the Threatening Face of Artificial Intelligence (AI) - Lethal Autonomous Weapon System (LAWS)

Lethal Autonomous Weapons (LAWs) aka Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS) aka Lethal Autonomous Robots (LAR) aka Robotic Weapons aka Killer Robots aka Autonomous Anti-Personal Systems (APS) are AI, ML, NN powered Military Robots designed to select and attack military targets (people, installations) without intervention by a human operator.

Qualities / properties:

1. Operate in the air/land/water/under-water/space.
2. Their autonomy is currently restricted to a human giving the final command to attack.
3. Obstacle avoidance
1. Trained through the equivalent of millions of hours in varied simulated environments to avoid obstacles, even when they are in motion.
4. Stochastic (Random) movements
1. Trained on thousands of movies of mosquitoes and other flying insects
2. Can defeat any attempt to anticipate their flight patterns
5. Efficient (Precise targeting)
1. Able to drive the size of a projectile and propellant to a bare minimum
6. Facial recognition
1. It’s in your iPhone, it’s in LAW, along with parallel networks
2. Able to identify targets by gait, gender, uniform, even ethnicity
7. Locate themselves in space
1. Has multiple self-location protocols
2. Uses GPS and other proprietary technologies 
8.  EMP-radiation-hardened
1. Radiation hardening is the act of making electronic components and systems resistant to damage or malfunctions caused by ionizing radiation (particle radiation and high-energy electromagnetic radiation), such as those encountered in outer space and high-altitude flight, around nuclear reactors and particle accelerators, or during nuclear accidents or nuclear warfare
2. EMP = Electro-Magnetic-Pulse
9. Incommunicado
1. Once a LAW gets flying, there is no way to stop it electromagnetically by jamming, spoofing, zapping, or anything else.
10. Big data links
1. Works with/on a consolidated host of data sets
2. Using these data-servers one can reliably tie individuals to their individual characteristics for later targeting
11. Examples:
1. The Stinger anti-Personnel System:
1. First-of-its-kind
2. mass-produced
3. mini-weapon
4. fully autonomous
5. wide-field cameras
6. tactical sensors
7. facial recognition
8. processors that can react 100 times faster than a human
9. stochastic motion (an anti-sniper feature)
10. inside it are 3-grams of shaped explosives that offer just enough power to penetrate the skull and kill the target with surgical precision
2. Vanguard Delivery and Breaching System:
1. can carry 18 Stingers
2. it arrives at a building or some other enclosed space (car, train, plane, you name it), releases its cargo, attaches to the barrier, and blows a hole in the wall or window. The Stingers can then enter the building and find their targets.
3. unstoppable once released
4. to target terrorist cells, infiltrate enemy compounds
3. The EyeFire Target Identification System
1. used to target non-predetermined target (whose faces are known & so facial-recognition won't work) like:
1. threatening underground movements
2. secret terrorists cells
2. has a big-data processing system that can scan billions of tweets, posts, pages, videos, and anything else you can find online to identify patterns indicative of terrorist activity. It then crawls that data to identify IP addresses and GPS locations to identify the suspect posting the dangerous messages
3. can also track down who the suspect is collaborating with
4. SoftTouch Bot
1. size of a bee
2. can fly anywhere, get inside any building, hide inside any vent
3. strike while the target sleeps
4. can be filled with a lethal dose of the poison of your choice, and the mark left on the body will be barely noticeable, looking like nothing more than a bug bite
5. used to target people who're hard to get to and even if someone can get close enough for the kill, an obvious murder can lead to greater unrest
6. can also be filled with a non-lethal formula designed to merely knock the target out for some specified period of time

Live DEMO of a Killer Drone

Future Group's CBO Devdutt Pattanaik explains how/why Indians do Business & Management & Leadership differently

Why are Indians so different from the rest of the World when it comes to doing Business or Management or Leadership or Governance?

Devdutt Pattanaik in the below Ted-talks explains what makes Indians the way they are. According to him, it is all deep-rooted in the centuries-old culture / mythology / value-system that the Indians belong to.

A MUST-Watch for every Indian Entrepreneur / Business-owner / Corporate-leader / Team-manager.

Indian approach to Business

East v/s West

Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik writes and lectures extensively on the relevance of mythology in matters related to leadership, entrepreneurship, branding, management, and governance.

He currently serves as CBO (Chief Belief Officer) of the Future Group & a story consultant to Star TV, and a leadership coach and inspirational speaker for many organizations besides Future Group.

Trained in medicine, he spent 15 years in healthcare and pharmaceutical industries including Apollo Health Street and Sanofi Aventis, before joining Ernst & Young as Business Advisor. All this while, he spent his spare time studying and writing sacred stories, analysing symbols and rituals and their impact on culture. His columns on management and culture that appear in the Economic Times are a hit with general and specialist readers. His show Business Sutra with CNBC-18 and Shastrarth with CNBC-awaaz are popular with viewers for their innovative approach and simplicity. He has written over 25 books for everyone from adults to children, to business executives.

Robin's founder & Flipkart's ex-CPO PunitSoni reveals Product Management secrets & plans

Greatest Tech Company ever built is going to be built in Healthcare. It is going to be bigger than Google, or Amazon, or Facebook. Numbers tell you that people around the world spend $3T on HC annually - That’s larger than e-commerce, social networking or search. The amount of data created, the amount of money spent, and the perpetuity in which money is spent make healthcare probably the richest space where the greatest company in technology can be built.

What problem are you really solving? For whom you are solving? Do you believe that you have a solution or at least a thesis for a solution that you can test and iterate on? Do you have problem statement that you are completely convinced about? Only if you have affirmative answers to these questions, then you have a shot at building something great (scaleable/sustainable/viable).

Once you have your problem statement & its planned solution in place, then you have to identify the vacuum in your skill set for that. That is the best way to decide what is to-be-done & so who can do it. That is the best strategy to hire.

Deploy your MVP, let your users use it, sit with them and listen to their feedback/queries - This is how you know what features will become part of your Mainstream Product.

Silicon valley gives you within a radius of 40 square miles the smartest people from every category in the world - and loads of them not just one or two. That’s something that will take some time to replicate anywhere, let alone India.

As a Product Head your job; apart from other know responsibilities; is to [1] be the voice of the consumer [2] bring in idealism to the table about the vision and what the organisation wants to build [3] being the glue to marry the sales and the design and the engineering with each other. [4] not do whatever the founder or the CEO tells you to do - you should have your very strong point of view and you are the one who is actually going to really figure out how to put everything together.

Above are the key takeaways from Punit Soni's latest Facebook Live AMA with Inc42.

Punit Soni, ex Chief Product Officer of Flipkart and current CEO of healthtech startup Robin, is an engineering graduate from NIT-Kurukshetra, with masters degree in Engineering from the University of Wyoming and an MBA from Wharton. He was working with Google before Flipkart roped him as the Product Head. At Flipkart, he helped build the largest marketplace in India and was instrumental in launching innovative mobile products like shopping messaging app Ping, Image search, Flipkart Lite and more. Punit left Flipkart to take a deep dive in the difficult yet vast healthtech space with his startup Robin where he intends to reinvent healthcare using ML (Machine learning), AI (Artificial Intelligence), and conversational voice.

This post reached ~0.15M views, 500+ likes, 25+ comments/replies, 20 shares/reshares on Linkedin. Click here to view the post. Thank you, Readers!!!

Source:

https://inc42.com/features/punit-soni-ama-healthtech-robin/

AI 'Mirai' & Robot 'Sophia' officially join Human society

AI & Robots are finally officially part of our human society.

Tokyo (Japan) just became the first city to officially grant residence to an AI (Artificial Intelligence) Shibuya Mirai which is just a Chatbot that exists only on the popular Line messaging app.

Recently The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia also granted Hanson Robotic’s Sophia (see video below) citizenship.

Source:

goo.gl/r9Km6R

goo.gl/zNZQ6d

Facebook #30 employee Noah Kagan reveals why he was Fired (which costed him $185M)

You WILL BE FIRED from your JOB if you DON'T DO these:

1. Never leak any company's data/information outside.
2. At office, put all of your energies only on office work.
3. Never let your work quality dip/slip.
4. Change, if your role or company's environment demands so.

Beware!!! This is NOT a JOKE or a PRANK!

Learn the above mentioned 4 points before it cost you something very important.

Noah Kagan is today the founder of a successful product marketing platform - SumoMe. But he could have been much more financially successful if he hadn't royally messed up.

Noah's Memoir

When Kagan was 24, he joined a 1-Year-old Facebook as its #30th employee.
This was his salary structure:

• $60000 pa
• 00.10% of FB shares (20k shares)

These 20k stock options would have converted to $185M when FB went IPO.

But 9 months after joining FB, he was fired.
In his book & in an ebook, he attibutes his firing to 4 mistakes that his did:

1. He leaked information to TechCrunch
While intoxicated at Coachella, Kagan told TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington about Facebook's plans to expand beyond college students to a professional social network for companies like Microsoft and Apple.
The news was supposed to come out in the morning, but Arrington wrote about it that night after his conversation with Kagan.
A few weeks later, Kagan was fired.

2. He was arrogant and tried to use his role at Facebook to make a name for himself.
Kagan used to host startup gatherings at Facebook's headquarters because he enjoyed showing off where he worked.
Kagan frequently wrote blog posts on his personal site OKDork.com about Facebook's business.
It got to the point where Mark Zuckerberg pulled Kagan off to the side and asked him to choose between himself and Facebook.

3. His work slipped.
Kagan was working with Facebook's co-founder Dustin Moskovitz on deciding which companies were going to be able to join our professional network.
He searched Google for a list of companies.
After a week of pulling together names it was a smorgasbord of random companies with no rhyme or reason to the order of them & presented this list to Dustin.
Dustin was disappointed, & ran some database queries, & aggregated companies based on the company domains FB already had registered on the site, & added to the waitlist for people who couldn't join yet.

4. He wasn't able to keep up with Facebook's growth.
When Kagan joined Facebook, there were only 30 employees and a few million users.
When he was fired, FB had 100+ employees and it was maturing into a corporation where things moved a little slower and there were more people to manage.
Rather than changing his work style to match the changing company culture, Kagan resisted.
When it was chaotic and things needed to get done Kagan was one of the best people in the company but he struggled with projects that dealt with multiple people, organizing a few months build schedule and dealing with politics.

Source:

Businessinsider.in/How-An-Early-Facebook-Employee-Messed-Up-Got-Fired-And-Cost-Himself-185-Million/articleshow/39832407.cms

every 'Product Manager' & 'Entrepreneur' should first become 'Problem Sherlock'

1 question that all Wantrepreneurs, Product Managers/Owners, & budding Entrepreneurs often have/ask is:
Are there still more new ideas like Facebook, Google, Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, eBay, etc.?

The answer is 'Yes' - a mammoth YES!!!

An idea is nothing but a Problem-solving-Product (notice the fact that 'Problem' comes before 'Product').

And the good news is that there are; and always will-be; trillions of problems waiting to be solved.

Though almost all problems look trivial/silly in the eyes of a normal person, they have the pottential to be turned into the next Facebook, Google, Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, eBay, etc.

To give you a bit perspective on what I just said, consider this:

1. In 2004, if you asked any normal person about having a site to connect to friends and post photos, they might have been quite unexcited about the idea.
2. In 1998, if you asked any normal person what would be the value of a company that does only search, they might have said a max of $1M - As a matter of fact, the Google founders themselves were willing to sell for such a small amount.

Point is, no company at the start ever looks like Google/Facebook/etc. in their present corporate form.

So what should be your steps towards building a Product?

1. Be a 'Problem Sherlock' - Keep looking for problems waiting to be solved - Lets say, if you are starting a healthcare startup, you should spend 4-6 months in a large scale healthcare system. Shadow doctors each day. Have lunch with the nurses. Go for drinks with the CMOs and CIOs. Basically breathe and live the life of a healthcare system from a patient perspective, from a doctor’s perspective, and from an administrator’s perspective. And when you do all of that, you start seeing the problems in the system.
2. Make a list of problems that you want to attack - Pick up the problem that some business needs or where someone would pay you money - This is your 'the Problem'.
3. Don’t worry too much about how big that problem is.
4. Don’t worry too much about how big the market is.
5. Nobody - none of the investors or experts - ever had a clue of how big Microsoft, Apple, Google or Amazon was going to become.
6. Avoid the need to go to an investor.
7. Come up with solutions for it.
8. Talk to your users/consumers to know if what you think/theorize will work.
9. Build a Product around the solution.
10. As you get sustainable, you will find a way to build a much bigger idea and get clarity on the market.

Summary is:
As a Product Owner or Entrepreneur it is your duty to unearth, find, discover, decode, understand a good problem and then work on solutioning it to ultimately build a product that can generate money for you.
The 'Problem' is the key/starting Point and you need to ensure that you make it not just right but also Perfect.
So, be a 'Problem Sherlock' and go search your 'the Problem'...

The word 'Problem Sherlock' is a copyrighted © property of the Owner of this blog.

Reproduction in any form or medium without the written permission of the owner is strictly prohibited by law.

Source:

Mostly copied from Balaji's answer on Quora
inc42.com/features/punit-soni-ama-healthtech-robin/

Economics of Indian High-Speed-Rail Bullet-Train on Mumbai-Ahmedabad route

On 2017-Sep-14 Indian Prime Minister Sh. Narendra Modi and his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe laid the foundation stone for India's first ₹ 100 Thousand Crore (₹ 1 Lac Crore) HSR (High-Speed Rail) aka Bullet Train (between Mumbai and Ahmedabad) 500Km project implemented with 90% financial support (50 Year loan @ 00.10% interest) and technology from Japan.

the ceremony

Just by reading '₹100kCr' & '90% loan' 3 questions immediately pop up in everyone's mind. Let's see these questions & try to answer the same...

Question 1
Why is it so expensive?

The cost of 200Km Mumbai Metro project is almost exactly same. But the question is why is the cost so high? This is because the following are highly expensive:

1. Land acquisition in cities
2. Building elevated tracks
3. Building undersea tunnels
4. Labour costs in cities
5. Cost of regulations in cities
6. New safety features (no level crossings, barriers to stop cows/humans from entering the tracks) & better Signalling
7. New technology

Why not cut cost by using the existing tracks?
Why build new elevated tracks & undersea tunnels?

Because:

1. Our existing railway lines are choked.
2. Over the past 20 years, number of our trains increased drastically and have strained our tracks.
3. Many of our lines are operating over 100% of their destined load & capacity and these are the lines where most accidents happen.
4. When trains keep running without gap, gov gets lesser time to maintain tracks.

So, we need to add new lines, add new security features.

Why not fly airplanes on this route?

Because:

1. Flying everyday is a pain. Let’s say you are flying Mumbai to Ahmedabad. It takes 1.5 hours from the city to travel to the airport. Another 1.5 hours to check-in bags and security check. Another 2 hours to pick up the bags, take the taxi to get to the city. 5 hours. The bullet train will do the same trip in 2 hours.
2. You can call/browse while traveling in a train.
3. There is no air pressure affecting your ears while you travel in train.
4. You can move around full time in a train & also can always carry liquids in a train.
5. You can also keep your baggage with you in a train.
6. A lot of travelers might not be traveling between Mumbai and Ahmedabad, but instead be going to the cities in between [Surat, Vadodara, Thane, Virar, Vapi etc] - Train will support this.
7. Trains do far lesser sound and air pollution than planes.
8. Trains do not need massive terminals.
9. Trains; unlike planes; need not depend on fossil fuels.
10. As India converts to solar power at a rapid rate, all trains will run on clean power.
11. While India will have to import almost all of plane components, for railways India can do a lot of local sourcing.
12. Trains have far higher capacity than planes.

In general, whenever the distance traveled is less than 1000Km a High-Speed-Rail beats air travel hands down anywhere in the world. It would be no-brainer to take the train even with a slightly higher than airfare.

Question 2
Why did we choose the Mumbai-Ahemdabad route and not any other route; like one of the most important 'Kolkata-Mumbai' route; of India?

One most important 'Kolkata-Mumbai' route was not used because it is 3x of Mumbai-Ahmedabad and that means it would have needed 3x investments. Also, the 'Kolkata-Mumbai' route is not traveled a lot by businessmen, while the 'Mumbai-Ahmedabad' route could be.

Look at the list of largest cities in India below:
Mumbai is #1, Ahmedabad is #5, Surat is #8, Pune is #9, Thane is #16, Vadodara is #20, Vasai is #31.

1. Mumbai
2. Delhi
3. Bangalore
4. Hyderabad
5. Ahmedabad
6. Chennai
7. Kolkata
8. Surat
9. Pune
10. Jaipur
11. Lucknow
12. Kanpur
13. Nagpur
14. Visakhapatnam
15. Indore
16. Thane
17. Bhopal
18. Pimpri-Chinchwad
19. Patna
20. Vadodara

A single train line can connect them all and has following advantages too:

1. There is no other route in India with such a high number of cities.
2. This route has much more traders and business travelers who can afford a higher rate to make the line economical. 
3. This route is completely flat with no mountains to cross.
4. This route's population is quite used to train travel.
5. Indian Railways also recently clarified that Mumbai-Ahmedabad route runs at 100% occupancy. 

That makes perfect business sense for a new project. Also:

1. As Mumbai and other cities choke with overpopulation the HSR can reduce the stress.
2. Business travelers can come to Mumbai in the morning and return home at night/evening - avoiding costly stays in the city.
3. Commuters can go from Vapi, Virar or Surat and that would put lesser strain on city’s infrastructure.
4. The smaller cities along the line would develop with such a connectivity and bring their own jobs to even avoid going to Mumbai every day.
5. This can become the blueprint for massive all-India expansion creating 100s of new cities along the route. Just as what railways did 150 years ago.

HSR works only when the train takes about 2–3 hours to the destination. Anything longer, the professional travelers would take the flight.

If the model works, it can be replicated elsewhere:
Bangalore-Chennai, Delhi-Lucknow, Delhi-Chandigarh, Bangalore-Mumbai, Chennai-Hyderabad etc.

Question 3
How do we plan to repay the loan?

Lets only look at the WORST Case and you can understand the rest :)
50 years from today, at 35,000 people a day (that is a very very shy number given the fact that the Shanghai metro carries 80,00,000 people per day) and Rs3000 (that will be smaller than even peanuts by 2070) for an end to end travel that that is 10 crore collections a day. The loan repayment would be in the range of Rs. 6 crores per day and the remaining goes into operating the trains.

Sources:

Mostly copied from- Medium.com/@balajivis/the-need-for-high-speed-rail-in-india-881e7876a328

Hindustantimes.com/india-news/overworked-tracks-excessive-traffic-underinvestment-make-train-travel-unsafe/story-oFyL1NN7xtQF6etLX1tgCI.html
Indiatoday.intoday.in/story/indian-railways-to-decongest-by-laying-new-tracks-constructing-3-new-corridors/1/652543.html
Livemint.com/Politics/AXIyUTEJaxNtX0Yv7npPiO/Is-Japans-bullet-train-loan-the-best-deal-India-has-ever-ha.html