Book: In the Age of AI, 'What Does it Mean to be Smart?'

 Here an intro to McKinsey's 'Author Talks', which interviews Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic on his new book on AI and Automation.   Plan to Read it. 

Author Talks: In the ‘age of AI,’ what does it mean to be smart?

March 16, 2023 | Interview

As artificial intelligence gets better at predicting human behavior, a business psychologist encourages people to strengthen the uniquely human skills that machine learning has yet to tap.

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Raju Narisetti chats with Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic about his new book, I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique (Harvard Business Review Press, February 2023). Chamorro-Premuzic explains why some AI algorithms model humanity as a simple species, how attention has become commoditized, and why the right questions are now more valuable than the right answers. An edited version of the conversation follows.

Why did you write this, your 12th book, now?

I’m a professor of business psychology at Columbia University and UCL [University College London] and the chief innovation officer at ManpowerGroup. I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique is a book about the behavioral consequences or impact of artificial intelligence, including the dark side of human behavior and what we should do to upgrade ourselves as a species.

The book is written at a time that, in my view, could only be described as the AI age. Humans have always relied on technological inventiveness and innovation to shape their cultural and social evolution, and I think there can be very little doubt that the definitive technology of today is artificial intelligence, or AI.

Now, even the wider public is talking about things like ChatGPT and other conversational interfaces, and the tech giants are described mostly as data companies and as algorithmic prediction businesses.

The book was very much written in the midst of the AI age, or under the influence of AI, because I wrote the bulk of this at the height of the pandemic when we had very little physical interaction or contact with other people outside of our nuclear families. This means I was heavily influenced by hyperconnectedness and the datafication of me. Everything I did was being datafied and subjected to the predictive powers of AI during 2020 and 2021.

I can’t say that there won’t be a better era to read the book, but it certainly wouldn’t have had the same connotation and impact if we had published it five or ten years ago.

Haven’t humans always blamed technology for every problem they face?

There is a common tendency for people to overreact to things that are novel, whether in a good way or in a bad way, and technologies are a very good example of this.

Perhaps the best example is how, when the written newspaper first scaled up and productized, people feared that humans would never meet in person ever again because there would be no information or even gossip to exchange if all the news was in written form. Also, from the 1950s onward, people showed concern that television would lead to less intellectual activities, but I don’t think they were wrong because reading habits went down since mass TV was introduced.

What I tried to do with this book is not be at one extreme or the other. What’s important to me is to not miss the opportunity to highlight the behavioral impact and consequences that we have already seen artificial intelligence have on us. This is not a book about AI, but about humans in the AI age.  .. .. ' 

Columbia Business School Digital Future Initiative

 Columbia's  Digital Future Initiative

“Digital technology has and will continue to transform our lives and CBS has a role in both advancing research and educating the next generation of leaders to succeed in and shape the digital economy.” -

Costis Maglaras, Dean, Columbia Business School    Digital Future Initiative

Digital Future Initiative Labs

The Digital Future Initiative focuses Columbia Business School’s world-class research and teaching on how technology is altering all industries and the fabric of daily life.

The initiative brings together hundreds of faculty members from Columbia Business School and Columbia University with corporate leaders from across industries to help organizations, governments, and communities optimize and accelerate the technological advances of the future.

Labs

To deliver critical insights on the digital transformation of business and society, the Digital Future Initiative will initially launch four labs, each devoted to a specific area of study.  ... ' 

Now we are Cooking with Lasers

 A long time amateur chef

Now We're Cooking With Lasers   By Columbia Engineering, September 20, 2021

Researchers at Columbia Engineering have digitized food creation and cooking processes, using 3D printing technology to tailor food shape and texture and lasers of various wavelengths to cook it.

"Precision Cooking for Printed Foods via Multiwavelength Lasers,"    Science of Food, explores various modalities of cooking. The researchers printed chicken samples as a test bed and assessed a range of parameters. They found that blue lasers (445 nm) are best for penetrative cooking, and infrared lasers (980 nm and 10.6 μm) best for browning. Laser-cooked meat shrinks 50% less and retains double the moisture as meat cooked in conventional ovens.

"Our two blind taste-testers preferred laser-cooked meat to the conventionally cooked samples, which shows promise for this burgeoning technology," says Jonathan Blutinger, a Ph.D. student in the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University.

 "What we still don't have is what we call 'Food CAD,' sort of the Photoshop of food," says Professor Hod Lipson, lead author of the study. "We need a high level software that enables people who are not programmers or software developers to design the foods they want. And then we need a place where people can share digital recipes, like we share music."

From Columbia Engineering   View Full Article

Hacker Resistant Cloud Software

From a former employer of mine.   Don't understand the details as yet.  See that it is to be presented shortly.   A proof?  See also the paper mentioned below for additional details. 

Columbia Team Builds Hacker-Resistant Cloud Software System   By Columbia University

Columbia University researchers have developed a system that guarantees — through a mathematical proof — the security of virtual machines in the cloud.

They discuss the system in "A Secure and Formally Verified Linux KVM Hypervisor,"   to be presented at the 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy on Wednesday (May 26).

"This is the first time that a real-world multiprocessor software system has been shown to be mathematically correct and secure," says Jason Nieh, professor of computer science at Columbia. "This means that users' data are correctly managed by software running in the cloud and are safe from security bugs and hackers."

The work is the first to verify the widely-used KVM hypervisor, which is used to run virtual machines by cloud providers. "We've shown that our system can protect and secure private data and computing uploaded to the cloud with mathematical guarantees," says Xupeng Li, a Ph.D. student and co-lead author of the paper.

From Columbia University 

Deep Learning Likes Sound Files

Quite interesting results about the nature of data for training.  

Deep Learning Networks Prefer the Human Voice   By Columbia University,  April 8, 2021

Neural network image classification systems might reach higher levels of performance if they are programmed with sound files of human language rather than with numerical label representations of photos, according to a study by Professor Hod Lipson and researchers at Columbia University.

The researchers discovered in a side-by-side comparison that a neural network whose "training labels" consisted of sound files reached higher levels of performance in identifying objects in images, compared to another network that had been programmed in a more traditional manner using binary inputs.

"Our findings run directly counter to how many experts have been trained to think about computers and numbers," says researcher Boyuan Chen.

The team describes its work in "Beyond Categorical Label Representations for Image Classification," to be presented in May at ICLR 2021, the Ninth International Conference on Learning Representations.

From Columbia University

Blockchain Impact on Securities

Worth following.

Understanding Blockchain Technology’s Impact on the Securities Markets

A team of legal and business researchers from Columbia has been awarded a grant to study how blockchain technology is affecting the security markets.

The grant, from the Columbia-IBM Center for Blockchain and Data Transparency, will allow the researchers to design and conduct a survey of securities-market stakeholders such as regulators, academics, policymakers, securities employees and journalists. The survey will allow for a deeper understanding of how blockchain technologies and digital ledgers are likely to affect the markets and how their potential should shape future regulation.  Once the survey is done, the researchers will outline their findings in a white paper and present their results in a conference at Columbia. The researchers are affiliated with The Program in the Law and Economics of Capital Markets, a joint program of Columbia Law School and Columbia Business School.

Merritt B. Fox, Michael E. Patterson Professor of Law at Columbia Law School who is leading the legal aspects of the project, said there is a vast amount of potential in blockchain but also many pitfalls. Each of the various stakeholders to be interviewed for the survey has a unique perspective on these issues and it’s important to learn the learn these perspectives in order to design regulation that best advances the interests of society.

“The area is bursting with innovation and experimentation and we look forward to learning more about these,” said Fox. “Facilitating clearing and settlement, reducing the role of intermediaries, increasing global access to data, and furthering empirically-driven policymaking are just a few examples of areas we’ll look at.”

Juliette Fisbein, Director of Strategy and Operations for the Columbia University-IBM Center for Blockchain and Data Transparency, said the center awards grants to cutting-edge research in the area of blockchain and data transparency technologies, with this project being a good example of such research. Formed in the summer of 2018, the center is devoted to research, education, and innovation in blockchain technology and data transparency. The Data Science Instituteand Columbia Engineering are partnering with the center, which also works in tandem with Columbia’s Business School, the Law School, the School of International and Public Affairs as well as Columbia Technology Ventures.

“The center is pleased to fund multidisciplinary research allowing to combine the complementary perspectives of lawyers and economists,” Fisbein said, “and will continue to seek multidimensional expertise to study blockchain technology and its potential throughout 2020 and beyond. Additional calls for research grant proposals will be announced this fall.”

In this Q&A, Fox discusses how the researchers will seek to gain a broader understanding of the role that blockchain technology may play in the securities markets. .... 

Regulations Needed for Digital Ledgers

Regulations for Blockchain systems and contracts

Columbia DataScience (@DSI_Columbia)

How is blockchain technology affecting the securities market and what regulations are needed to govern digital ledgers? This Q&A with a Columbia law professor explains it: bit.ly/2KXa5wR

@CUSEAS  @Columbia_BIZ  @ColumbiaLaw  .... 

Augmented Reality Glasses to Transform Vision

The emphasis on vision correction in context is interesting.

DARPA Awards $4.7 Million Grant to Transform Augmented-Reality Glasses 
Military Embedded Systems   By Lisa Daigle

Researchers at Columbia University, Stanford University, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have won a $4.7-million U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency grant to develop a lightweight glass that dynamically monitors the wearer's vision and displays vision-corrected contextual images. The goal is to create an ultra-high-resolution, see-through, head-mounted display with a large field of view and significantly reduced size, weight, and power consumption. The device also will be correct the user's vision deficiencies in real time and project aberration-corrected visible contextual information onto the retina. The augmented reality glass relies on the ultrafast generation of arbitrary wavefronts, both in visible and near-infrared wavelengths. The researchers will develop a scalable fabrication process based on standard complementary metal-oxide semiconductor techniques, and well-established procedures to integrate the new materials into the silicon nitride-integrated photonics platform. The team will develop analytical and computational tools for modeling large resonator arrays and dynamics of device performance.... " 

Software can Identify People from DNA

This software can Identify People from their DNA in minutes  via the Hindu Times

“We’re especially excited about the potential to improve cell authentication in cancer research and potentially speed up the discovery of new treatments,” he said.

Researchers have developed a software system to accurately identify people and cell lines from their DNA in a matter of minutes.

The technology has a wide range of applications, but its most immediate use could be to flag mislabelled or contaminated cell lines in cancer experiments, according to the study published in the journal eLife. “Our method opens up new ways to use off-the-shelf technology to benefit society,” said Yaniv Erlich, from the Columbia University in the U.S. .... " 

Original source and technical details, via Columbia University.

Fewer Assistants in China

Attended a meeting this week at Columbia featuring proposed uses of virtual assistants,  excellent ideas, many by Chinese students.  Impressive.   So I see some evidence to the contrary.

This Is Why China Hasn't Jumped on the Smart Speaker Bandwagon   in Bloomberg 

- Two million units seen shipping versus 35 million in U.S.
- Mobile devices seen as key way to deliver AI-based services ... "

Intel has its Ginger Assistant

Somewhat belatedly brought up, but Intel reported buying Ginger in 2014.   No reports of what has been done with it, but it was mentioned in a Intel sponsored Columbia meeting today.   Following up.

Intel Pays Up To $30M For A Personal Assistant Platform From Ginger Software   Posted May 9, 2014 by Ingrid Lunden

Apple has Siri, and now Intel has Ginger. The chipmaker has made one more acquisition to bolster its advanced computing and artificial intelligence holdings: it has purchased selected assets, and hired talent, from Israel’s Ginger Software in the area of natural language processing tools and applications. Those assets include a platform for third parties to create customised personal assistants, for a price believed to be up to $30 million.

Ginger Software, backed by investors like Li Ka-Shing’s Horizons Ventures, will continue to operate as an independent business focusing on its remaining business: intelligent grammar and spell checking software. This is not the only change afoot at Ginger: the company recently saw its chairperson, Soffer Teeni, leave to head up Facebook Israel.  .... " 

Charting Change

Last year taught a course at Columbia on change management.  To my students who are still following, here is a nice piece out of Innovation Excellence on charting change.  Some very useful points included.

Digital Pillars of Change

I taught a class at Columbia University on making change happen ....  This is a digital view:

Evolve Or Die: Why Digital Transformation Is More Important Than Ever  by Mike Bainbridge  

Digital transformation: The four pillars of change:
"Why is digital transformation so important and topical? Quite simply, if your organisation is not modernising then you'll be left behind, and the threat of disruption becomes very real." Here's a clear-eyed look at four pillars of change: customer experience, product digitization, employee engagement, and process optimization. .... "

Idea Networking

Simple thought.  Via Columbia B School.

Get Ahead with "Idea Networking"

When opportunity takes too long to arrive, it's time to go out and find it. ...  by William Duggan

Excerpted from The Seventh Sense by William Duggan. Copyright (c) 2015 William Duggan.  ...

Standardizing Predictive Influence Measures

Determining influence is a very frequent need for analytics in business.  It can often guide us towards data collection.   It is often a prelude to further analysis.  Always thought it would be useful to have a more standard way of measuring this.   Now the I-Score.  Reading the paper and plan to follow.

In PhysOrg News:  Researchers at Princeton, Columbia and Harvard have created a new method to analyze big data that better predicts outcomes in health care, politics and other fields.

The study appears this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  (Abstract of technical paper) 

In previous studies, the researchers showed that significant variables might not be predictive and that good predictors might not appear statistically significant. This posed an important question: how can we find highly predictive variables if not through a guideline of statistical significance? Common approaches to prediction include using a significance-based criterion for evaluating variables to use in models and evaluating variables and models simultaneously for prediction using cross-validation or independent test data.

In an effort to reduce the error rate with those methods, the researchers proposed a new measure called the influence score, or I-score, to better measure a variable's ability to predict. They found that the I-score is effective in differentiating between noisy and predictive variables in big data and can significantly improve the prediction rate. For example, the I-score improved the prediction rate in breast cancer data from 70 percent to 92 percent. The I-score can be applied in a variety of fields, including terrorism, civil war, elections and financial markets.  ... " 

Technological Change: Harvey Nash Tech Report

To register for the entire report.    Fascinating piece by a participant.  Links to my recent Columbia course on managing change, this is part of that change.

Almost half of tech professionals expect their job to be automated within ten years – Harvey Nash

Technology Survey 2017
Technology is 'eating itself' / Continual skills development key to career success
Forty five per cent of technology professionals believe a significant part of their job will be automated within ten years, rendering their current skills redundant.

The change in technology is so rapid that 94% believe their career would be severely limited if they didn’t teach themselves new technical skills.

This is according to the Harvey Nash Technology Survey 2017, representing the views of more than 3,200 technology professionals from 84 countries.

The chance of automation varies greatly with job role, with Testers and IT Operations professionals most likely to expect their job role to be significantly affected in the next decade (67 per cent and 63 per cent respectively), and CIO/VP IT and Programme Management least affected (31 per cent and 30 per cent respectively).

Business Process for Analytics Modeling

I Posted in the Wiki for my Columbia Class:

Business Process Modeling ... Franz Dill

I have often mentioned business process modeling (BPM) in my case study comments.  It is often useful to understand how the business works. .  It lets you understand how the parts you want to improve connect, and where to insert the analytics or intelligence needed.  Its also a good way to communicate your plans to management.   It can also be used as a means to simulate solutions.   There are formal ways to do BPM, with specific computer packages, or informal using concept maps to sketch out the process.  I always use process mapping before doing a project.  In the enterprise we cataloged analytics systems via their process models.

More in my posts on business process mapping (BPM).

A Learning Analytical Organization

I wrote for my Columbia Course:

A Learning organization is one of the fundamental lessons of this course. Our world is changing quickly, so our methods and implementations must adapt.  Business focus, competition, business process, finance, technology, risk and likely rewards are all rapidly evolving.  So our implementations, and how they are integrated must change as well.

That learning can make our methods more efficient to implement, and produce more value. A learning organization adapts to all parts of its environment. That learning can come from academia, publications, consulting, and online resources. 

And also importantly from continually retesting our proposed analytical methods, to make sure they continue to be correct under change. 

A learning analytics organization also learns from previous projects. that can only happen if they have been well documented, cataloged and made readily available to colleagues. .... 

Sports Analytics not Always a Slam Dunk

In our Columbia course we have been using sports analytics as a disruptive example of the analytics technology.  Movies like 'Moneyball' imply it is fail safe, but of course it is not.  For my students and further reference to cautions  This piece addresses some of the issues.

Columbia University Course on Analytics Change

Next week I will be giving a course in Columbia University's School of Professional Studies entitled:   Applied Analytics PS5700 Analytics and Leading Change.    Any comments on what you might like to see emphasized in such a course, let me know.