10 more things I learned from Age of Invisible Machines
1. What is a CIAM?
"customer information access management (CIAM) (is used) to remove liability. This technological intermediary houses any data you “ship” to a company. In truth, you never actually send your information directly to a business; instead, it zips off to a CIAM service that collects and secures it. If a company needs to any of your personal details, they request it through CIAM."
2. The author lives in the future/fantasy
Maybe in his part of the world things move as fast as he says they are. Also, I have no doubt that AI will increase an alarming rate. However, when he talks about artificial intelligence replacing APIs, I really have to say, not anytime soon. I work with API's for a day job and They're not easy to understand. There is no perfect data for an AI to pick up and use. Maybe something widely used like a Twitter API could potentially be replaced but APIs connecting small businesses will be less likely to be replaced. After all, the pharmacy industry in the United States, still uses fax technology to communicate prescriptions between all the various constituents. The place that I was working at six years ago had to maintain functioning fax lines. This is a technology that most people would've considered dead 25 years ago but it is still in active use today. The presence of human beings in existing industries will make the complete AI take over more difficult than some would imagine.
"The same way that conversational interfaces will replace GUIs for end users, they will also replace APIs as an interface between machines." - maybe some machines, and some new applications.
3. Latimer's terrarium
I did not know that this thing existed. Apparently Mr. Latimer put seeds in a bottle and completely sealed it. The seeds are able to grow without the addition of any water. Simply the sun and the plants maintain the ecosystem inside the sealed glass jar. Pretty neat!
4. Intelligent digital worker (IDW): Think of an IDW as a peer to a human.
"For an IDW, primary skills can look like this: Being able to operate over specific communication channels, such as Slack, phone, Google Home, and SMS; Understanding natural language; Including a human-in-the-loop when help is needed."
so these are kind of like Robotic Process Automations, with the addition of skills.
5. Hyperautomating an organization
This is the author's term. Humans should always be able to make final decisions and there should also be "human in the loop" processes. Hyperautomation is about creating an ecosystem of tasks and skills that can be shared and combined to achieve business goals. For example the ability to charge a credit card is a skill that can be part of many tasks: checking out, refunds, etc.
6. You can re-do haphazard processes as idealized processes
"Nine times out of 10 it will be more valuable to your company if you create automation that reflects the ideal way of getting things done, rather than how they're currently being done."
7. Hyperautomation is not the individual tools, it is the ecosystem
Environment at the company white buying to start this process. They dividual tools like chat bots an API skinny pieces of this puzzle. Expect a lot of early failures, but as long as your ecosystem exists, it will be easier to adapt. If you perceive of your efforts ecosystem and a small part of the ecosystem fails it's not a big deal. If you think about launching a chat bot isolated effort, and it fails, you might give up on the concept too early because you were focused on the tools instead of the ecosystem.
8. The “tipping point of explore/exploit”
Basically, there's a sweet spot between exploring your options and exploiting them: acting on the information that you have. This is a good thing to keep in mind for everything, shipping products, or making lists.
9. Design patterns in user experience
The author lists about 15. These are useful concepts to help plug AI into your workflows. He gives the example of a "contextualize" pattern where a gps puts locations of nearby gas stations (data) onto a map (context). It would be helpful to have a list of these patterns to refer to and agree on when working on Hyperautomation.
10. LATCH acronym for information organization
"According to Robert Saul Wurman, the creator of LATCH (and founder of TED), “I believe, and it has been accepted, that there are only five ways of organizing information. I use the acronym LATCH: Location, alphabet, time, category, and hierarchy.”
11. speech synthesis markup language is a thing
12. The author must have very highly developed elbow muscles from patting himself on the back.
He lives in his own creation and has seemed to have some success (maybe a lot?) But he vastly overstates the importance of what he is working on. Still, an interesting read and he is probably correct in the long term: the economy 200 years from now will look a lot different.
No comments.