The Return of the Automaton
Just over a week ago I was at a small Easter family gathering. As always there was some chance to reminisce: that embarrassing childhood anecdote about my little brother (again), what happened at Christmas in 2004, and so on.
Working in an industry that is always focused on the latest trends and what comes next, it’s quite relaxing to reflect on the past from time to time, no matter how trivial the topic.
One of the more amusing chestnuts that came up was that time my great-grandmother asked the 14-year-old me what this whole “internet thing” was.
My great-grandmother, who we all called “Nona”, passed away peacefully four years ago. She had lived an incredibly full and long life. So long in fact that she was born into an Ottoman-era territory, then known as Mount Lebanon, where record-keeping was so poor that her exact age and date of birth was no more than an estimate.
This was a woman with an incredible amount of wisdom, renowned for her ruthlessness at the game of bridge, and all sorts of other experience. She had seen empires rise and then crumble under the weight of history and witnessed technologies change the world many times over; so I was not about to take the responsibility of answering this question lightly, if only as a way of thanking her for all that she had taught me.
The internet, I thought to my teenage self, was the technology that defined my generation. I had grown up with it and should be able to break it down in language accessible to a nonagenarian.
I decided to base my metaphor on Wikipedia, which for me was prototypical of what the internet had come to represent: A global, searchable repository of networked information, accessible to anyone and where responsibility for authorship was nearly as equally devolved. “Imagine an encyclopaedia”, I said to Nona, “which anyone can access from any computer machine. Experts (and trolls) from all around the world can contribute to it and make reference (or link) to its pages. Because of this, it’s the largest body of information ever written and holds information on even the most obscure and weird topics in dozens of languages”. I continued, “new information can be accessed by everyone instantly and discussions can be held to resolve issues or solve problems that otherwise could have taken weeks or even years”. Nona was impressed, and I was admittedly relieved to have been able to give what I felt was a fair representation of what the internet “meant” at the time: A platform to share ideas, gain knowledge and discuss. This was 2004: Facebook had just launched (but I still hadn’t heard of it), the iPod had gone mainstream, the Economist predicted e-commerce was about to take off, and the Motorola RAZR was the coolest phone your parents wouldn’t buy you.
So how different is the internet of today? For starters, cat memes weren’t really a thing back in 2004. But besides that, what does the internet mean nowadays? How would I have responded to Nona’s question if she had put it to me today?
In 2004, Wikipedia had just under a million articles, this year it will reach 40 million (some more valuable than others). More broadly, according to a 2003 study, print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002, of which 92% was digital. By 2012, 5 exabytes of data was being created every day.
Assessing the overall size of the internet is inherently difficult because it is a distributed body and no complete index exists — even Google barely scratches the surface of the accessible web — but whatever proxy we use, the results are staggering.
Today, our smartphones and arrays of IoT devices collect millions of data points every second. Machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms digest and produce more insightful data on everything from election commentary to composing music.
More and more of today’s useful data is being created by machines, not people, and increasingly out of necessity, machines are doing most of the reading and primary analysis of that data as well.
It is an internet of machines, for machines — outputting deeper, more refined and more valuable data and insights to us humans.
Automatons have been a constant fixation for technologists and futurists throughout modern literature. In film, Georges Méliès was obsessed with them. Robots, as we would call those same mechanical wonders today, still grip the public imagination. Bots, with their trusty algorithms, are robots too. They are the unsung automatons of our day: Hidden away, disguised as ones and zeroes amid lines of code.
“Nona,” I would have said, “the internet is a bit like having millions of automatons spread around the world, all connected through a web of telephone line. Each automaton has a purpose but they generally fall into four categories: Collecting new information, improving or transforming information, storing information, and finally communicating information back to their human masters when needed. Because of this, not only is the internet the largest body of information ever written, it is also growing faster than humans could ever imagine before. It is able to constantly improve and combine new and old information to help us understand things. By surfacing the most relevant information at the right time, the automatons help us make better decisions.”
The automatons are back in the form of bots and they have brought incredible speed and efficiency to nearly everything they have put their virtual robotic arms to. Today’s world wide web would be essentially useless without them. Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) continue to make these automatons more useful and flexible every day.
At Oxford Capital, we are constantly on the lookout for automatons that we can deploy to help improve our processes both as an employer and an investor.
While Google, Amazon, Facebook and the like have deployed armies of bots to analyse their oceans of data for years, we see huge opportunity in the democratisation of the bot and are actively looking to invest in early-stage ventures that are pushing this forward. Everyone should have their automaton.
Whether you’re interested in bots and the future of web automation, or you’re just a silly chatbot, start a conversation with me below or on Twitter @NadimLahoud.
