Skip to main content

Mind, the Gap - addendum II - Ecomonics

While reading "Mind, the Gap" again, I felt the need of explaining the usage of term 'economics'. The classical definition of the terms goes somewhat like the following:
economics (ĕk'ə-nŏm'ĭks, ē'kə-)
n.
1. (used with a sing. verb) The social science that deals with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services and with the theory and management of economies or economic systems.

In other words, it is classical trade but in a much advanced and re-defined form. All throughout 1900's, economics remained the force of forces, surfacing in clear sight in forms of capitalism, especially towards the last couple of decades of the century (whilst communism was being defeated by its own self).

In the current century, however, the term has to expand event more that "production, distribution and consumption" to encompass the new dimensions of technological proliferations of the society - namely, Web 2., et al.

In the sense that I would like to use the term economics whilst talking about 'the Gap' should also include not just monetary-economy (though it remains the flagship), but also the "attention economy" (how Google makes money by having you to give attention to all those sponsored contents and ads), and "reputation economy" (how Google 'pressurises' you to improve you hit-count of your online presence - your website, blog, social-networking profile - that should feature among top 20 Google hits when someone fires a relevant query. That, and also Google PageRank.)

Technology is raw. Net is the medium by which technology would interact and interchange information with society. Whilst technology has to prove itself (by turning profitable) economically, it could only do so if (and perhaps the only if) it would get the tune of the psychology of the society.

When the inventors start to really master the tune of psychology of the society their technology is serving, you find that the society is 'hooked' to the given technology. People are so wound up into it that almost no questions are asked. The hook is attached to a line, and the sinker is usually heavy (with right marketing). The spin of the spindle wounding up the line is actually the economy making profit.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

OpenAI and the Network Effect (ft. Md Rafi and Ola Krutrim)

"Who is the greatest Bollywood singer of all times?" I typed into chat.krutrim.com It listed seven, but missed Mohammad Rafi.  Horrified, I followed up, "Why is Mohammad Rafi not in this list?"  And it missed the context, replying, "Mohammad Rafi is not in the list because the list you are referring to is not provided." With a deep sigh, it reminded me of Altman's India visit June last year. Someone asked him if India should invest in building a Foundational model (assuming funding and talent is not as issue). And he replied , "it would be hopeless to compete with us on training foundation models.. you shouldn’t try”. Try they will, and they should. The world's fourth(?) largest economy has pockets of deep pockets that can sustain the demands of developing a resource hungry technology such at Foundational LLMs. But distribution, diffusion and monetisation remains challenging, when chatGPT, Copilot and Gemini in Indic languages are just an App ...

Digitally.me (or, your next unicorn startup idea!)

Clone thyself as the next unicorn startup idea. Imagine you have the superpower to clone yourself. You can send this clone to as many places as you like. These clone presense will be present 24x7 for you. Serving you. As you. Like the various hats that you like to adorn, so do the clones. A clone for every Avatar of you that you’d like to personify. A clone for a situation, a clone for every need. Yes, imagine Agent Smith of the last act in The Matrix. Hundreds of “him”, doing work for him. Only, yours will be benign and avoid evil. Because you are not evil, and your clone is but what you are. My son was playing with a phone while I was on a separate WhatsApp call. He was making videos of himself, and he ended up capturing my voice from the call in the background. When I heard myself there, it gave me a start. Have you listened to yourself on a zoom call, video off, just a name displayed on the screen? Sarcasm aside, is that real you? Or is it an audio representation of you for tha...

The Independent Directors at OpenAI

Sam Altman was the CEO and  Greg Brockman  was the chairman of the board  at OpenAI.org, the parent company that is listed as a not-for-profit organization in the US u/s 501(C)(3).   On 17 Nov 2023 both of them were fired by the Independent Directors of the board. This post talks about the 4-day drama that ensued at the back of these events, focusing on the role of Independent Directors. (Try here for a related earlier post.) One year ago the company launched the ChatGPT, the Large Language Model, that rose to prominence with its Generative AI capabilities (“GPT” or Generative Pre-trained Transformer) and human-like response and interactive interface (“Chat”). At launch ChatGPT was based on based on GPT-3.5 series. The launch took the internet by storm as Microsoft unveiled its commercial partnership with the firm, and its global marketing machine geared into action.  To accommodate for this new profit-making "partnership" endeavor, the firm came up with anothe...