Friday, September 7, 2018

Sapiens - where are we heading?

Interview with Noah Harari on his book Sapiens

Interview with Noah Harari on his book Homo Deus

Learning how to reengineer our bodies and minds - could result an end of humanity. When the datacentre understands you more than you know yourself - you become useless

Steve Cutt’s on Sapiens and impact on the Planet

Are you lost in the World - Steve Cutts

Our History in 2 minutes

Thursday, September 6, 2018

Yuval Boah Harari on AI, Cars , Doctors , Jobs and Cyborgs

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/why-the-rise-of-ai-makes-mental-resilience-so-important/

I came across an interesting CBS newsclip (link above) of an interview with Yuval Noah Harari - author of Sapiens , Homo Deus and now 21 lessons for the 21st century.

Some of my takeouts. - would be interested in yours ....

Will AI become the dominant force on earth controlled by a few humans or cyborgs?

Politics has moved from Land to Machines to Data !

The powerful will be those who control the data!

Up to now , life matter as we know it has been made of organic compounds and organic biochemistry - from Giraffes, tomatoes, plant animals and humans.

We are now entering the realm of replacing natural selection with intelligent design.

Organic to inorganic life forms - cyborgs - will this enable us to explore the galaxy (ps whose us?)

Is AI going to create “The useless class of Sapiens?
Will humans stay relevant? What will they do?

They will Not only be unemployed - but unemployable

Not only will drivers of vehicles be replaced by more efficient AI - but doctors by IBM Watson!!

Will AI augment and improve doctors as opposed to replace them?

It is clear that the onset of AI will change the nature of jobs as we know it. AI will not be a Big Bang but a gradual evolution of byte size innovations that will eventually disrupt and replace jobs as we know them today

Some questions

Jobs - can people retrain and reinvent - and do it again and again and again ? They say a millennial's today will have 14 jobs in their lifetime - at least

Have we got the tools to teach emotional intelligence at schools?

Do we need to have a new paradigm to learn how to learn - knowledge dumps is not the go .

What should we be teaching?

Wednesday, September 5, 2018

Preparing for artificial intelligence, or the fourth wave of industrialisation

Posted 7 hours ago in Tech

by Dina Veljanovska

https://www.xero.com/blog/2018/09/artificial-intelligence-fourth-wave-industrialisation/

It’s Day 1 of Xerocon, and the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre is buzzing with excited accountants and bookkeepers as they explore what’s on offer.

Anthropology professor and futurist Genevieve Bell, known for her work at the intersection of culture and technology development, took the stage today and shared with us her vision of how artificial intelligence, or AI, will shape our lives.

“AI is nothing more and nothing less than the steam engine of the 21st century,” said Professor Bell. “Steam engines were originally used to power mining operations. But over the next 100 years, they changed the ways we live in ways far beyond the mines – enabling us to build railway systems.”

We are now on the cusp of a fourth wave of industrialisation, says Professor Bell.

The first wave, in the 1800s, was about mechanisation using steam power.

The second wave was about the electrification of mass production, which gave us the assembly line in the 1900s and electricity in the home.

The third wave, starting in 1946, was about computers.

Now, we are entering an era of cyber-physical systems – drones, robots and self-driving cars powered by artificial intelligence. They will change how we live in ways we can’t anticipate today, just as no one envisioned the railways and automated factories that would spring from the first steam engines, said Professor Bell.

As we enter this age, we need to consider five issues about AI:

The question of autonomy

Are these machines really going to be autonomous? And if so, what do we mean by that? Are they really running around with complete free will?
To make a machine autonomous you need AI technology.

The nature of agency

What are the rules? Someone is going to have to determine what those rules are. Someone has to decide how many rules there are and what rules this system should follow.

The challenge of assurance

Trust, reliability, security, ethics, management. How do you know they are safe? Who gets to decide what the threshold is for risk? Who is determining whether the system works?

The necessity for metrics

How will we measure these systems? Is it safety? Is it about collecting better data? Some of these technologies need to be thought of in terms of how much energy they consume. Who gets to decide what the metric should be?

The possibility of relationships

You do not want a world where you have to learn how to engage with the autonomous vehicles. Do we want to talk to those systems, or will they learn to talk to us?

“I didn’t want the future to be built just by engineers,” said Professor Bell. “So as an anthropologist, I’ve spent 20 years in Silicon Valley looking for answers. How do you put people first in the business of making technology – what people care about, what frustrates people – and build technology with that in mind?”

We will increasingly grapple with these questions over the next few years.

“Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week, but two years from now, three years from now — this will be our world,” says Professor Bell. “How do we manage these cyber-physical systems? These will be the questions that propel our businesses.”

You can follow the work of Professor Bell at the Autonomy, Agency and Assurance (3A) Institute, which is building a new applied science around the management of artificial intelligence, data, technology and their impact on humanity.

Tuesday, September 4, 2018

A Look at the World’s Largest Smart Cities

Source :- https://techspective-net.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/techspective.net/2018/09/04/a-look-at-the-worlds-largest-smart-cities/amp/

A smart city is the ultimate in efficiency. Data and technology are used to boost economic development, improve the quality of life for those living in the city, and improve sustainability. The UK Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills (BIS) defines this as, “A process rather than a static outcome,” so by this definition, smart cities are continually in a state of flux.

In terms of data, smart cities make use of interconnected information technology to aid operational control. These systems are scalable, so they are being continually improved. For the people who live in smart cities, it’s a great place to be. They are clean, modern, with excellent, more efficient transport links and internet connectivity.

Spending on smart city data technology is expected to reach $80 billion this year, and $135 billion by 2021. The US is expected to spend the most on smart city technology, with spending forecast to reach $22 billion, but China is not far behind, with a $21 billion shopping list.

Singapore

Singapore is one of the world’s largest smart cities. It’s also one of the world’s leading financial centres, which is handy if you want to learn how to trade forex. Singapore aims to become the world’s first smart state, and it’s working hard to make that happen. The city is managed incredibly efficiently, with smart waste disposal systems, efficient lighting, and smart sensors all over the city that monitor everything from elderly relatives in care homes to car parking.

London

London is an aging city, but it’s using smart technology to bring its ailing infrastructure into the 21-st century. Electric bike sharing, also known as Boris Bikes, as well as smart parking spaces, make traversing the city’s congested roads a lot easier. There are also plans in place to turn the River Thames into a renewable energy source. Innovative measures like this will ensure London remains one of the world’s top smart cities.

Oslo

Oslo in Norway has long been committed to cleaner living, which is why it is one of the world’s top smart cities. Oslo’s lights are powered by 65k smart LED bulbs and there are plans in place to add an additional 37 miles to the city’s bicycle lanes. Waste is reused as fuel, so the city is fairly unique in that it has zero waste. By 2030, Oslo aims to be climate neutral.

San Francisco

800k people call San Francisco their home, which means it is plagued by congestion, just like many other large cities. Smart technology is helping to make the lives of San Francisco’s citizens much easier. If they want to use the city’s transport system, they can use smart technology to pay for fares. The city has also invested heavily in clean energy initiatives, with all new buildings now required to have 15 percent of roof space devoted to solar panels.

It’s clear that these innovative smart initiatives are for the greater good, but with smart cities currently consuming 70 percent of the world’s energy, city leaders must balance the need for greater technology whilst paying close attention to the environmental impact of such technology

Saturday, September 1, 2018

Kpi’s - what you can measure you can manage

How often have you heard Peter Drucker’s quote “what you can measure you can manage”?

As companies experience rapid growth, a common question is “What should we measure?”

Here are some:-

• do you know the number of new website visitors you received in the last 30 days? (Leads)

• do you know what percentage of them turned into new paying customers? (Conversions)

• do you know how the level of satisfaction among your customers has fluctuated over time? (Retention)

• do you know the precise average lifetime value of your customers? (The long tail)

• do you know the average price per transaction ?

Retention)

• do you know the number of times your customer will tans act with you during theyear?

• do you know how much it can Syd you to run your business each month

• do you know your margins

There are many questions such as these that measure each aspect of your business.

And if you don't know the answers, if you can't measure them, then you can't possibly manage or improve them.

Many leaders are finding that they have more information than ever at their fingertips—but this can create confusion, too. What good is having access to data that you can’t use.

The best practice is to identify a handful of key metrics—or KPIs—that will help you measure the health of your business.

We’ve found that measuring a handful of KPIs in each of these four categories can help you keep a pulse on the overall health of your enterprise: Employees, Customers, Revenue and Process.

Here’s a list of examples of the types of KPIs you might measure in each category if you are in the service industry:

Employees

1 Utilization rate

2 Attrition/retention

3 Employee satisfaction score

4 Employee engagement score

5 Employee health index

6 Performance (specific desired result by role)

7 Number of open positions

8 Time to fill positions

9 Number of managers on virtual bench

10 Training hours

Revenue

1 EBITDA

2 Profit margin

3 Year-over-year revenue growth

4 Cash conversion cycle

5 Cost of acquiring a customer

6 Cost of service delivery

7 Revenue/employee

8 Revenue/customer

9 Revenue/product line or service delivered

10 Actual v. budget

Customers

1 NPS or satisfaction score

2 Retention

3 Amount ($) of up-sell opportunities

4 Service renewal rate

5 Customer lifetime value

6 Number of customer complaints

7 Number of open support tickets

8 Percentage of customer requests

9 completed in X time

10 Number of customer testimonials

11 Number of referrals

Processes

1 Project profitability

2 On time product/service delivery

3 Scheduled downtime

4 Unscheduled downtime

5 Number of defects

6 Percentage of bugs detected in-house

7 Safety incidents

8 Idle time

9 Time to product launch

10 Length of sales cycle

This list is by no means comprehensive, and if you measured everything on this list, you’d be measuring too many things. The trick to setting a valuable KPI for your company is to focus on your specific business model and what you need to know in each category.

Narrow your list to the top 8-12 KPIs during your team's quarterly planning session.

Not sure which KPIs to focus on?

Download https://bsi.skillsoptimiser.com/BusinessHealth/

Looking for more KPI Examples to help get you started? Check out our additional resources:

33 KPI Examples to Measure Productivity & Prevent Organizational Drag

25 KPI Examples for Manufacturing Companies

Employee KPI Examples: How to Measure What You Want to Move (Video)

KPI Examples for Successful Sales Teams

Marketing KPI Examples

10 Best Employee KPI Examples

Sources:- https://www.growthink.com/content/two-most-important-quotes-business

http://connect.rhythmsystems.com/key-performance-indicators-guide