Category Archives: Life

My friend created a pretty cool Youtube video explaining some of the mechanisms behind ChatGPT; and you’d realise that behind the whole engine of this ‘artificial intelligence’ is really lots of brute calculations and updates. Never at any point of the calculations would ChatGPT ‘fact-check’ or validate anything that it ‘says’. It relies upon statistical accuracy in matching and finding the next most relevant word to string together.

So the entire system wasn’t quite ever designed to give you accurate or right information – just something you might believe rather than something real. In some sense, technology as an aid to humans have reach the new next level of helping us to ideate more by bringing up relevant connections to what you’ve first provided as a prompt. But it doesn’t replace thinking; it simply supercharge one’s memory prowess more.

What is interesting in this whole march of progress with technology is that we can say rote memory is no longer that useful and should not be tested in school. But associative memory remains important and the ability to actually triangulate and fact-check things becomes even more important. Search engines and all of the internet are now no longer ‘objective’ but creating bubbles to house its users, trying to deliver the most ‘relevance’ to them. Validation of information now becomes a super-skill that depend on random and highly dispersed connections.

The future doesn’t just come; you choose to step into it. And your choices defines the future that you actually step into. So if you continue to live wastefully, use lots of resources and ignore issues around sustainability, then you may soon no longer have a future to step into. In fact, your choices and manner of life pits you against the future generations, and the future.

It’s not too late to fight for the future instead. And it definitely isn’t too early to fight for those who are not yet born. You can choose to do so by the things you choose to consume, the life you choose to take on, the people, brands, companies that you choose to get behind. It doesn’t matter if there are habits you still can’t kick, that it seem hypocritical to try reduce your carbon footprint when your work or life still requires you to travel around via flights.

At least, when you become aware and make that choice to fight for the future, you stop fighting against it.

There’s been huge layoffs announced in the tech industry; and that’s been spreading to even the big established technology firms like Microsoft and Google. One could say this is many years in the making as those firms have grown perhaps too big and reaching the edges of the overall economy. Hence when the economy starts shrinking or just slowing its growth, these companies no longer have that much room to realise their original growth ambitions.

Yet at the same time, there’s a manpower shortage. We don’t have sufficient good people in the market who versatile enough to switch rapidly from one industry to another; or from even one company to the next, despite having gradually moved out of the whole lifelong employment culture and psyche since decades ago.

After years of drumming up the whole idea of upskilling, reskilling and all that nonsense around training, certification, we made the labour market even more rigid. And we do so by telling people stories around scarcity in skills, training, and affected their narrative and confidence in what they can actually do. Now you have to be ‘qualified’, and chosen by someone or some organisation before you can do the work.

That is simply not true. You need to choose what is the work you’d like to do and who are the people you seek to serve. And allow the job to naturally take its shape.

A dentist friend who teaches in the dental school sometimes was complaining to me about the declining quality of students. No one could explain that the objective of the root canal was to actually help the patient save a natural tooth. The answers given were around the technical aspects of the procedure such as cleaning out the bacteria.

The problem wasn’t that the students weren’t smart. They seem to expect to enter a lesson empty awaiting to be filled with knowledge and content and see their sole role as soaking up what is needed to ace the assessment and then move on with life. We have structured education so much that students think of learning as a means to the end of taking exams. That is a very serious problem and mindset gap that needs to be filled.

These students are not going to be able to deal with problem solving on a forward looking basis. Because we want to train students not to be solving known current problems though that is useful but to prepare them well enough for the problems that may come along in the future. In fact, most of highest level of academia is surrounding discovering problems at the frontier of knowledge to crack them.

Being able to understand and define a problem should precede mastering the solution to solve the problem. I’m not too sure if it’s an issue with intelligence, the system or the culture that we are creating because we have over-optimised on too many things. A system that is over-optimised over-indexes the problems today and the current solutions; without equipping our people with the ability to see beyond and into problems of the future.

That will be a problem we have to treat.

When Leon Walras set out to made economics a science, he sought to describe the workings of the market using mathematics and even captured the mechanics of its dynamism – the notion that the system is just trying to head towards equilibrium. But the problem with real markets is that the prices never clears the market. Equilibrium is never reached.

If the Walrasian equilibria were reached, there’d be no goods on the shelves of any shops. All the goods would already immediate be in the hands of those who are willing and able to pay for it. And no one would really have the opportunity to master any jobs or pick up any skills reliably because they’ll always be switching jobs and jumping back and forth different production curves in order to optimise the market. Time was a missing ingredient in those equations of economics.

So the equilibria-seeking economics was useful as a way to describe and think about markets to some extent. But for the problems we are dealing with today, we need a new set of economics and approaches that enables us to move the world forward. This is already available as part of development economics and the new institutional economics – we’ve had decades of experiences thinking about laws, competition, market organisations and design in order to guide ourselves all towards the outcomes that can improve the world. It’s probably time for the basic foundations of economics to be about incentives and behaviours rather than demand and supply.

Did you know that bureaucracy is a solution to disorganisation and disorder? Hierarchy introduced some degree of check and balance that enable things to move in an orderly fashion where discretion at various levels would have created sheer chaos. Industrialism is built on finding good-enough practices to be put into a standard operating procedure and with simple enough indicator for the average person to check if instructions were being followed and things were moving normally.

Bureaucracies were not built to retain or use talents – they were built to ensure continued, smooth operations and to maintain status quo. They worked in a world which changed slowly. And they created broad based benefits as it enabled the average person to get a good job, progress through the ranks and be considered to have done well in life.

So not all bureaucracies are bad or made to cause trouble. The difficulty comes when there’s a need to change. As the system is built to hang on to status quo, it becomes hard to change or shift with new needs. And then it becomes strained. Not only so, in order to meet changing needs, additional work-around and often more bureaucracies were created.

The future we want to step into is not one that’s void of bureaucracies but one where breathing spaces are built into bureaucracy to enable changes and where the rationale of rules must hold within the new context or those rules can be ignored. After all, it is often more important to understand contexts than to understand rules.