WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Sometimes the centre of gravity in tech is very clear, but as we enter 2022 there are lots of areas where trillion dollar questions are wide open. These are the questions I wonder about today, from crypto to cars to fast fashion - there are others.

Covid brought shock and a lot of broken habits to tech, but mostly, it accelerates everything that was already changing. 20 trillion dollars of retail, brands, TV and advertising is being overturned, and software is remaking everything from cars to pharma. Meanwhile, China has more smartphone users than Europe and the USA combined, and India is close behind - technology and innovation will be much more widely spread. For that and lots of other reason, tech is becoming a regulated industry, but if we step over the slogans, what does that actually mean? Tech is entering its second 50 years.

There’s an old saying that the first fifty years of the car industry were about creating car companies and working out what cars should look like, and the second fifty years were about what happened once everyone had a car - they were about McDonalds and Walmart, suburbs and the remaking of the world around the car, for good and of course bad. The innovation in cars became everything around the car. One could suggest the same today about smartphones - now the innovation comes from everything else that happens around them.

The retail industry is rewriting the laws of physics. Change is coming at an ever faster rate each year and 2030 will be upon us before we know it. Explore the world in 2030 and the future of retail 2030.  

“We chose right from the very start to not hide the technology,” Hanrahan explained.

This conversation happened after the release of the paper from our group at MIT on driver functional vigilance during use of Tesla's Autopilot. The Tesla team reached out to me offering a podcast conversation with Mr Musk. I accepted, with full control of questions I could ask and choice of what is released publicly. I ended up editing out nothing of substance. This was an insightful discussion on various aspects of Tesla Autopilot that I hope catalyzes further nuanced conversation on the future of AI-assisted driving. Starts at 2:35. The full outline of the video is as follows:
0:00 Introduction
2:35 Start of conversation: Autopilot motivation
4:01 Display the vehicle's perception of the driving scene
7:11 Algorithms, data, and hardware development
10:23 Edge cases and common cases in driving
12:18 Navigate on Autopilot
13:57 Hardware and software path toward fully autonomy
17:08 Driver supervision of Autopilot
20:13 Human side of Tesla Autopilot (driver functional vigilance)
23:13 Driver monitoring
24:30 Operational design domain
26:57 Securing Autopilot against adversarial machine learning
28:29 Narrow AI and artificial general intelligence
30:10 Physics view of love
31:53 First question for an artificial general intelligence system

The Artificial Intelligence Revolution isn’t around the corner—it’s here. A common remark is that as soon as some new form of AI is possible, it’s no longer AI, it’s just what computers “do”. And while we won’t notice most of AI’s effects in our world, there will be visible signs as digital technology is infused with AI. Through the lens of commerce, it’s easier to see AI’s deep effects as progress continues. Here are a few examples.