Original Quotes from Corporate Life (and daily citizenship)

It is a fact not universally acknowledged that intelligence and majority are never on the same side. (due credit to Jane Austen) 

 

What is AI Slop Stress

There was that joke about a doctor's office having this board: 

Consultation: 1000 rs 

Consultation after you have googled your symptoms: 1200 rs 

Consultation after you have googled your symptoms AND spoken to ChatGPT: 2000 rs 

I think i want to follow the same model: 

Advisory: X 

Advisory after you have generated the "perfect" solution document using AI: 4X. 

The breakdown is as under: 

Advisory: X 

Removing AI slop (5 lines where there should have been one, same point in 3 places in different words: X 

Telling you what AI missed completely and you never thought of either: X 

Dealing with that smug grin and delusional confidence: X 

The difference between manipulation and empathic conversation

I have some reputation for stepping into a negotiation room and walking out generally successful. 

One day, a team member said, "You are great at manipulation. You get people to say yes to you very easily." 

Her statement stayed with me for a long time. Manipulation and gameplay are behaviours that i left behind, consciously, after reading Dr. Eric Bern's Games People Play - not because politics is bad in itself but because i realised that gameplay is not who I am. It has been a lonely ride, but since making that resolve, every single one of my friendships has been emotionally mature and very rewarding. When i encounter gameplay, i step away consciously and allow the person to continue on their journey.

So, here are my thoughts:

The output of getting a successful negotiation might look like manipulation, but manipulators rarely get good negotiation results. To be a good negotiator, you have to:

A. Think Win-win. You truly have to believe that two people are at a table because each has something the other wants, and they will both be the richer/better for it. People who think in terms of zero sum games execute zero sum settlements, and those rarely work in the long term. 

B. Be selfless and impartial - a good negotiator needs to be inherently selfless. The reason i get results is that i constantly think of the greater good and inspire everyone else at the table to draw their eyes to the horizon that is larger than our view. If I take sides (even though I am sitting on one of the two sides), then somehow the conversation is sub par and not as productive. 

Knowing what we want is important, but knowing what the other person wants and how they will benefit from it is even more important. 

And then, on further thinking, I arrived at this - What I do is not manipulation. I get people to accept my ideas, so it might look like manipulation to the onlooker. But the core motivation and the psychological processes behind that action are diametrically opposite of manipulation. And this distinction is so important that i am spending a beautiful Fall day writing about it here instead of being out on the road. 

What I do is called Empathic Conversations - I put myself in the shoes of the other person and think - What does this person want? What are they looking for? What is their real need? My motivation is not to twist that information around to get them to give me what i want. it is to ensure that in any interaction with me, their real needs get met. 

Let's take an example. A 20-year-old gets asked at home - "Beta, what is AI?" 

Here is how he responds - 

To dada: Dadu, imagine all the world's knowledge is put in a single computer. Then we assign a librarian like program to that computer. Now, suppose you want to know anything. So you ask the librarian program, and it will find the information you want. It will give it to you in a way you like. So you dont have to read multiple things to learn what you want to learn. 

To Dadi: Dadi, all the things you wanted to say, but had no one to tell, you can tell to this computer. It will give you advice like your sisters used to. It will understand your personality, your relatives and family, and it will talk to you. For your physical symptoms also, it will help you do some quick diagnosis if you want. 

To dad: Dad, think of AI as the skill everyone needs to learn to get a job. Like Microsoft Office. It is like a supercomputer put in the hands of every laptop user. like if i want to know what advice will a stock broker give me about an upcoming IPO, i dont have to look for a stokebroker. I will ask the AI to assume the role of, say, Anand Rathi, or Rekha Jhunjhunwala, and give advice. 

To mom: Mom, think of it like this - you have a friend. That friend knows everything about you and about your family. It knows how you feel about everyone. It talks to you, it learns from you. It learns to understand your moods, your needs. It also answers your questions quickly. It does not leave u dependant on anyone for anything. You can train an agent to set reminders for you instead of remembering everything yourself. If you are wondering how to handle a friend, you can discuss it with this. It talks like a person, but is not a person. It moulds itself to your personality, your talking style, your everything.

Now, look at what the child has done - to each stakeholder, it has given the information that makes AI relevant to them. There is no jargon, though he has explained the essential themes of reinforcement learning, massive training datasets, job viability of AI skills, agentic AI, etc. 

But this is not manipulation. Why? 

A. The motivation- There is no ulterior motive to be liked, to appear like an expert. Could the child have answered like this: Dadu, its a very technical thing. Massive datasets, reinforcement learning, tasks, reward rigging, bahut kuchh hota hai. Very high tech skills are needed to use AI? - Yes, they could have answered this way. It would have impressed everyone. Would it have been useful? No. The child takes away their need to appear important and comes down to ask - How can i help this person understand?  

B. The psychological process - the core psychological process is empathy. While the question from each family member is the same- What is AI? The real question is - What is AI TO ME? The child's psychological process is to understand the information need and then to meet it using words and concepts that are familiar to each user. That is personalised communication coming from a place of understanding and empathy. 

The outcome is the same - the child is now well liked. But they did not start off wanting to be well liked. They started off wanting to help. 

 

On buying a car

I am scared of my car retiring. In time, of course, one will have to buy a new car. And that is the moment I am terrified of. 

Because, now, buying a car means: 

A. No USB port - so the only way to listen to music is through streaming. I don't want to use the internet for something as basic as listening to music in my car. Bring back the cassette tapes please. 

B. My data goes to the car manufacturer - THIS is the real reason i dont want to upgrade that car. Once upon a time, you bought a car and paid for it in cash or loan. Today, you buy a car and pay for it in cash AND the leak of your data to their servers for all infinity. Dear Lord, the car, once bought, is my asset. It is not a subscription. It is MINE. And therefore, my location data is mine. I do not want to pay for a car in cash + data ad infinitum. 

C. Automatics only - My dad taught me to drive. Listening to a car and changing gears just right is micro moments of connecting with him. I would never drive an automatic. I LOVE the gears. I love the connection that sound of the car gives me with the car. (Yes, I have driven an automatic. Incredibly convenient, thank you). But most new models come with automatic transmission! 

D. Proximity Sensors - This is my second biggest issue. Manufacturers are idiot proofing cars. Some of us are not idiots. We like to take responsibility for our cars. We like to know the dimensions of our car and move through traffic or tight spaces accordingly. If you had to innovate, maybe you should have created 90 degree movement axles. The proximity sensors and their beep beep drives me totally up the wall. This is India - 2 inches is "bahut jagah hai". Your proximity sensors are made for god-knows-where and start screaming at 8 inches! They make the driver more nervous than the proximity itself. 

E. The SCREENS - The screens scream. I am very sensitive to LED light-based screens and use them sparingly. For 25 years, I have been able to drive perfectly fine without staring into a large screen roughly to the left of where my eyes should be (on the road, straight ahead). I do not want a car with an in built screen. There is a whole youtube channel playing outside my windscreen! The ONLY thing for which i can envisage using a screen is navigation, and for that, a mini screen in front - in the dashboard, should do just fine. The best innovation done was by Honda - they placed the speedometer close to the eye level, so the driver does not have to look away from the road to monitor their speed. Why manufacturers thought a great way to increase road safety is to force the driver to look periodically to the left and down, instead of the road, I have no idea. But i do not agree with the car manufacturers on that one. While driving, i love the road. That's where i want to look. 

My son said I should at least take a test drive. I tried. Started by asking - What happens to the data you collect from me? How is it safeguarded? What is my right to delete? As you can guess, the conversation did not go much further. My son shook his head and gave up. 

Sam Altman

 

Errm.. as it turns out, I kind of agree with Raj, but I would remove the word concept from his note. It WAS their worst product, it was released wayyyyyy too prematurely but by making it public from waitlist, they created an unnecessary dogfight in the industry - leading to a deluge of non-market ready LLMs, none of which is quite able to deliver as promised - 3.8 years and counting. So, "current tech" WAS the keyword.

10th December 2024: Geoffrey Hinton gave a speech while accepting his Nobel Prize. (No Thank you, no honored-to-be-here. This man used the highest platform available to him to warn against the invention winning him that Nobel).

June 2024: He said the same thing at the AI for Good Summit.

May 2023: He quit Google after being one of the pioneers, citing risks from the technology.

His speeches were actively kept off google search results on AI safeguards (I have experienced this myself).

29th July 2026: 1100 IT staffers and leaders signed a letter, asking Washington to "pace" the development of AI. Signatories include Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Claude Code’s head Boris Cherny, OpenAI co-founders John Schulman and Wojiciech Zaremba, and Meta’s vice-president of AI research Dawn Song.

Note: This is the first time that employees and leaders have come together to say the same thing.

Is this a case of "What goes around comes around", or a case of "Next time, listen to the experts"?

Its not social media

 Dear Human Interaction Platforms:

Terrible UX will make network effect disappear really, really fast.

Human users don't quiet quit. They abandon in droves.

Then bots fly in to fill the vacuum before you can notice.

That is how dead internet is born.

Love,

Orkut

Google Wave

Ryze

...

PS: Its not social media because it doesnt feel social any more. It feels mechanical.