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.
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.
The battle lines in the business in AI are going to get sharper and sharper, with clear divisions between individual users and enterprise customers, with a further division within enterprise customers. While Anthropic is a principally enterprise focused company, OpenAI, Gemini are targeting both individuals and enterprise customers.
We live in a culture which celebrates quantity against quality and is indifferent to origin. The desire for popularity, mass acceptance, career mobility and prestige and the hope of a short public memory forces people to find ‘short cuts’. An entire industry of ‘research papers’ literally opens the path to plagiarism.
There is a continuing debate on ethics and AI. It is probably a premature debate because we have not even succeeded in addressing the serious and sustained problem of the lack of transparency and misuse for personal gain in contemporary information technology, especially as it is used in markets. The number and scale of recent scandals in crypto has put paid to the assumption that technology will usher in transparency. If anything, the contrary appears to be the stronger probability. The misuse of systems, any system, is not a new phenomenon.
Trillions of dollars in business are an alluring prospect in the AI products/platforms space, which will attract billions in investment. Throwing money is not going to fetch results. Just as it happened in the early stages of telecommunications, which was a huge learning for everyone including and especially the companies and governments – because everybody got it wrong – the AI market too will force interested parties to think carefully before plunging. Clinging to entrenched notions could be a path to disaster.
While there is tremendous enthusiasm for the use of AI, the question for makers of AI is when it will begin to fetch profits, which begs another question – when will users be ready in large numbers to pay for the use of AI agents/products?
Land, Energy, Water – sounds like the demand of a people fighting for basics but these are three resources that will dominate public policy discussion in the world as cities vie with one another to attract companies to set up data centres. Sustainability has not been a subject of debate linked to data centres and AI but it should be. Given the intensity of water usage, it is imperative to make appropriate investments in water treatment.
Land might well hold the key to building a business in data centres. While other factors such as connectivity, access to power are of course critical factors, everything starts with land. This means that landowners have emerged (even if they have not realized it) as key players in designing viable business models in the business of data centres. This is true for governments as well as they are among the biggest landowners. The current trend of using land for residential/commercial construction might shift towards data centres.
If the world is dynamic, there will always be a weakening or strengthening of exiting alignments and forging of new alignments. The likely differentiating factor now is that we will see a future where businesses and national governments will work more closely together than ever before. The reason is simple: (ignoring the domestic) governments have defined goals to face and take on the world for which they will need the support of business, who, in turn, will benefit from building businesses to a scale they could not have imagined
Wilful ignorance is unpardonable in anyone, especially those responsible for policy-making, but that is exactly what is happening in healthcare. The business media’s staple diet everyday is valuations, return on investment and so on, with no attempt to look beyond financial and investment metrics to quality of patient care. Taking care of your health has never been more critical than ever before for a simple reason: you just can’t afford to fall sick.
There is an intensifying obsession in businesses with automation, aided and abetted by AI, which is so overpowering that it has displaced from the public sphere all else, displaying a poverty of thinking through. Since it is clearly not a phase, the sooner businesses realise the folly of such narrow thinking, the better it will be. Will they?
