Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Some time back, the Titan , a submersible took 5 people to the Titanic wreck 4,000 meters below sea level. As we know, everyone died. Rahul Matthan wrote a piece with an interesting angle to the tragic events.   He writes: “The company steadfastly refused to submit its vessels for classification by third-party agencies like the American Bureau of Shipping.” And passengers had to sign legal undertakings that they understood that the vessel was not certified by any regulatory body; and of course, things could go horribly wrong.   At this point, you’d be shaking your head and muttering about corporate greed and callousness. But wait, there is more. The article is about thinking from first principles. In this case, the first question is – What is the purpose of regulations? Usually, it is to ensure a minimum level of safety and quality.   The company had been claiming that they had far superior and different safety features, but the existing regulatory system did not reco

Decades of attempts at Artificial Intelligence (AI) failed, until the advent of “neural networks”. That is basically an attempt to make computers “learn” the way our brains learn. For example, one feeds the system photos along with labels (cat, dog etc) and lets the computer find the patterns corresponding to each. Once ready, one then feeds it new photos that weren’t part of its training. This is the test – to see whether the patterns it noticed were correct or not.   That approach has yielded the AI we see today all around us – speech recognition (Alexa), image recognition (face unlock on your phone), driverless vehicles etc. While that’s very impressive, it is what is called “narrow AI” – limited to specific topics only. General purpose AI is still far away.   The Chinese venture capitalist and ex-Googler, ex-Microsoft, Kai-Fu Lee wrote an excellent book o n the state of AI in China. While the US is Number 1, he says China is the clear Number 2 and closing in fast, even ahe

In her book on the Entrepreneurial State , Mariana Mazzucato says that even Apple, the company we associate with creativity (at least while Steve Jobs was in charge) didn’t really come up with new technologies. Rather, as Steve Jobs himself said about creativity: “Creativity is just connecting things… (Creative people) were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”   Mazzucato says the iPhone is the perfect example of “just connecting things”, each of which was created by the State, not the private sector. These include semiconductor devices, ranging from the CPU to dynamic RAM (DRAM) to hard-disk drives (HDD). LCD’s (Liquid Crystal Display) too originated from government funded labs. So too did those tiny enough to fit in a phone Lithium-ion batteries. The entire field of DSP (Digital Signal Processing) was based on advancements to the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). Then there’s the Internet itself which was created by the US military. HTTP and HTML aros

Teddy Wayne described one of the attractions of a physical book over an e-book : “there’s something irreplaceable about a printed book: the heft of it in your hands, the striking cover, and, most important to me, its  smell .” Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s boss, agreed with that sentiment. Which is why he said: “…we have to look for things that we can do that you can never do with a paper book.” Features like the ability to write reviews for everyone else to see and to search for information as you read your e-book. Now contrast all of those Amazon features with a patent the same Amazon filed some time back about resale of e-books. See, e-books don’t degrade over time unlike their “dead-tree brethren”. So unlike physical books that can’t be sold an infinite number of times because of all the wear and tear, an e-book could be resold forever. Not very good news if your business is selling e-books, is it? So here’s the gist of Amazon’s patent: add a (digital) counter in the e-book t

I always thought of metaphors as something from poetry, which never appealed to me anyway (I am one of those “if you want to say something, say it, don’t rhyme it” kind of guys). So it was interesting to learn that : “Metaphors are much more than a poetic imagination or rhetorical flourish. They can help us translate ideas into mental models” Most of us can’t recognize an idea or model outside of its context. Don’t believe me? Then try naming a principle that is central to both economics and physics. Give up? Answer: it’s called demand and supply in economics; equilibrium in physics. (It doesn’t have to be exactly the same, just very close). So why do most of us not see such similarities? It’s because we are highly domain dependent when it comes to concepts, ideas and models. Or as Nassim Taleb wrote in Antifragile : “It is as if we are doomed to be deceived by the most superficial part of things, the packaging, the gift wrapping.” Well ok, you might say, but so what

Pretty much all companies talk about the importance of innovation, to be creative, to come up with new ideas. Google has its famous 20% Rule: employees can spend 20% of their time on activities/projects that interest them without considering whether/how what they do could benefit the company. The idea is that if people do what they like, then some of those ideas may hit gold. Possibly. Some times. I heard that Facebook takes it even further and allows pretty much everyone to do whatever they like all the time ! That seems outrageous at first. But if you stop and think, what exactly do companies like Google and Facebook really need their employees for? I mean, their algorithms are already written, servers deployed with redundancies and backups built in already. They are not manufacturing companies; so they don’t that need to build one more fridge or car (or anything else) to sell more. Since they provide everything for free, they don’t have service contracts to provide free upgrades or