I was in conversation this week with a senior IT chap from a big, global industrial conglomerate. It's a world away from most of the organisations I've worked for over the years- namby-pamby creative or professional services businesses who wouldn't know one end of a monkey wrench from the other. It's easy to fall into … Continue reading The second wave
Category: innovation
A new week, a new book. This week it's Steven Johnson's Wonderland: How play made the modern world. Johnson's thesis is that much technological innovation attend from the pursuit of happiness and distraction rather than from hard-headed economic need. In one of the early chapters he charts how the work of automata manufacturer Jacques dear … Continue reading The Thinking Duck
At the end of my street is the reasonably busy road that links the suburbs of Teddington and Kingston. At peak times the traffic can pass slowly, sometimes queuing in one or both directions. Even at non-peak times there is a constant flow of cars in both directions. Taking a right turn North out of … Continue reading All in a glance
In conversation yesterday I realised that I've developed an occasional habit of defining alternatives to the Turing Test as ways of understanding quite how far away Artificial Intelligence really is. Here's the compilation... https://twitter.com/ballantine70/status/542986402800365568 An observation that humans are getting quite good at being able to parse complete gibberish that is the result of "AI" autocorrect … Continue reading New Turing Tests
Computers are very good at following rules. It's kind of what they do. If you look at the recent landmark advances in machine intelligence, they are generally in one of two camps: using artificial intelligence to excel in a rules-boundaried domain (playing Chess, Go, Jeopardy, Poker, the markets and so on), or alternatively to use masses … Continue reading Following rules
And so the insurrection is beginning. Last week Japanese insurance Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance announced that it was going to be replacing 34 staff with an artificial intelligence that would be calculating payouts (although, it noted, with human oversight still making final approvals). The technology would improve productivity by 30% and the firm expected to save some … Continue reading The rise of the cost-benefit robots
In January I'm going to be part of a stellar line up of speakers at The Focus Group's Customer Experience Digital Leadership event taking place in London. I'll be exploring some of the themes on Play that are developing out of my work on the book (see the clip below), but I can also highly recommend … Continue reading Digital Customer Experience event
I was pointed yesterday to an article on Harvard Business Review that talked about how machine intelligence was about to change the world. It was interesting enough, although talked a great deal about MI being a "predictive" technology. As I've expressed many times, the human desire for sages of the future is deep and a … Continue reading Plus ça change
Last night I was lucky to be invited to speak to the 360° Club at a hotel overlooking St Paul’s Cathedral. here's roughly what I said… So here is my starting proposition: “You’re less likely to be disrupted if you are in sync with your customers’ view of your value proposition.” I think that most … Continue reading Ripe for disruption
A couple of unrelated conversations in the past week... At the LEF executive forum event last week I heard the London Business School's Rob Goffee speak, and the one abiding memory is how he explored the idea that organisations need to move beyond the idea of employee engagement and motivation if organisations want to be … Continue reading We are all suppliers now…
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