This widely quoted advice from Albert Einstein about never losing curiosity should be taken together with another of his advice about asking the right questions, spending more time to determine the right question to ask because that will point the way towards solutions.
To question is to challenge. To challenge responsibly is to focus on asking the right question, whether of entrenched or even fluid views or opinions. With confidence but in humility.
Whatever I write on is based on subjects I have studied and taught and areas I have worked in. Hopefully, one day, I may resume teaching, through technology.
I have begun with economics & the economy – the subject and the object it studies; information & analytics – so basic and advanced as they play a central role in all walks of life; management & innovation – so decisive in the way resources are used, productively or otherwise. I wish to write on simple and complex themes across the three but hopefully in a manner that will keep you engaged. I will start writing on Accounting and Finance in some time.
I don’t have any specific reader in mind; I have never believed in the idea. All I am asking of you is to be open-minded and respect the efforts that go into sincere questioning.
It is important to be challenged. This is the only way to fight stagnation.
Adverse remarks recently by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India on the RBI being a mere ‘by-stander’ in the matter of Yes Bank, once again brings to the fore the key question – is the model of supervision established in 1994 and modified in 1997 working at all? A connected sensitive question is – what kind of individual should be the Governor of RBI – an economist or someone with a deep understanding of how the banking (and non-banking) systems operate?
The question is this – what is the difference that the Constitution of India makes to the lives of citizens of and people living in India? After 76 years of the Constitution, this may seem a bizarre question, but it is not. It is so easy to fall into an idealized view of a constitution as a basic document holding together people of a country, but the harsh truth is that a constitution can divide a people too. Are we expecting, no demanding, too much from our constitution? Are there limits to what constitutions can do? The misgivings about the constitution have accompanied it almost since its inception. Some of these have been given voices by judgements of learned Judges at both High Courts and the Supreme Court of India, during their tenure and later.
Creating images from verbal or textual prompts has long been done by artists, especially by the police when witnesses describe the physical characteristics of the people they saw committing a crime. Now, AI has turned into a business in short films, for now. This is for the moment the latest in a series of technological changes in the creative industries that began with the synthesizer which replaced many instruments. Orchestras of film music directors in India became obsolete. However, some creative pursuits have not just survived but flourished.
IT firms never had to confront the question of technology, with their worlds largely revolving around application software. Until now. In an era of proliferating software, including apps, the big IT service companies built a huge business out of system integration. Now for the first time they need to confront technology/technologies but their trajectory or trajectories. It is anybody’s guess which path they will traverse.
There are problems that are indifferent to the level of economic advancement of a country. It was at once both a relief and a shock to learn that the problem of skills mismatch troubles not just India but advanced economies as well. However, this ‘common ground’ should not lull us into treating the problem as not deserving of immediate attention.
Building a corporate brand other than based on a family name is a different challenge. We have seen in India over the last 2-3 decades the emergence of successful corporate brands built out of a single business with a product/business brand that does not mention a family name. Some of them rose above their origins by reducing themselves to a set of alphabets. Slippery and nebulous and constantly reminding you of the six visually impaired men and an elephant, brands are an alluring field of exploration, especially corporate brands.
Model development was always a challenge in any subject but is more so in an area where abstraction is the foundational attribute: AI. I have written earlier also that abstraction is the first step to building great software and especially in AI, because AI works on abstraction, which depends on mathematics of the highest level. Most people will say data but what they forget is that the model needs data and vast amounts of it, precisely because it has to abstract from it so as to work effectively whatever be the data. The model abstracts from the data so that it can work on any data! This is the crux of any model.
RLHF – reinforcement learning through human feedback. This fanciful and seemingly innocuous phrase used in GenAI to moderate the output it generates hides a dark truth. GenAI needs content-moderation on a massive scale, because its inputs are the ‘vast corpus of humanity’, making it impossible to control. Some writers glibly talk about how such moderation, practised through the use of third parties, bring about ‘ethically aligned’ output, completely ignorant, wilfully or otherwise, of a vast environment of clearly unethical practices. We owe this revelation to an old institution: good journalism.
A superior technology such as AI cannot wash away the sins of poor implementation which inevitably results in poor data quality and as source data to AI. Will this poor quality of data not escalate problems with the embedding of AI in an ERP software? Analytics, the darling of consultants for over a decade, could well become an unmitigated disaster. It is firmly established that poor data quality alone remains one of the principal causes of failures in the efficient use of AI systems. Interestingly, the database as the OS, an idea articulated by Professor Michael Stonebraker, could be the opening to a new way of looking
The holding company structure has for years been an immensely attractive option as a control strategy in building a Business Group with varied businesses under its belt. A pure holding company’s legal character was not a problem until regulation decided otherwise. While this probably forces a Hobson’s choice on such a holding company structure, the alternative of an using an operating company as a holding company, long an established reality in India, will see ‘renewed’ growth.
Neither panic nor euphoria is an answer to technological changes but simple understanding of its implications, its ramifications, both in breadth and depth. Neither gaping in awe nor recoiling in fear is a sensible response. Since, despite all the hype, it is reasonably clear that AI is here to stay, wisdom lies in drawing out opportunities for various businesses. Incidentally, this holds important lessons for education too.
Whether you are a manager, investor, policy maker, or analyst some hue or the other, scenario analyses is part of your job portfolio. Analyses not just analysis, because the world is open to multiple interpretations, some credible, some beguiling. Since ‘analysing data’ has become easier and faster with some AI agent, as even Excel too will be embedded with AI, the job of all these professionals has more to do with building scenarios. How AI can assist you is really a function of the breadth of your thinking.
