how to use tools and form strategies without additional programming

Elon Musk’s Open AI just released a paper in which they describe a simulated training environment in which they make agents (RIL) play a game of hide and seek. The environment progressively introduces 6 strategies and counterstrategies. What they observed was incredible, they observed emergent complex tool usage. As an example, hiding agents using boxes to block doors so that they cannot be discovered by seeker agents. Seeking agents using ramps to jump over obstacles, hiders using ramps and hiding them in rooms to prevent them from being used for jumping over by seekers. If this type of “completely unprogrammed” behaviour is not intelligence then I don’t know what is! Please read a blog post by OpenAI here.

2. Google Duplex RNNs enable a natural sounding calling service for restaurant bookings etc was out of this world – borderline spooky as well.

https://youtu.be/ijwHj2HaOT0

This is the first time synthetic speech was indistinguishable from human speech. To use it, improvise it and do it at Google scale was simply an incredible feat for speech synthesis, natural language understanding and processing and apparently a factory of human agents as well 😄 jokes aside this really gave me goose bumps. Google uses RNNs for this. See conceptual architecture and the link to original Google blog here.

3. Breakthrough language model GPT 2 released recently by OpenAI achieves state of the art performance on many language processing benchmarks and performs rudimentary machine translation, comprehension and summaries

I don’t think people appreciate how much of a big deal this is. Basically you feed the model some seed and it generates many many paragraphs of coherent human like text on its own, replete with stories, meaning and full sense. If you read it you will not believe that an AI wrote it. I have previously written about how tech / social is being misused. You add this and you have a frankenstein-ish monster on your hands. This can be used to generate fake news en masse and it would be really hard to detect. It can be used to impersonate people, for identity theft and many more. On a positive side it will make bots, writing assistants translation, and knowledge systems remarkably useful and human like! For an AI that is the ultimate goal. See an example below from openAI original blog post.

The scientist named the population, after their distinctive horn, Ovid’s Unicorn. These four-horned, silver-white unicorns were previously unknown to science.

Now, after almost two centuries, the mystery of what sparked this odd phenomenon is finally solved.

Dr. Jorge Pérez, an evolutionary biologist from the University of La Paz, and several companions, were exploring the Andes Mountains when they found a small valley, with no other animals or humans. Pérez noticed that the valley had what appeared to be a natural fountain, surrounded by two peaks of rock and silver snow.

While it is impossible to list down many incredible feats achieved in this path breaking tech, I wanted to cite a few examples that gave me the goose bumps. Perhaps if you are interested you should also check out DeepFakes and MuseNet and do share in comments what did you find exciting.

I believe we are looking at building blocks of higher intelligence getting better and better, you could say we are helping machines evolve faster in their own right – but most still believe we are far away from AGI, or singularity… But are we?

Ps. This blog post was written by a human, and if you don’t believe it, ask Gruffalo 😅

A Trojan horse – usually an eavesdropping kind of a computer virus, or as some of you may know the mythological wooden horse with hidden warriors inside used by the Greek to end the siege of city of Troy. I think the brilliant metaphor continues to evolve and its latest incarnation is social media! Specifically, the rampant mis-information on social media.

Don’t worry I am not asking you to give up your WhatsApp! However with great power comes great responsibility according to Voltaire or Spiderman 🙂 depending on whose philosophy you follow. I strongly believe that Social media is being used as a Trojan horse to manipulate and literally hack into the minds of billions of people. We need to do something about it.  Social media is probably as profound an invention as the internet itself. However, I believe it is a huge contributor to some crises of our times. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of world-wide-web, highlights these challenges in 3 parts. First, we have lost control of our personal data (huge topic, not for now). Second, it’s too easy to spread misinformation (a.k.a. Trojan horse 3.0) and third,  political advertising needs transparency and understanding. In this blog post, I share my perspectives.

1. People are the biggest subjects of mass internet adoption & social media

The first apparent signs were seen in Arab spring. People used social to rally public opinion and an uprising. We began to see fundamental impact in Tunisia and other places. Fast forward to today – Brexit is a reality, despite our utter disbelief. Donald Trump got elected on a super controversial and rather ingenious campaign. Most people are still gobsmacked by these results.  These movements have been enabled by social media. Can anyone predict what are the long-term consequences of these events? One thing is certain, the reductionist narratives are succeeding far more than they used to. Savvy people who know how to manipulate social media are grabbing power. The future,   to say the least looks very much on an edge. How did we let this happen?

2. Majority of people do not verify facts, and are prone to cognitive bias. We need to acknowledge this, without an excuse

Most people look at a headline online and assume it must be true. People look at an internet meme negatively associating someone with a crime, and over time, they think it must be true. We are not the most logical creatures we think we are, we are prone to errors of judgement all the time. Information bias, confirmation bias, belief bias, ambiguity bias, conjunction fallacy and more are known pitfalls of our own cognition. These make us an easy prey when we are faced with complex social decision. We favour simple looking options and complete information over complex options and incomplete information – often ignoring truth or facts in the process. Ironically, real world is often full of complex options and incomplete information. Consider Brexit. People were given simple options (In or out), and total but apparently complete mis-information i.e. we go out of EU and we get back £350m a week, we keep single market access, and we are in control of free movement – sounds awesome, right? well except it was not a fact. This red-bus photo or similar ones were distributed and seen millions of times, thanks to social media.

Reality however, turned out far more complex. We have heard ridiculous red, blue or white Brexit, hard-brexit, a “deep and special” partnership, god knows what this all means in future but people voted nonetheless!

 

 

 

3. There is no silver bullet to address the root cause, however we can make a good start with a transparency movement, and a sufficiently strong industry response to this phenomenon

With billions of people X times the content, it is literally impossible to police everything. I have seen algorithms and AI tasked with identifying “bad” stuff, but it is also well known that algorithms are probably even more biased than human beings and are prone to manipulation. Perhaps, a good start would be to start with a transparency movement – Google has made a good start by including a fact checker on some of its content.

At least it will act as a warning sign to not take information at the face value – others should follow suit. In fact, I believe with Google and Facebook pretty much controlling most of the products in question, there should be a strong industry response translating in explicit features such as the one describe above, online ads reminding people, awareness campaigns and TV commercials.

 

Ultimately though, we do not believe everything a stranger tells us in the real world, we use discretion. Why should the virtual world be an exception?!

Thanks for reading, please let me know what you think in the comments section.

The rumour is true. When was the last time you got really excited watching a smartphone launch? I bet it was a long time ago. Even the once highly sought after leaks are all too lacklustre these days. I love to be on Twitter during a major launch event and watch some really funny mock-tweets. It has got to a point where people don’t even know the difference. They just love Apple and buy! see one of the Jimmy Kimmel creations below!

In all seriousness though, we all know that smartphones have transformed the world. Growth in smartphone base, number of apps, and the amount time people spend on the apps is just staggering. This is true despite seeming lack of innovation. I highly recommend reading this blog post. It highlights that Apple & Google are now unassailable until the next S curve is here. AR, VR, AI, voice and chatbot may all turn out to be a thing, but that may not affect the S Curve of the Smartphone. In fact, as the unit growth in smartphone continues, Apple and Google will focus more on improving software, experience and the ecosystem. The massively increased share of revenue via app stores, is certainly a leading indicator of this shift. The reason I say the slow innovation is a good thing is because I believe it is an opportunity for Enterprises. They can focus now more than ever to catch-up on the incredibly challenging task of gaining, keeping and transacting with customers on Mobile. In fact, I strongly believe that many enterprises need to re-think their very perspectives on this.

We need to stop thinking of Mobile as “an interface” and think of it as “the interface” and invest sufficiently, where it matters

Imagine, a fictitious sandwich company that wants to leverage mobile. Sounds like a great idea. You can build an app to enable ordering, delivery, streamline payments, click-to-buy and a host of other things. Alright, assume you have a great app and a fantastic user experience but think about it for a second. How many of us will care to download the Sandwich company app, and even if we did, how many will use it or keep it without deleting? With almost zero footprint of user’s attention, it is incredibly hard.  Even more so for a sandwich company! Business, technology and operational complexity even in a sandwich business is significant, and it would be foolish to suggest that there is one strategy. However I believe, as enterprises strive to leverage mobile they need to consider the following 3 key dimensions. Attention, interaction and transaction. If we consider economics of an app based commerce, we can assume for most businesses it means lower costs, increased margins and potentially great 1-1 customer experience. This is very foundation of e-commerce, so nothing new here; but apart from having a great product, I believe we need to incentivise customers along these dimensions.

Attention

Unless you are Snapchat and you can make a rainbow jump out of people’s mouth, there needs to be a compelling incentive for customers to even notice your app. Some offers are simply not good enough – for instance “a chance to win X” or “a chance to win trip to Y”. We can do better! something tangible, of real benefit to the customer.
Best fulfilled in context and instantly. For the sandwich company for example – 40% off your first purchase, or £5 credit on first usage. Nothing new here, most mobile native start-ups do this, so I wouldn’t dwell on it too much.

Interaction

How many times a day do you expect people to open the sandwich app? In order to continue to occupy people’s mind-space, we need to incentivise the customer regularly for visiting the app. I understand that this is easier said than done. Obviously some app categories don’t need this kind of interaction incentive. For instance, great content e.g. Netflix, ultimate productivity e.g. Dropbox, Social e.g. Instagram, to name a few.  So, interaction incentive is when you give something to the user for coming back to the app. Some games do this really well – every time you stop playing but come back to the game after some time, you get free virtual coins. Depending on the nature of business you can decide the frequency of your incentive. For instance, the sandwich company could do one of their best deals exclusively for app users every 2 weeks. Obviously all needs to make commercial sense – generally though customer retention cost is less than acquisition cost and there can always be limited number of deals. Oh and there is word-of-mouth! invite a friend and both get credit. Remember Uber? Virulence is an important feature that needs to be built in to the app. It is expensive though! You could build social invites too. We all hate random invitations on Facebook, something to keep in mind!

 

Transaction

This is the holy grail. Assume that customer downloads the app, interacts with it regularly to redeem your generous incentives. How do you ensure they transact? Well firstly, the sandwich better be good, the ordering, payment, click-to-collect all needs to “just work”. That often is not enough, we still need to incentivise. You might think we’d be out of business after giving so much away in offers. However, with added volume of transactions, you will realise that it almost always makes commercial sense. Otherwise Starbucks wouldn’t do it – collecting stars on the app whilst having the ability to cut the queue is simply fantastic. So, how about an app exclusive loyalty program for our sandwich company? There can be a mix of options – coupons, points, virtual currency, or simply cashback. It is needless to say that apart from offering direct incentives, your app can just create magic through experience that cuts the time and effort it takes for customers to transact or reduces anxiety associated with the transaction. Invisible payments (Uber), cutting the queue (Starbucks), live waiting times (Citymapper), real time tracking (Dominos) are all fantastic examples.

To sum up, I believe that whilst its not necessary to pester the users with deals & offers enterprises must make explicit effort to address the attention, interaction and transaction barriers when they think about their adoption and engagement strategy. While we hit the maturity curve of smartphone product lifecycle, it is now more important than ever for enterprises to catch-up.

A small disclaimer – I realise any generalising is dangerous & this may or may not apply for everyone. Thanks a lot for reading, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments section.