A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Not all techies are “brilliant assholes” or even aspiring to that label.

Further, there plenty of brilliant nice folks and plodding assholes to be found amid the majority of people that populate techdom.

Unfortunately, that loud, vocal, arrogant, in-your-face minority often becomes the standard by which all participants are judged — think Gen X (slackers) and Millennials (entitled).

Worse, their MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) tends to rub off on others and permeate the group culture, as it did on Wall Street, to the point where those who don’t fit the mold are ashamed to admit their involvement.

“MBA jerks used to go and work for Wall Street, now wealthy white geeks go to Stanford and then waltz into a VC or tech firm.”

Patrick Connelly, founder of health-tech startup Corevity, also sees the Wall Street parallels.

“The focus of Silicon Valley used to be innovation with the wonderful bonus of money on the side of that, but those two things seem to have switched – just as the pencil-pushing mentality of finance in the 70s became the champagne lifestyle in the 2000s, People have come to have too much swagger and not enough insights.”

Like Wall Street banks in 2008, Big Tech is in no hurry to take responsibility for its actions, as shown in the recent congressional hearings — no CEOs or executives showed, instead they sent their company lawyers.

Big Tech sold the world and its employees on the idea that, unlike Wall Street and other dominant corporate entities, tech was focused on changing the world for the better and would do no evil.

But, like most concepts, evil has a fluid meaning (like murder) and money is a change agent — nothing that drives revenue is evil. That includes Russian ads, hate, bigotry, and trolling.

Industry leaders espoused values that anyone could embrace: sharing, connection, community, openness, expression. The language they spoke was the language of a universal humanism….

These concepts might have sounded vague, but they produced concrete political outcomes. They convinced politicians to privatise public goods – starting with the internet itself. In the 1990s, a network created largely by government researchers and public money was delivered into private hands and protected from regulation. Built on this enclosed ground, a company like Facebook could turn formerly non-economic activities – chatting with a friend, or showing her a picture of your kid or crush – into a source of seemingly endless profit. Not by chance, the values that these companies touted as intrinsic goods – openness, connectivity, deregulation – were also the operating principles that made their owners rich.

That said, not everybody has drunk the kool-aid. There’s a small, but growing, cadre of techies working to change things from the inside out.

While tech has outsourced many roles, software development is, and probably always will be, handled internally.

Even if (when) AI reaches the point of being able to automate some coding, it will take far longer for it to take on the roles of creation, architecture or design.

And that will concentrate even more power in the hands of the engineers able to handle that work.

One can only hope they use it more wisely than their bosses.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Our apologies for missed and late postings. We were still having technical issues, but they’ve all been handled. (I hope!)

I’m ambivalent about AI.

On one hand, some of the things it can do, such as enable an iPhone to do an ultrasound scan, are amazing and encouraging.

Earlier this year, vascular surgeon John Martin was testing a pocket-sized ultrasound device developed by Butterfly Network, (…) he knew that the dark, three-centimeter mass he saw did not belong there. “I was enough of a doctor to know I was in trouble,” he says. It was squamous-cell cancer.

On the other hand, AI is full of human bias, whether intentional or not.

AI tends to be fairly unflattering to anyone with a darker skin tone, and that using AI to judge female beauty is a pretty questionable goal. (…) MakeApp’s unflattering, malfunctioning AI is the latest in a long line of AI controversies: Snapchat’s offensive Bob Marley filter, FaceApp’s “black” filters, and smartphone cameras that lighten your skin by default.

There was a time when the phrase “seeing is believing” was tightly connected to reality.

That connection became shaky with the advent of Photoshop and has been rapidly deteriorating ever since.

Enter AI in the form of the generative adversarial networks (GAN).

But images and sound recordings retain for many an inherent trustworthiness. GANs are part of a technological wave that threatens this credibility.

GANs are poised to escalate fake news, discredit evidence, legal, medical, etc., and force you to question everything — or believe blindly.

Image credit: brett jordan

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Do you believe that Silicon Valley is the best (only?) place to start a company? That there is some almost magical ingredient that isn’t duplicated anywhere else?

Many people do and more did back in 2010.

Demis Hassabis, co-founder of high-flying DeepMind didn’t believe the myth.

“I was born in London and I’m a proud born and bred Londoner. I obviously visited Silicon Valley and knew people out there and also I’d been to MIT and Harvard and seen the East Coast. There is this view over there that these kind of deep technology companies can only be created in Silicon Valley. Certainly back in 2010 that was definitely the prevailing view. I felt that that just wasn’t true.”

Investor Peter Thiel was one of the true believers.

“At that time he’d never invested outside of the US, maybe not even outside of the West Coast. He felt the power of Silicon Valley was sort of mythical, that you couldn’t create a successful big technology company anywhere else. Eventually we convinced him that there were good reasons to be in London.”

Hassabis convinced Thiel to invest; Google acquired it for $400 million, and DeepMind is still making AI history.

One of the major reasons Hassabis wanted to stay in London was the availability of incredible talent.

“One of the things was I thought it [staying in London] was going to be a competitive advantage in terms of talent acquisition,” said Hassabis. He went on to claim that there weren’t that many intellectually stimulating jobs for physics PhDs out of Cambridge at the time that didn’t want to work for a hedge fund in the city.

Unlike Silicon Valley which, in addition to its normal talent shortage, suffers a severe talent crunch in whatever tech is hottest.

Silicon Valley may be a great place to start a company if you are connected, but for the majority who aren’t there are plenty of locations that are just as good, if not better.

Of course, that depends on whether your goal is to found a company valued for funds raised, which is best done in Silicon Valley, or to found a company that is valued on actual revenue, which can be done anywhere.

In fact, for the latter, anywhere could even be preferable to Silicon Valley.

Image credit: HikingArtist

If you’re a regular reader you know I’m not a big Google fan. Google isn’t all bad or all good, but, as with any entity, a mix of both.

Their most recent big score on the good side is the effort to reduce, or at least not promote, fake news.

Google engineers and executives are disturbed by how its algorithm promotes offensive and fake content on the web — such as a Holocaust denial site reaching the top result for certain searches about the Holocaust — and they are doing something about it, search expert and editor of Search Engine Land Danny Sullivan reports.

In a different vein is the article KG sent that’s in the pattern of Tracy Kidder’s fascinating looks at the stories behind major technology developments.

It’s the story of the people and effort to radically change Google translate using AI.

Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company’s popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He was astonished. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination.

It’s not a book, but it is a long article — long, fascinating and well worth your time to read.

Which is why this post is very short.

I sincerely hope you will take time to read both articles.

Flickr image credit: JC

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

As a founder, do you have an ethical or moral responsibility to consider the ramifications of your product on society — globally, not just locally?

In Numbers, a TV show that ran from 2005 to 2010, the central character, Charlie Eppes, was a young, prodigy mathematician. One storyline forced him to question his long held belief on his responsibility in innovation.

I always believed it was my duty to develop numerical tools and someone else’s to use them wisely.

Is that what you think?

In your drive for sales would you sell to any who could pay or would you scrutinize them to assure ethical usage?

Some companies do just that.

Data analysis powerhouse Palantir has been ultra-careful since it was founded.

Palantir can afford not to sell to just anybody — you have to believe in its values, too (…)  Palantir once turned down a partnership with a tobacco company “for fear the company would harness the data to pinpoint vulnerable communities to sell cigarettes to,” CEO Alex Karp told Fortune.

Jad Saliba, Magnet Forensics’ founder/CTO and ex-cop is emphatic on the subject.

 “The two areas I care most about are combating terrorism and child exploitation,” he says, adding that he hopes to keep his company on the side of the angels. “We spend a lot of time validating who we sell to … We sell to people who are going to use it ethically.”

Big Data in all its forms has enormous potential for good — and even larger potential for abuse.

And AI even more so.

From man’s earliest days, every new discovery has been a two-edged sword — fire can bestow life or death.

And while the final, future outcome of an innovation can’t be predicted, it should still be the responsibility of its creator, whether individual or company, to work to assure whatever it is is used responsibly.

Image credit: HikingArtist