Innovation 4 Jobs - or instead of jobs?

Thanks Dominic Powell from Smart Company 

Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes. Source: Supplied.

The co-founder of one of Australia’s largest and most influential tech companies has fronted a Senate inquiry into the future of work, urging the government to take proactive steps to prepare for automation’s “massive job disruption”.

Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder of software company Atlassian, told a number of Senators at a hearing for the Select Committee on the Future of Work and Workers in Melbourne this morning there are many industries that automation will disrupt in the future but he picked out the rapidly emerging self-driving car sector as an example.

“There’s no doubt this technology will revolutionise the economy and many many people will lose their jobs. Approximately 30% of Australian jobs involve driving, and by 2030 an estimated 800 million jobs lost worldwide due to automation,” Cannon-Brookes told the Committee.

“A study from 2016 put it at 40% of all Australian jobs by 2025.”

Cannon-Brookes believes drivers of today, such as Uber drivers or long-distance truck drivers, will be the “blacksmiths of the 20th century”, their jobs made largely irrelevant by new developments in technology. Despite reluctance to scare people and be “Chicken Little”, Cannon-Brookes was resolute that “there will be massive job disruption”.

“Look at any big technological change, like the steam engine. That came with massive job loss and massive job gain,” he said.

“But the jobs gained were not filled with those who lost the jobs. It’s a very hard part of how technology works.”

Despite the entrepreneur’s alarm-sounding, he underpinned his warning with the message that technology is not a destructive force, and with many new jobs created as old ones are lost, workers would have the opportunity to switch careers given enough warning and support by government.

He told the committee the future was here and disruption is “not science fiction”. The government to act soon rather than fighting or ignoring the impending changes, he said.

Cannon-Brookes also specified that self-driving cars are far from the only area where this disruption could occur, but mentioned his four young children and predicted, “I don’t believe any of them will every learn to drive a car”.

“Tech change has been a constant throughout civilisation, and hindsight is a beautiful thing,” he said.

“I implore you to use it in our favour.”

Amazon will tear apart Aussie retail

Cannon-Brookes also briefly touched on the incoming disruption from retail giant Amazon, which is now more valuable than all bricks-and-mortar retailers in the United States.

The impact of Amazon will soon be felt in “our own backyard”, warned the Atlassian co-founder, and while the disruption will be a boon for consumers, he said the effect on Australian businesses “scares me a lot”.

“If I’m being honest, Amazon is going to tear apart Australian retail as it did in the US. That’s not an uncertain future, it’s an already written past,” Cannon-Brookes said.

Upskilling and supporting local workers essential for Australian economy

During the hour-long discussion, Cannon-Brookes spoke on issues of skilled migration and the problems with Australia’s 457 visa system, grievances he and the wider tech sector have regularly raised in recent years.

An oft-heard line was repeated: “The lack of access to talent is the single biggest factor draining the growth of the tech industry in Australia”.

He mentioned the government’s 457 visa changes had “directly” hurt Atlassian as a company, and are suffocating Australia’s ability to grow as an innovation nation. With this in mind, he proposed three major challenges for the economy to overcome, while addressing the future of work and the growth of the tech sector.

“The first part is upskilling and retraining workers. We need to shift the opinion on education from something we do when we’re young to something we do for our entire life,” he said.

“It’s about how we enable lifelong learning so people can continue to learn new skills and embrace new learning opportunities.”

Cannon-Brookes also implored the government to provide income support for displaced workers other than through “traditional systems”, along with ensuring there was enough post-disruption job creation.

“It’s time to start planning how to overcome the negative impacts of technology disruption. Embracing change is hard and scary, you have to learn from the past and move forward without any fear or rhetoric around robots taking our jobs,” he said.

AI at SCSW was VG while I was at BBG in the offices of BSI - it was VG

Learnings from the AI session at #sxsw - hosted by Loïc Le Meur - at leade.rs Loic just hosted a session at South by Southwest on Artificial Intelligence with fantastic speakers. Adam Cheyer — co-founder of Siri now building “the Siri of Samsung” as his new company got recently acquired Daphne Koller — co-founder of Coursera, McArthur Genius award, Stanford computer science professor Nell Watson — entrepreneur, engineer who wrote two books on philosophy and focusing on machine ethics A few learnings from Loïc from the session Siri doesn’t understand my “frenglish” The highlight for me was definitely when I complained to Adam that Siri never understood my accent and he replied “I never understand your accent either what do you expect”. The entire room laughed (photo). So good. How can we be scared by the creation of a Terminator like AI+robot when we can’t even tell Alexa I have eggplant and parmesan in the fridge give me a recipe? That doesn’t work well yet while Google or YouTube will just return a good recipe of… eggplant parmesan. I also learned that the top two questions asked to Siri according to Adam are 1. will you marry me? 2. do you love me? Humans apparently really need love from machines! The Terminator is a 1,000 years away Adam Cheyer said we might be hundreds of years away, maybe 1,000 years away of any AI exceeding human intelligence. For him there is absolutely no reason to have any fears of an AI Terminator. He said that Elon Musk’s Open AI to work on a “safe AI” with up to $1 billion funding committed is a worthy exercise but the near threat isn’t real. What is human intelligence? How far did we understand our own intelligence, what makes it different to machines? Daphne Koller told us that this was a totally irrelevant question to understand or create artificial intelligence. Point. You do not have to understand human intelligence to create AI. It goes even further for Adam, it is better to NOT teach human intelligence to a machine to design an AI. Google/Deepmind managed to repeatedly defeat the best Go player in the world by letting the machine teach itself how to play without any knowledge of how a human would play. What makes human intelligence different is the capacity to learn from a single experience. A kid burning himself touching a flame for example. A machine needs many repeat experiences to learn, we only need one. The line between reality and AI created fiction blurs There are now videos of Obama that are generated by machines making him say things he did not in a remarkably “real” way. It is so well done that humans cannot figure what’s true or not and it will only accelerate. We should be concerned that fake news will look more real than reality now. Machines also learn from news and social feeds and deliver ultra targeted ads. It is easy to imagine how the story of Russian Facebook ads during the Trump campaign is only a start. We won't tell the difference between what's real and fiction anymore. Loading human values into machines Nell Watson made really interesting points on how we need to teach machines human ethics so that they do not destroy us. I wasn’t convinced how to be honest but then this was a very short panel. I want to understand it better. If a machine learns from the human atrocities it can find on the internet it will be difficult to teach it “human ethics”. We don’t even agree on these ethics ourselves. What are the 8 million americans making a living from driving a car or a truck going to do when they lose their jobs? I got the same answer as always. The agriculture and industrial revolutions also destroyed millions of jobs and we figured it out. Nell added that in the near future she believes that millions of people will just be directly employed by machines. Yes, she believes we will more an more work for machines managing businesses on their own without human management. Are we going to remain the most intelligent specie on the planet in the future? The AI experts all agreed that they would have never thought any of the major AI achievements in the last decade would have happened. They urged us to focus on the positive and the incredible applications starting to show results in biology, agriculture or energy. Curing major diseases with AI and machine learning seems to be the most promising for the future of humanity.

3 phrases that Kill innovation

Here are three phrases that tend to kill innovation in the workplace

1. “BEST PRACTICES”

When it’s time to figure out the next right move or a first action, it’s natural to want to follow best practices, but this can send a signal that challenges should be avoided... “you can’t go wrong with hiring IBM syndrome”

Best  practices are usually two, three, or four years old. They probably aren’t even best practices anymore.”

Using best practices don’t enable you to tie innovative, creative thinking to evolving your work.

While following the blueprints of others can inhibit innovation....  Best practices can also encourage innovation - especially  when they’re inspired by industries other than your own.

 “A hospital in the U.K. had struggled with bringing patients from the surgical unit to ICU,” he says. “Instead of looking at how other hospitals do it, they gained inspiration from a racing pit crew. They dropped their error rate by using another industry as a take-off point. It’s more interesting to take an established idea in a new creative direction.”

2. “RETURN ON INVESTMENT”

Trying to predict a return on investment (ROI) can be smart business, but when it’s tied to innovation, there’s no way of knowing what it will be. “

After 9 months, the founders of Google tried to sell Google to Yahoo for a million dollars. Yahoo ran their numbers and determined the Roo wasn’t there . 

 Neither the founders nor the leading search engine of the time had a clue of Google’s ROI. You can’t bring up ROI when an idea is developing. 

Discussing ROI is a weapon that shuts down innovation,  Ratger look at developing an idea like this/-

 ‘If this fails, what is the cost and are we okay if it doesn’t work out?'”

3. “WHEN I WORKED FOR . . . “

Another way to shut down ideas is trying to tie your past experience when discussing something new. “When I worked for”drives me  insane! 

However, using experience from another firm may encourage ideas and new ways of thinking! 

Otter - Voice recognition and transcription and search for meetings

A very cool app, Otter, that has been cooking for the past 2 years by AISense, has just been released. 

Otter searches everyday conversations like meetings and conversations, making it as easy to search your voice conversations as it is to search your email and texts. 

Essentially, Otter is a voice recorder that offers automatic transcription, Otter is designed to be able to understand and capture long-form conversations that take place between multiple people.

The team 

Otter was built by AISense - a company founded by Sam Liang, the former Google architect who put the blue dot on Google Maps, then later sold his next company, location platform Alohar Mobile to Alibaba.

His team that hails from Google, Facebook, Nuance, Yahoo, as well as Stanford, Duke, MIT and Cambridge, Liang’s new company AISense has been developing the technology underpinning Otter over the past two years.

Liang says building a system like Otter’s wasn’t possible before. 

“Four years ago, there were tremendous advances in deep learning and A.I., and suddenly, the accuracy became much higher. It also requires a lot of CPU power, GPU power, and a lot of storage…these became much more affordable today compared to five or ten years ago,” 

The system, at launch, is not yet perfect, but shows much potential. The AI technology was able to differentiate between speakers as promised, but doesn’t yet catch every word of a conversation. It also misses the exact word at times, too – for example, dropping the “s” off a word like “helps,” and recording it as “help.”

What is cool is the tag cloud at the top of the transcript, where Otter identified words that were used a lot in a conversation. You could click on these words to jump to that part of the transcription.

The company has already licensed its transcription technology to  Zoom, 

Backers

AISense, to date, has raised $13 million in funding, led by Horizons Ventures – a backer of Viv, DeepMind, Siri, Slack, and others. Also participating were Bridgewater Associates, i-Hatch Ventures, MetaLab, Jay Markley, and Boston investors Jim Pallotta and Stu Porter.

Seed investors include Tim Draper through Draper Associates and Draper Dragon; Dave Morin through Slow Ventures; David Cheriton; SV Tech Ventures, Danhua Capital, and 500 Startups.

How Blockchain Technology is Changing the World

Great article by John Hawthorne john@connex.services

February 2, 2018

Since the earliest days of the internet, community and security have been key topics associated with both the growth of the digital age and the difficulty of finding a secure place within it.

A noble, albeit elusive goal, the tech giants of today still struggle with the open concept of the internet, while at the same time trying to guarantee with certain securities. Passwords, queries, and the infamous “I am not a robot” prompts are time tested solutions that keep us safe amongst an ever growing online population.

But do they really?

What if the community was the security? What if transactions done online were efficient, transparent and secure? What if everything you transmitted digitally could be done in this manner? 

Blockchain technology could very well be the answer to those questions. It also has the potential to be so much more.

What is the Blockchain?

At its core, a blockchain is a series of computers or “nodes” that together make up a network, or digital ledger, of transactions. As new transactions – the blocks – are made, the ledger is updated and all nodes instantly possess the new ledger.

Think of it in terms of a database that is being updated and added to by multiple users, who each in turn have access to the latest, most up-to-date version.

The key to the blockchain concept, though, is that the ledger is not stored by a central entity or in a single location. Instead, it is shared and maintained across the multiple nodes that make up the network.

Born of Bitcoin

Initially, blockchain technology was created to manage digital currency transactions made with Bitcoin. As noted above, the ledger of these transactions were not stored in a data center or in a central repository, as, for example, a bank would.

A simple example of this transaction process may go like this:

• I have 50 bitcoins but owe you 25.
• I ping the network of the impending transaction and as my account decreases by 25 yours will increase by the same amount.
• Each node is alerted to the arrangement, validates it through accepted algorithms, and updates their ledger with the transaction.
• Every node that is part of the system now has an updated record of the transaction.

It is important to note that the system does not track the actual balance, but instead catalogs the current transaction along with all prior ones.

With the exchange shown above, a few things become clear. First, unlike the majority of modern day financial exchanges, this transaction is public, and is made through a single, common ledger. 

Second, there is no intermediary or central point of contact. All of the nodes involved confirm the soundness of the transaction before it is added or finalized in the system.

Finally, there is no middleman handling the paperless transaction. Nothing can get lost in translation and a signature page will not be found stuck between the wall and copy machine. The exchange is quick, efficient and public.

A pointed summation comes from Don Tapscott, co-founder and Executive Director at Blockchain Research Institute. He notes, “At its most basic, the blockchain is a global spreadsheet — an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value and importance to humankind.”

He goes on to mention that this includes anything from birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, and degrees or diplomas to medical records or procedures, insurance claims, or even votes. 

Basically, if the information can be communicated via code, it can be communicated via blockchain.

How Safe Is It?

Going deeper into how the blockchain works reveals the machinations of its security apparatus.

Going back to our Bitcoin example, to initiate the transfer of the 25 Bitcoins, I must possess a wallet, which only I have access to and which is where my Bitcoins are housed. That wallet has a private and public key, both of which are encrypted.

The public key is effectively my blockchain address. The private key is what allows me to retrieve my assets, Bitcoin or otherwise. So when I initiate the transfer, the nodes on the network verify my request by decrypting the public key, not the private one.

With no centralized verification system, the blockchain method of broadcasting the transaction across the network of nodes means the proof is, effectively, everywhere.  makes forging or exploiting the data a fool’s errand.

To explain it another way, if I say the sky is blue and you argue it is not, I would be correct as it is common knowledge and universally accepted that the sky is, in fact, blue.

The blockchain, by repeatedly and publically updating the requests, is creating a commonly accepted authenticity of every transaction performed.

The implications of this are profound. Eliminating identity theft, protecting against mass hacks, and guarding sensitive or proprietary data have been difficult challenges to overcome as thieves, and those aiming to do digital harm become more sophisticated and aggressive in their methods.

Several respected business leaders see the very real benefit of this breakthrough approach to digital security.

Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com, has said, when referring to the blockchain and money market security, “With blockchain technology, we can create a version of Wall Street where no one can cheat and where all kinds of mischief cannot even occur.”

Additionally, Jason Kelley, IBM Global Manager for Blockchain Services, points out, “It allows people to exchange value without knowing the identity of each other necessarily, in a secure way on the back end. On the front end, it’s simplicity, transparency and trust. Think of all the cost, time and often waste that happens in the exchange of value – blockchain rids that from the system.”

Blockchains, while maybe not a panacea, can aid in creating safer, more reliable data systems through elimination of singular data vaults and propagating irrefutable public records.   

Real World Applications

As noted, blockchain may have been created to maintain the integrity of Bitcoin transactions, but the application of the concept has endless potential.

We already covered the document management aspect, from certificate to licenses to certain data records. But what else is there? Several start-up groups are exploring ways the blockchain can improve upon or revolutionize current standards and practices. 

One such group is using the blockchain concept for cloud based storage. This enables users to increase their data’s security by eliminating the single storage method of today’s providers. It also allows subscribers to sub out unused space or storage they are not utilizing.

Tech giants and governments alike are also part of the blockchain revolution. Microsoft is actively looking at partnerships with organizations that specialize in the technology. Delaware is the first state in the US to harness its possibilities, hoping to improve efficiencies for companies incorporated within its borders. 

Even retail giant Wal-Mart is looking at potential applications through a partnership with IBM. Together, they hope to improve food safety by monitoring the food life-cycle from beginning to end.

As impressive as that list may be, many believe that only scratches the surface. For some, the blockchain may very well be the next level of the internet.

Abigail Johnson, CEO of Fidelity Investments, said this in 2017, “The internet wasn’t just a more efficient way to send letters – it spawned new industries. Blockchain technology isn’t just a more efficient way to settle securities – it will fundamentally change market structures – and maybe even the architecture of the internet itself.” 

Conclusion

Public transactions. 

Widely verifiable records that are secure and tamper-proof. 

Greater efficiencies and reduction of unnecessary costs or time consuming measures. 

All of these are goals in pursuing a more community driven and less corruptible means of communicating and transacting with each other. Many prior generations have looked for the right balance in achieving these objectives in creating a better, more hospitable society.

And today, much as in the past, we still strive for that utopia. 

Now though, perhaps more than ever before, the future is clouded in uncertainty. No one really knows what the world will truly look like in ten, twenty, fifty years. Unfortunately, this often leads a lot of people to believe it will be fraught with distrust, turmoil and maybe even a bit of madness.

As our world evolves, so do the breakthroughs that help meet those fears head on. And with technologies like the blockchain reconfiguring the way we interact with one another, the future may well be a very bright place.

Disruptive innovation and entrepreneurs

The Bob Pritchard Column 

Disruptive innovation and entrepreneurs go hand in hand. Entrepreneurs are often the ones that develop new products or services that change an entire industry. But before we get into the reasons why that is, it’s important to ensure we’re all talking about the same thing.

 

“Disruptive” has become much like the word “innovation”—both are used so often and to describe so many different ideas that the real meaning often gets lost in translation.

 

 

Disruptive innovation is, “a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors.”

Disruptive innovations are:

• Affordable to a large group of consumers
• Simple to use
• Improved upon and continue to take a larger share of the market

 

Incumbents in the market don’t tend to focus here, instead choosing to modify existing products, concentrate on producing higher-priced products and enhancing the value for current customers.

 

This open space should be good news for entrepreneurs, who can start small in a niche market, and then build the product to appeal to wider and wider groups of people. Startups don’t necessarily need to be intimidated by bigger players either, as established companies are probably not interested in developing these low-margin products and are usually very slow to introduce new initiatives.

 

But, just because an entrepreneur has a potentially disruptive innovation, doesn’t mean instant success (or success at all). It can take a long time for a product to reach a large audience. For example,  it took six years for the smartphone to reach a 50 percent adoption rate in the US.

 

Where might a disruption happen down the road? One scenario is in the electric vehicle (EV) industry. It’s argued that electric vehicles are not disruptive, because, compared to cars today, EVs are not cheaper or simpler to use; nor do they reach new consumers. And more significantly, all the major car companies are developing their own EVs.

 

Certainly, the definition leaves open the possibility that any industry can be disrupted, including education. Higher education could be disrupted by online institutes that are creating cheap (sometimes free) courses that are simple to use, and can potentially reach a large group of students, from all over the world.  Whether these changes will lead to a disruption, only time will tell.

 

To reiterate, a technology may have a significant impact on an industry, but few products are disruptive since they don’t create new industries. When pitching an innovative product, “valuable” or “groundbreaking” might be more appropriate adjectives. Then wait to see if it is disruptive.

 

Looking forward to REFERRON being seen as a disruptive technology!!!!! 

Vodaphone’s 8 tech trends that we expect to see in 2018

Here are eight tech trends that Kellie Gale from Vodaphone suggest that you can expect from 2018 

1. The rise of Machine Learning
2. Increased adoption of cryptocurrencies
3. Prepare to talk to AI chatbots
4. VR introduced in the workplace
5. Longer battery life
6. Foldable smartphones
7. Drones will become more of a reality
8. Demand for more data
 
New research from Deloitte has predicted that this year will see a large amount of growth in the adoption of Machine Learning (ML) in medium and large-sized enterprises. In fact, according to their 2018 Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) report, in 2018 the number of ML pilots and implementations will double. For the uninitiated, Machine Learning is exciting technology that teaches binary logic computers to learn the way we do – by interpreting information around us and learning from successes or failures. This may sound a bit dystopian, but the technology can be extremely useful for personalising products, advertising to customers, and more.

Bitcoin was certainly one of 2017’s favourite buzzwords – just don’t expect the cryptocurrency craze to slow down in 2018. The CEO of Blockchain predicts that this will be the first year that we see banks hold digital currencies as part of their reserves in case they need to react to any market shocks – so we know things are getting serious. Of course, it isn’t just Bitcoin on the rise, other digital currencies like Ethereum, Ripple and Cardano are increasing in popularity. Will you get on board with the blockchain?

Technology will affect every aspect of our lives – and that includes customer service! Customer experience (CX) is becoming more and more important for brands to survive, and companies are starting to get on board with Artificial Intelligence to interact with customers. Gartner predicted that by 2020, 85% of conversations with customers will be with chatbots. Some businesses like Qantas are already using chatbots to help people complete orders or even just engage with their content. According to a LivePerson report, How consumers view bots in customer care, most customers in Australia would still prefer talking to a human, with 57% people preferring to wait on hold for 3 minutes to talk to a human over talking to a bot. However, chatbot technology is getting smarter, and is going to be a way of life very soon – so watch this space.

While we know some people (like the Wallabies) already use VR tech at work, 2018 could be the year that we start seeing it more and more in businesses, according to Deloitte’s Tech Trends 2018 report. Deloitte identifies VR as a key ‘digital reality’ opportunity for organisations, as it could solve a lot of common business problems – like connecting remote teams, improving the employee training process, and even improving focus with virtual reality desktops. It could even be used in the recruitment process. Personally, we’d love to see how VR tech could be used in the workplace, too!

There have been several reports that new technology in the new year will have significantly better battery life. The battery life of some laptops might last a full day (for instance, LG has claimed that its 2018 Gram laptop will last up to 22.5 hours). Innovation continues for smartphone batteries, with some exciting smartphone releases planned for 2018, and technology is improving to charge less frequently, and charge faster.

Microsoft, Apple and Samsung have hinted at plans to release foldable smartphones in the future, with both Apple and Microsoft recently filing patents. Huawei has also recently suggested that they will release a foldable smartphone in 2018. The rumours are flying, so it’s time to wait and see what happens.

At the moment, drones are somewhat of a novelty for most people, however drone expert Elaine Whyte predicts that the drones market will become a ‘mature professional service offering’ in 2018. Potential uses include collecting 3D data for building information modelling, drone delivery, and of course, photography. With this also comes regulation, so it will be interesting to see where this goes in Australia.

As smartphones develop their capability, there’s demand for more data in mobile phone plans, for video streaming, social media and file sharing. 

All this is just the beginning. Every year is full of surprises, and we can’t wait to see what lies in store in 2018!

From - Kelli Gale - Vodaphone Head of Retail Marketing, Brand and Communications