This first thing I want to talk about this week, is something that intuitively has been coming to me very strongly this entire week.
A lot of technology applications, especially with artificial intelligence, have been and are being developed for business use or for sales and marketing purposes.
AI algorithms that are being used to track people and market to them or used keep them on a website or social media page, in my opinion, will become outdated technology in the future. Using technology to manipulate people isn’t good for technology companies, people and the U.S. economy. I see this turning around within the next 5 years as we go through some challenging times, in the U.S. and worldwide. Many technology companies will start to work on solutions based programs to help people evolve into the future.
I’ve always said,
“Artificial Intelligence is not just a large part of a technological revolution, it’s a major part of a human evolution of going beyond the limits of an environmentally programmed human biological operating system.”
To really understand what I’m saying, check out my articles
Is Facebook And Social Media Psychologically Destroying This Generation?
Are People Merging Into And With Their Smartphones?
Keep in mind, that I love technology but I also know how to manage it and use it for my own advancement.
We don’t need AI algorithms to know what people are doing or what they will buy or respond to. The human biological machine is not as complex as many people make it out to be. When the human mind becomes intuitive and innovative. No AI algorithm can compete with that, now and in the future.
Steve Jobs, used his intuitive abilities to change the way we communicate and how we relate to our technology without advanced AI algorithms. Google, Facebook and Amazon, to name a few very successful companies, didn’t need the help of advanced AI algorithms and a lot of data to get started and become some of the most successful companies on the planet, they just used an idea they believed in and risked overcoming all the odds of failure and persisted to make their ideas a reality. This is not something machines may be ever able to do.
Steve Jobs: Secrets of Life
All the talk right now in technology is on big data and AI but don’t count out the immense value of human intuition and innovation. I’m not devaluing advanced artificial intelligence but simply giving everyone a new perspective to think about.
Check out this amazing video, from Andy Grove Co-founder of Intel in a 1999 Interview talking about technology and human intuition.
I believe the technology companies that will be the most successful in the future, are the companies that will look at and address the needs of the people and our planet. They will create simple to use but advanced technology to make people’s lives better and or our planet a better place for everyone to live. This is not some utopian idea of mine because I know this is the future.
I’m currently working on a book that outlines a new type of corporate Futurist position This will also show how humans can keep an edge over today’s weak narrow task pattern driven AI and future artificial general intelligence (AGI). I’m not just writing a book, I’m living and following everything in it to advance myself into the future.
A quick economic note this week.
New home sales grew by 6.7 percent in May.
This is the highest level since November 2017.
Sales in the South surged to their highest level in nearly 11 years.
US new home sales surge in May
I see this as a further sign of another U.S. housing bubble approaching. The southern part of the U.S. is really in trouble and this is where homes sales are surging.
Two reasons why:
The south is on the verge of a major health crisis and healthcare epidemic. Personally, I think their traditional diet of fried foods of unhealthy oils, mass carbohydrates and sugar is the blame for most of it.
The 10 least healthy U.S. states:
Mississippi
Louisiana
Arkansas
Alabama
West Virginia
Tennessee
South Carolina
Oklahoma
Kentucky
Georgia
The healthiest and least healthy states in the U.S.
It’s also not a surprise, that most of the population in the U.S. south work in Healthcare.
Retail is 2#, Manufacturing #3, and Construction #6. Retail and manufacturing are industries that will be taken over by machines and construction will decline if the housing bubble bursts. Now we have a situation where people paid a premium price for a new homes and are left without jobs and without healthcare.
Industries in the South (Region)
I believe, this house of cards if just waiting to collapse and it will affect the entire U.S. economy.
My specialty has always been improving business processes. I have a green belt in Six Sigma but found an even more effective method with training from the Institute of Cultural Affairs in facilitation.
Let’s discuss a recent article from Thomas H. Davenport and David Brain in the Harvard Business Review, called “Before Automating Your Company’s Processes, Find Ways to Improve Them”
This article discusses robotic process automation, or RPA. Before I get into it, I’ll discuss briefly what RPA is and why you should care about it. I do understand the technology and although, I’m not an RPA developer, I have taken courses on two popular RPA systems called UiPath and Automation Anywhere. I’m also a member of the Institute for Robotic Process Automation & Artificial Intelligence and regularly read their excellent articles.
What is RPA?
Robotic process automation is a popular automated AI software tool which creates and uses specialized agents or bots on someone’s computer to learn a process by watching and mimicking what the person does on a daily basis. It’s great for activities that require jumping from application to application and completing repetitive tasks that require little thinking. Once the specialized agent or bot learns the process, it can then repeat it, the same way, every day, without error.
For more information on RPA check out the Institute for Robotic Process Automation & Artificial Intelligence.
According to the Harvard Business Review article,
“The match between RPA and business processes isn’t a perfect one if the goal is to redesign or improve the process rather than to automate its current state. As Andrew Spanyi, the author of four books on process management, put it to us by email: “RPA does not redesign anything. It doesn’t ask whether we need to do this activity at all. It operates at the task level and not the end-to-end process level.”
They are right, RPA doesn’t make processes more efficient and better. This is where a human who knows how to learn and recognize waste and flaws in a process comes in and a perfect example of how AI automation and RPA can work successfully together.
Going through the training, I noticed there are a lot of people training as RPA developers, especially in India. It looks like the new H1B path into the U.S. for a lot of people.
The situation is that that most of these RPA Developers don’t have extensive process improvement experience and they don’t see the link between RPA and process improvement methodologies. While a lot of these people will be technically literate, they won’t have many key process improvement core skills.
Any process can be automated but automating waste and flaws in a process, will only automate all the flaws and waste in the process as well.
A really good RPA architect will know how systematically improve a process and then draw up good process maps. This is also key, as you can tell a newbie from an experienced person by looking at their process improvement experience and by looking at the process maps they create. If they have a good background in AI and process automation, then hire them quickly because there are not a lot of people with these skills right now.
It’s the same thing with big data, or data and AI. Garbage in, garbage out but I will save that discussion for a future article.
Thanks for joining me week on Mr Futurist, I hope you enjoyed this article/podcast. I have something really great and informative scheduled for next week, so be sure to subscribe to me on my website or on YouTube. Thanks everyone and have a great rest of the week and weekend.
