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AI Washing – The New Face of Fraud

💡 AI Washing : The New Face of Fraud in the Digital Age

Surprised by hearing it as Fraud, isn’t it ???

**AI washing**, a deceptive practice where companies exaggerate their use of artificial intelligence, is on the rise. Surprisingly, the number of S&P 500 companies mentioning AI in their Q1 2024 earnings calls has skyrocketed 🚀by 249% compared to the five-year average.

This alarming 🔔trend highlights the urgent need for companies to be cautious about making broad claims regarding their AI capabilities.

Shargel, from Bracewell, advises organizations to create a clear definition of AI for internal use and regulatory filings to avoid potential scrutiny

CIOs and executives 👑 must thoroughly review their AI capabilities before making any public claims. Failure to do so could lead to misleading statements and potential legal consequences.

AI washing 📈is a form of fraud, that capitalizes on the growing demand for AI-powered solutions. It’s crucial for businesses to distinguish genuine AI innovations from marketing hype to make informed decisions and avoid investing in ineffective tools.

As the generative AI market is projected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2032, up from $128 billion in 2024, the temptation for companies to exaggerate their AI capabilities will only increase.

In nutshell, AI washing is a new and concerning trend that requires immediate attention from companies, regulators, and investors alike.

Read more about it in this article at https://www.cio.com/article/3476097/under-pressure-to-show-progress-cios-must-beware-committing-ai-washing-themselves.html

ai aiwashing fraud technology IT CEO

Are Digital Gadgets disrupting your sleep???

Recently, survey had finding that 9 out of ten young adults using gadgets may not get enough sleep as a result of light from using their smartphones and tablets before calling it a night. As you might be aware, phone & tablet screens emit short wavelength blue light, which interferes with the production of melatonin, a hormone needed to control sleep patterns.  Due to this, lots of people are unable to get sound sleep at night.
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Cybersecurity Tips for Startups and SMBs

It can be argued that startups are the future of business.

These smaller companies have perfected the idea of identifying a unique concern and working hard to solve it. Unlike the more prominent companies, most startups excel in not wanting to do it all at once. They would instead take one concept and work around it, making life easier for people on that front.

With the growth of the technology industry, we have also seen the emergence of many startups. More of these businesses are also coming up in other sectors.

If the cybersecurity concerns that they face are not adequately addressed, we might see them going out of business faster than they came in.

 

Why Startups Should Stay Alert

When hackers strike, they are going for the biggest payday that they can manage. This is why it is not uncommon to see them go after the more significant companies most of the time.

However, this is where it is easy to get things wrong.

When Yahoo lost the details of over 3 billion accounts to hackers, it made the news. The same was true for Uber, caught in the middle of a messy business where about 57 million details of riders and drivers were exposed.

It can be argued that we only heard about those because of the sheer size of those companies.

However, every day, there is a small company experiencing a breach that we do not hear about. The data supports this, too, showing that 43% of all cyber-attacks are targeting small businesses.

That number is not as gloomy as knowing that 83% of small business and startup owners do not even have the funds to deal with the after-effects of a cyberattack. It is, thus, little surprise that 60% of small businesses will go out of business within six months of suffering a cyber-attack.

If nothing is done, we might lose more of these small businesses than we can get back.

 

Staying Safe

All small business and startup owners should know that staying safe is not just the role of the IT staff. Everyone on the payroll should understand what they have to do to ensure they are not the weak link to make the breach happen.

Poor password habits are usually to blame in most cases. Passwords should not be shared indiscriminately, and they should be as reliable and secure as possible. Do not forget to enable additional measures like two-factor authentication.

Businesses should also consider downloading a VPN, antivirus, antimalware, and other security-oriented software for increased protection.

The former provides quality encryption against network snooping and data hijacking. The later will step up security against malicious files that would have been downloaded over the internet. Antimalware will also keep internal networks safe from infected external drives.

Finally, everyone should know about phishing attacks. Since they account for 90% of all data breaches, they are not to be taken with levity.

Don’t fear Intelligent Machines

Don’t fear Intelligent Machines: Work with Them…

With the popular works like ‘The Matrix’ or ‘The Terminator’, where the humans get replaced, enslaved or hunted to almost an extinction by their own creations, our deepest fears of technology taking over humans have time and again resurfaced. If you look back, from mythology to science fiction, human and machine have been often pitted against each other. This essay portrays that although technology can be intimidating and many of today’s skill sets, careers and business models will be challenged by the rise of the machines, there is no escaping them. As Gary Kasparov points out – “We must face our fears if we want to get the most out of our technology, and we must conquer those fears if we want to get the best out of our humanity.”

For eras, mankind has looked for ingenious ways to get rid of grueling manual labor and duties. We tamed animals, invented the wheel, crafted new tools and made novel machines. The successful inventions and adaptations have generated wealth, upgraded our lifestyle and constructed new opportunities. Machines can’t be separated from our daily lives. As a blogger and a self-claimed gadget freak, I have even forgotten the count of times I use Google or the Google translator for work. And what is it? “SMT” (Statistical Machine Translation)!  Those of you who use online translation to catch the gist of a news article from a foreign newspaper will know that it is far from perfect. But we use our judgment and make sense out of it.

A century ago, when elevators became automated, many people were scared to go inside without an operator on-board? Do you recall the first time you took an elevator? Or take an instance of a public railway. In 1825, people thought that human bodies were simply not capable to withstand the traveling at a speed of thirty miles per hour! It took humans to take some time to get used to the technology but here we are! At the point of using driver less cars and isn’t it saying something?

Today, when we are living in a world on the cusp of the next industrial revolution and are witness to breakthrough advances like Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT) or nanotechnology, wondering if robots or machines are coming to steal our jobs can’t be far from our imagination. But is our fear real or baseless? Are machines really so bad? The answer is NO. Let’s explore some facts that would throw light into our assumptions. Since old times, humans have feared technology expansion, afraid that it would put them out of work. But it hasn’t.

It all depends on perspective. While one can see these changes as a humanoid robot replacing our existence, one might choose to see it as a hand that can guide us move forward than where we are. With the advent of antibiotics, many had complained about putting grave diggers out of work, but the invention of antibiotics was a great boon for mankind. Hence it doesn’t serve to romanticize the loss of jobs due to the modernization.

History has shown time after the time that technology paves a path and creates far more than it destroys for new industries, jobs and prosperity. We are forgetting that if robots can take over our existing jobs, many new are getting created. As Kasparov proposed, some of these new jobs, like a drone pilot or robotic surgeon, still need the operator to work together closely with the machine. The productive and profitable collaboration of human and machine is here to stay.

Google engineer Ray Kurzweil says that intelligent machines will enhance humans, not replace us.

As a Chess grand-master who has played the game against the machine, Garry Kasparov has mentioned his observation that machines are really good at taking on board huge amounts of information and making sense of it in a way that humans simply can’t do. But they have no perception or mindfulness. Machines were created to reduce our workload.  They are mechanical and don’t have the capabilities to understand the situations and behave accordingly. They have a man-made intelligence. While humans can do anything original, machines can’t. They can’t think independently.  They are programmed by humans and do as instructed. They can’t question their duties and just follow the orders.

Nowadays Machines with artificial intelligence prepare coffee, play games, even diagnose patients, carry out medical surgery and drive cars. But humans are superior when it comes to reasoning, originality, creativity, evaluating risks and using resources beyond limits to name a few.

As Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Chinese e-commerce site Baidu, puts it: “There’s a big difference between intelligence and sentience. Our software is becoming more intelligent, but that does not imply it is about to become sentient.”

Science and technology advancements always come with pros & cons. Like two sides of a coin, the fire that cook food can also burn down the house. With more and more machines replacing the physical job and getting over unskilled jobs, we will get more time to focus on exploring and elevating activities that bring us joy and satisfaction.

As IBM’s head of research, Guru Banavar, mentions, “AI will work with humans to solve pressing problems such as disease and poverty.”

Being a human is more than playing a game of chess or developing a skill like putting a hammer to the metal. We humans will still have plenty to do: for an instance painting a masterpiece or composing soulful music.

While discussing the technology and its implications on human life as species, we have always feared automation and then eventually accepted it. Although technology advancement may seem turbulent, we are living at the best time in human history where wonderful things are happening. We as species possess the strong human spirit and collective ability to adapt and grow.

I completely agree with this view of Kasparov as he urges us to not to hinder progress or fear machines: “We must speed them up. We must give them, and ourselves, plenty of room to grow. We must go forward, outward and upward.”

“So, I want all the people reading this article here to think that whether you want to live the rest of your years fearing the machines or be a part of a new day that is on the horizon! We are at the door of this unique opportunity to grow and evolve and it will be because of a lot of magnificent people like you, and some pretty incredible men who take us to the time where humans have never been taken before. Are you ready?”

Facial Recognition Tech: A friend or a foe?

Understanding the Fight Against Facial Recognition

The growth of Clearview AI as a startup focusing on facial recognition is momentous. That could be largely linked to their alliance with law enforcement agents that are using the platform widely. While there exists little to no regulation around how this kind of tech is used, that has not stopped business from booming for all the parties involved.

There are outcries against the privacy invasion that comes in the way of facial recognition too. Recently, a hack of the company brought fresh debates to the fore about how safe facial data can be when with keepers like that – and how such data will also be used.

 

Facial Recognition Isn’t Your Friend

Surveillance has always been a touchy subject. So that the state does not go beyond reasonable means in surveilling an individual, certain laws and regulations were made. This requires that even law enforcement agents obtain permission from the judiciary arm of government before they can put anyone under surveillance.

Even at that, this surveillance has to be proportionate.

None of such moves has been placed around facial recognition. Not on a large scale, at least.

Before the Clearview AI hack was reported, the company admitted to having more than 3 billion faces on record. That is more than a third of everyone on the planet as of this moment. Seeing as many countries have not even heard of the company, that is shocking that they would have that many faces on file.

Official statements from the company claim that it mines data from social media networks and other open-source platforms for its database. In other words, they can collect picture you posted on the internet to populate a database of facial recognition technology. The important part of this business is remembering that all of this is done without your giving them any express permission to take such advantages of your image rights.

Social media platforms like YouTube, Google, and Facebook have already reached out to this company with a cease and desist. That is a laudable move to protect users, but we are just seeing one side of a bad coin. Facebook itself runs in-house facial recognition software which you have to manually turn off.

Recalling how many scandals Facebook has gotten into in the previous decade alone, we do not know if they would honor any privacy requests from the users. Thus, those pictures you removed facial recognition access from could still be in the system for all that we know.

If these systems were as good as they are claimed to be, we might not have much against them. Instead, there is a huge bias against races and women. This is not a basic fault of the technology itself but how it was trained. After all, it can only adapt to the models that it has been trained with, of which there is a gross under-representation of the negatively affected population density.

Such can lead to cases of false positives or negatives. Depending on how you look at it and the prevalent situation, it is never good news.

 

Where Do We Go from Here?

San Francisco has banned the widespread use of technology in the city. This is a huge move 

from the city that considers itself one of the biggest, if not the biggest, concentrated tech hub in the world. If they cannot make such brazen moves to defend how tech is used, they might as well be a serious part of the problem in the tech space.

Other states and cities are working on similar moves, but they are not working fast enough.

 The need for a widespread ban right now is not for the hate of facial tech systems but the lack of a regulatory framework within which it works. If we do not have that, it is just a matter of time before everyone has a facial recognition system of their own and takes stalking to a whole new level.

That is not something we are willing to take. Till things improve, the fight against facial recognition will remain.

Fiction to Fact – in Five years Flat

Today being 31st Dec and the year 2019 is about to end. The decade is about to end, and we are geared up to welcome the next decade of 2020. Got a message on my WhatsApp couple of days ago indicating how do we write date to avoid confusion in year 2020…responded with three options a) write with apostrophe i.e. ’20 or b) don’t complicate as no one has edited the date when we wrote date in current year…the chance of getting the date was equally high when we wrote 2-Oct-19 or c) use digital signatures!!! 😊

We have come a long way; I still remember the day when we transited from year 1999 to 2000. There was a big noise about the millennium bug (aka Y2K bug). People were indeed scared and concerned about the technology in use and our dependence on technology at that point of time. Nothing major incident happened as enough preventive steps had been taken and we sailed into year 2000 smoothly.

First decade post year 2000, was an era of mobility where in we saw rise of mobile networks. The next decade (2009-2019) was of smartphone and cloud compute and we all got hooked to it! Today mobile penetration has crossed 100% in most of the urban markets. Our mobile is more than supercomputer for an individual compared to old computers in 1970. Today, right from train ticket to air ticket to paying bills to paying to a local kirana wala most of our day to day transaction got executed using a smartphone.

In today’s world we are surrounded by disruptive technologies be it Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning or Blockchain or Virtual Reality or Drone or chat bot or Robotics or 3D Printing…now is the era when the confluence of multiple technologies would take shape and more and more new use cases would evolve to our benefit. Many say that machines would rise and take over our jobs. While technology is eating away our jobs, technology is also creating new jobs. Future of work is an interesting topic and is being studied and discussed at length in universities & conferences. If decade of 2009 was known as decade of mobile networks and decade of 2019 was of mobile applications; the next decade would be known as decade of 5G, edge compute and quantum compute.

The solution to a problem which used to be a fiction few of years ago is being converted to reality at the supersonic pace. Thanks to technology and the entrepreneurs around. The amount of trust we have on technology today is much higher than it used to be a decade ago. This rise of technology and innovation is result of uniform availability of internet infrastructure, robust hardware & on demand compute.

Now let us have a look at the technology trends for the years to come. Top 10 technology trends which would drive disruption in 2020 are:

  1. Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
  2. Internet of Things
  3. Robotic Process Automation
  4. Block-chain
  5. Edge Compute
  6. Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality / Mixed Reality
  7. Cyber security
  8. 5G
  9. Voice Compute / NLP
  10. 3D Printing

 

These trends would lead us to confluence of technology and new / improved use cases such as:

  1. Nextgen Commute i.e. Autonomous cars, drone taxi, Hyperloop
  2. Supply of life saving drugs in remote areas using drones
  3. Block-chain enabled electronic health records
  4. Smart Speakers in homes and enterprise
  5. Smart homes
  6. Next level entertainment and sports enabled by Virtual Reality
  7. Streaming platforms providing 4K & 8K video
  8. Auto mitigation of Cyber Attack using Deception technologies
  9. 3D printing in healthcare
  10. Digital Transformation in Enterprise
  11. Edge Compute in Smart Cities
  12. 5G enabled autonomous factories

 

Still there a few challenges (including but not limited to) we need to focus and put more efforts upon:

  1. Clean potable water & air
  2. Food for all
  3. Containing wildfires
  4. Global Warming
  5. Reduction of fossil fuel
  6. Efficient recycling waste and e-waste
  7. Ethics in Technology
  8. Ocean Clean up
  9. Fake news
  10. Prevent Soil erosion

 

However, we are progressing in the right direction and here are few use cases which renews our confidence that with use of technology we can overcome any challenge:

  1. An AI enabled device to detect 90% of diseases in flat 10 minutes
  2. Lab grown meat to overcome food shortage
  3. 3D printed organs & medicines
  4. Biodegradable plastic
  5. Space tourism
  6. Smart Fertilizers and precision agriculture
  7. Super microbes eating oil spills in the ocean
  8. Human Augmentation and Hibernation
  9. Smart IoT sensors to ensure right quality of clean air in smart cities
  10. Time travel
  11. Gene editing i.e. CRISPER
  12. Inter plenary communication network
  13. Holographic Telepresence
  14. 3D Printers in Space to build space colonies
  15. Block-chain enabled Crypto Currencies
  16. Human Head transplant using AI, ML & Robotics

 

Conclusion:

Steve jobs rightly said, “Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they are basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they will do wonderful things with them.”

The technology seemed distant is coming to our life at a higher pace solving our problems and making our life more comfortable. Indeed we are in an era where fiction is becoming fact. Let us embrace benefits and continue to learn-unlearn and relearn to progress with technologies and the trends around.

Thanks for your time. Hope you liked our collaborative effort. Feel free to Like/Comment/Share !

Wishing you a Happy New Year 2020 !!!

This article is a collaborative effort by Chintan OzaBiren ParikhAjit Joshi & Chander Wanchoo who are members of TMI group. TMI Community is a professional community of Technology, Management and Innovation enthusiasts. Started in 2016, the community has been growing every year and collaborating on an ongoing basis.

Biren Parekh