I hate group projects

I really do hate group assignments. There is a part of me which just wants to crawl up into a ball and die whenever an important assignment has that cruel and callous quality. For some odd reason, group assignments are always the hardest, regardless of the workload. Writing an 8000 word essay by myself is magnitudes easier than writing a 1000 word essay with two others.

All group projects? Or leaderless ones? - TheChive.com

I like to think of it in the same way computer engineers do. Bear with me here. Computers have multiple cores. These cores can only do one equation at a time, though they do it incredibly fast. The only way to do more calculations in a smaller amount of time, is to add more cores. 1 core can do 100 equations per nanosecond, 2 cores can do 200 equations per nanosecond right? But there is a catch. With each core you add, time is lost. They have to communicate, they have to take in the data, divide it up, wait for everyone to complete it, and then put it back together. This is such a problem in computing, that even today, most computer have 4 cores maximum, any more than that and the communication time between each core starts to slow down the computer in a variety of intensive situations.

This is exactly the problem. People can do the work, but splitting it up, waiting, and putting it together, takes eons.

The extended confusion does not come from one individual dividing up the work load. Not at all, everyone divides the work, and everyone has a vested interest to do enough to benefit the group, but just shy of a solid effort. This annoying situation almost forces us to create a leader.

How did the Egyptians build the pyramids? Certainly they did not decide on it together. In fact I cannot think, off the top of my head, of any mega-project which was organised by the same people who worked on it. The builders don't design the buildings. The Kings don't work in the field.

But why? What element within us, causes team work without a leader to be so inefficient and ineffective? Is it work avoidance? Is it something more?

In my personal experience, it stems from a lack of discipline. There is always a calling in the back of our minds, allowing us to feel comfortable as someone organises our lives. Not too the point at which we cannot do anything about it, something akin to slavery, but a neat arrangement of activities. University assignments are some of the more frustrating assignments I have ever worked on. But why? The clarity is atrocious. In order for me to create a neat arrangement of activities, study sessions and whatnot, I have to trawl through terrible websites, past broken links and incorrect dates to find the information I need. And to top it all off, the method for studying is nothing more than dredge fishing, it is impossible, in many subjects, to determine everything that is examinable.

If I were given I list of study sessions, exam dates well in advance, and a booklet of all the facts I need to remember, I would be ecstatic. Which is odd. In some strange way, I am giving up my freedom. I am doing exactly as someone else has told me, and yet, I am loving it.

I think this is the reason why leaders are so effective.

From these experiences, and my habit of jumping to conclusions, I feel an effective way to manage a team, is to enslave its team members' schedules. Instead of getting angry over the nitty gritty aspects of their work, give them strict times to review their work, with a set of criteria to meet. Instead of hounding at them for not completing portions for an abstract due date, give them as many due dates as they need, clear and concise.

I hate teamwork, but I love being organised. In the teams of people who do not hiss, but instead remark on the time which needs to be spent, I feel I could find more comfort and keep on working.

Kings don't work in the field - they organise the people who work in the field. 

Australian Innovation

What does the word "siege" mean? If you were to ask someone 50 years ago, they might give you an example, the siege of Leningrad - The encirclement of the city by Axis forces, where 3 million people lost their lives as they were cut off from the rest of the world. But today, as recently as 2014, Sydney has had its own siege. If you were to bring someone back from the 1950s, and ask them to guess what happened in the Sydney siege, what would they say? Perhaps China invaded Australia, and encircled the city for months, cutting off supplies. Perhaps it was a civil war? Or maybe a rebellion? A large militant force taking over portions of the city?

Trenches outside Leningrad. - Vsevolod Tarasevich

With the siege of Leningrad, and countless other cities, fresh in their mind, they might laugh, and think you ridiculous, when you finally reveal to them, that it was one man, with a gun, in a cafe.

The word siege has been corrupted. And all it took was the front page of a major news outlet, to trivialise a violent struggle against an army of attackers. To turn a powerful word to dust.

What does the word "queer" mean? Well take that individual from the 1950s and ask them, they might give you a rude response. To them, it is obviously a derogatory term, referring to a homosexual man. But today people openly blog about, talk about, and promote the "queer community." In this case, the word "queer" has also been corrupted, but in a different way, arguably a more positive way, though still by way of trivialisation. It was reclaimed by the community, they wore it like armour, and eventually that is what it became.

Words are fickle things. They come and they go. Shifting, transforming culture as they are transformed by culture. Some more examples which come to mind might be:
Feminist, rape culture, racism, gender, trigger, curvy, patriarchy.
Or, from another perspective:
Fresh, healthy, superfood, natural, organic, free, sale.
Or going into a more obscure realm:
Communism, capitalism, liberalism, nation, state, money, job.

One could argue, and I do, that all these words have been corrupted. And I don't mean the legal definitions, oh no, I mean the *real* definitions, the definitions which exist within the majority of citizens. The definitions which participate in society. Though, these example are testament to the ebbing flow of the lingual and cultural river, a testament to our own evolution, they are relatively harmless.

But there is one word which makes me unbelievably angry. Its slow demise, especially at the hands of Australian politics is gut-wrenching

Innovation has been corrupted.

Here is disgusting fact for you:

We are paying Malcolm Turnbull $522,000 per year to decrease our standard of living, decrease our wages, increase income inequality and raise taxes on the poor. Because as Scott Morrison has said, with regard to wage growth, “You don’t get that from taxing and spending as Labor proposes; you get it from encouraging enterprises to innovate.”

Australians have lost touch with what innovation truly means. The word has been trivialised, incorporated into a political campaign, hung up and bled dry. The same way "jobs and growth" means nothing to the next generation of Australians, "innovation" will soon be a shell word.

Where did we go wrong?

Innovation is about new ideas, new methods and new products. It is common knowledge that any individual in a comfortable position wont innovate, there is no need. And equally so, we know that any individual in a terrible position, such as a wage slave, has no time or energy to innovate. And so using this logic, there is only one group of people we need to encourage. The hungry elite, people who have just enough, but not everything they want.

How could we generate more of these people, create more hungry elite? Should we tax the poor more? Well, that would put some of the hungry elite, people in the lower-middle class, into a terrible position. So no, it would be detrimental, and yet the government has done this. Should we tax the rich less? Well that would put some of the hungry elite, the upper-middle class, into a comfortable position. So no, it would be detrimental, and yet the government has done this. We are throwing money at incubators and accelerators, and yet we are not at all encouraging the development of these types of people.

If this is what innovation looks like. I don't want any of it. - The Guardian

Do we innovate by crippling our university students with even more debt, by deregulating education? No, that would be detrimental, and yet the government plans to.

Do we innovate by deregulating the economic advice and banking sector, allowing large banks to manipulate and snuff any potential startups looking for advice? Or further cripple the economy with shoddy practices. No, that would be detrimental, and yet the government has done this.

Sure there is more money floating around, but money doesn't generate ideas, people do, and Malcolm Turnbull and his party seem adamant in slowly whittling away the prosperity of future generations, making it harder and harder for individuals to innovate.

I will may never be able to afford a house. Innovation is a shell word. Do not be fooled by their advertising. They care very little about you and your future, and very much about their donors. They provide startup funding because they know you'll give it back to them. After all, neo-liberalism has a daughter named nepotism.

Words are fickle things. Some are harmless deviations, existing in micro-cultures, some are powerful components of a propaganda machine, powerful enough to deceive my course co-ordinator, and countless others.

If I hear the word innovation again, I'm going to puke.

This Orange Door is so Inviting

Let's talk about fatalism.

Credit: Realityzone.blogspot.com

That disturbing sensation which starts deep in your gut, making its way up slowly until is clasps your chest. A feeling of dread soothed subtly by a cleansing realisation.

"Humanity is doomed."

Well maybe I'm being a bit too dramatic, too pretentious. I seem to be very good at that. But for me, the dramatisation of life is an escape. The world is a story, a grand play. The bad guys win because in this particulary tragedy, it was meant to be.

That is just how humans are.

But you don't feel this. I am sure of it. So stop reading, and watch this video. The whole thing. Just for a moment.

How do you feel? A well spoken gentlemen just turned your attention towards the performance. An Empire of Chaos, the slow rise of a once dead fascist state, the erosion of rights, lies, bureaucracy and rich, sociopathic kings. How does the story end? Do you want to stay and watch it to the end? Maybe it has dragged on too long. Maybe the past was brighter.

Maybe the past was an error in our programming. Maybe it's always like this? Always filled with lies, walking forwards and backwards into infinity.

We have been fighting forever, oppressors and victims indistinguishable from each other. Here is a brief history of Jerusalem to a rather relaxing tune:

This sort of gut wrenching detail is depressing. My bubble of relative peace is shattered and I have to wake up to a sick world. A fucked up world. A dreadful paradox:

People are distracted > evil prevails > evil entertains > people are distracted.

Should I stay in this sick world?

---

I talked to my mother recently. She thought it was ridiculous how people would design some jumpers which stopped just short of a wearer's lower back. How terrible they must be at keeping people warm. I said I thought it was rediculous how we weren't allowed to speak about what happens on Manus island. She looked down, "Could you stop bringing conversations back to things like that? It's depressing."

People are distracted > evil prevails > evil entertains > people are distracted.

---

What am I supposed to do? It becomes harder and harder to distract myself. I've seen too much of this terrible play, as cheezy as that sounds. Every country in the performance is a piece of shit. Every actor is just an animal in a suit. Expendible, sometimes only appearing for one line of dialogue. Disgusting and manipulative.

And so I stand alone between two doors.

A bright orange door. Made from painted wood. A bronze handle, stained with dried blood. This is the door of the man who has seen too much. The man who wants to defy the play. The man who wants to crawl onto the stage and stab the actors to death. The man who wants to become an activist, to play the game dirty. Terrorism, assassinations.

Justice.

Then there is the blue door. Made from plastic, with a steel handle. This is the door of the man who wants to be distracted. Who wants to meld into the paradox. The man who sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil. He never attended the play, he was off doing his own thing. People say they've seen it, they say the play was life-changing. The man calls them crazy. He's the normal one, and he loves it.

Ignorance.

But we always forget about the third door. A black door made from cast iron. This is the backstage door. Where the play can be veiwed in all its detail. The actors memorizing their lines. The set pieces being moved into place. The man who steps through this door will either subsist in eternal agony, or accept the inevitability of it all. See the play as something unique, see its flaws, its human flaws. See how contrived and irrational everything really is. Try to guess what comes next.

This man embraces fatalism.

So, reader, or more correctly, fellow classmate form GC (the only people who read this stuff anyways) which door should I walk through?

Orange, Black or Blue?

And if you're walking my way, can I walk with you? ~ That was an intentional rhyme ;)

Keep on Running

I say something big and bold, I might even shout to myself: "Moral integrity is something to be celebrated!" it feels so right, and yet I pause for a moment.

"Well... I guess if you aren't part of the ruling class? If you aren't a politician, if you aren't one of the most untrustworthy people on the planet, then moral integrity is something to be celebrated?"

But then I think a little further.

"Oh wait, many celebrities don't posess any real moral integrity. Having divorces to sell magazines. Their entire job revolves around lies, scandals, the gossip which drives that great media machine. So maybe, as long as you aren't part of the ruling class, or a celebrity, moral integrity is something to be celebrated?"

Still thinking, door after door opens up.

"Oh, wait. Businessmen are often unethical, betraying the moral framework contructed in their youth in order to persue a profit. Joe Hockey protested against the abolishion of free university education, and look at him now. Okay so, moral integrity is something to be celebrated as long as your aren't: a politician, celebrity or businessman? Right?"

Dissatisfaction.

"But that doesn't work either! Just looking at France, two generations ago they were banning short skirts, and now I guess they're banning long skirts? Banning people covering up their skin? I swear showing skin was considered immoral not too long ago, in fact to some it still is. So maybe moral integrity is celebrated if you aren't part of the popular opinion? Or a politician? Or a celebrity? Or a businessman?"

Morality, modesty, what do they actually mean?
Jufnitz - Reddit.

Do you see the problem here?

People talk about goodness, as if it's an immovable code of laws, standing strong against the winds of time. And yet, time and time again we see that morality can be warped and altered.
Just as ideas live and die, so too can morals and ethics

Like whispers on the back of a butterfly, they flutter amongst the masses of opinion. All it takes is a destabilising event, a gust of wind, and the whole operation plunges into the ground.

With this thought in mind, and this perception: "Morality is fickle." Entrepreneurialism is just a little bit more terrifying.

What are you really trying to do? Create an ethical product. Create something which will change the world? Do something good? Entrepreneurialism isn't just about the idea, but the implementation.

Your freedom is limitless.

Anything you do can be seen as ethical.
Anything you do can be seen as immoral.

Just imagine, you have a bright idea to improve the quality of society in every way. You can increase productivity, lower the government's spenditure on healthcare, improve the education system and reduce poverty and inequality. Just imagine how that idea would be received? Everybody would do it, it would become a trend which would sweep the entire world! And it did. In the 1930s eugenics was an integral part of government policy in most developed nations on Earth.

And then the war began.

The creators of this bright idea were were shunned, dismembered and left broken and bleeding in this new, post-war world.

This morum-mutatio, this drastic shift in morality, is not rare. And neither you nor I are safe from its effects. Any and all of our ambitious projects, any attempts at touching the silver coulds of success, come with the deep rumble of this sleeping demon, a soft reminder that at any time we could be crucified for the ideas we hold.

The birth of Rashidun and the spread of Islam.
The definition of morality in Arabia was changed for ever.
Wikimedia Foundation.

Maybe we should all handle our morals lightly? Maybe we should be ready to sprint away from contention?

Or maybe we should hold our ground?

I personally believe, in the end, if you aren't doing it because it makes you feel good, whatever that could mean, then that rumbling demon will eat you alive.


Morality is fickle. You freedom is limitless. Beware the morum-mutatio. And keep on running.

Lethargic Prince

A 'Successful Life' calls for work. Work in the early mornings before the sun has even risen. Work late at night when the world should be quiet. Any trashy online article about success lists things such as perseverance and taking action.

Ever since I was little, I was given the number 8. A magical value for the amount of sleep which will allow you to perform at your best. Every night since, I have tried, so very hard, to achieve this number and beyond. Sometimes I get home late, and find myself in my bed drifting off to sleep minutes past 1am. I comfort myself. I need only wake up at 9am. I must have more than 8 hours of sleep.

Recommended Sleep Chart
- National Sleep Foundation

This number is addictive. A cage. Only when my anxiety is drowned out with drink or physical exertion do I have the capacity to perform with less than 8 hours sleep. Only when the real world drifts away can I wake up feeling refreshed, not knowing the time of day.

Or maybe it is the excitement. Days go by and nothing is really invigorating. Sure I go out, have fun with my friends, but fun is not something which needs to be earned. I can sleep all day and still have 'fun'. I can still subsist, nothing really cares if I'm well rested, or lethargic. Only I can care.

And so here in lies a problem.

Excitement gets get me out of bed, regardless of my 8 hour addiction. Entrepreneurship should be exciting, it is exciting. And yet, I just can't do it. It is as if, what excites me in the morning is completely different to what excites me during the day.

I have tried countless measures. Left my windows open, set really loud alarms, gotten my parents to smash on my door and yet nothing works. Nothing works because, in that moment, I don't want anything to work. In the early morning I am a different person.

So now there is a war. Night Sam v Day Sam. A terrible battle between the Lethargic Prince and the Ambitious Duke. There has to be a way to resolve this fight without a costly war? And there is.

The Duke has something the Prince never acquired. A capacity for ideation, research and creativity. What would a minimum viable product for my terrible sleeping habits look like? A thought? A process? A physical object?

After much deliberation, research and ideation, I have found something wonderful. And I'm not the first.

It's cheap, sustainable, actionable and solves the problem in a novel way. I bring you, the Jolt. The idea has been around for a while. As soon as you gain consciousness in the morning, you spam. Yes that's right, contract all of your muscles at once, in one sharp motion. Suddenly your mind clears, and you can more easily get out of bed.

This Jolt hijacks a neural pathway which is also the case of a terrible mental illness some people face. Known as a hypnic jerk, affected individuals feel a falling sensation as soon as they are about to sleep, due to mixed up muscle single interpretations. This hypnic jerk is enough to keep someone wide awake for ridiculous amounts of time.

Scientists believe that the hypnic jerk could be "an archaic reflex to the brain's misinterpretation of muscle relaxation with the onset of sleep as a signal that a sleeping primate is falling out of a tree. The reflex may also have had selective value by having the sleeper readjust or review his or her sleeping position in a nest or on a branch in order to assure that a fall did not occur."

View from CN Tower, Toronto
Photographer - Reuschp

In analogy, the Lethargic Prince is really scared of heights, and any tall place will make him weak. In the early morning while he walks along the castle walls, have an assassin push him close to the edge and demand he surrenders. The Ambitious Duke will take control, and you will have you kingdom back.

I have only just discovered this wonderful wake-up routine, and I hope to use it now and into the future. I will continue to fully develop my strategy and never wake up at 12pm ever again.

Motivate the Existent

Like any ambitious entrepreneurs, or perhaps like any arrogant younglings in this modern society, my business team made some assumptions.

Our soon-to-be product, a gamification platform aiming to engage people with real-world issues through competition, was designed before any research was done! Oh the shame! The researchers shiver in their sleep! But we pushed through, and as expected, our results confirmed our assumptions, allowing us to steam ahead even faster. However, while our results answered some questions, it also made us think, and ponder and question once again. Gotta love science eh?

Our experiment was simple, we presented people with twelve subtly different cards, all images of a ranking system, with the participant ranked in the middle between two friends. We would ask the participant to order these cards into three piles based on how motivated or demotivated the different representations of their score made them feel. Some cards were realistically scaled, some were unrealistic. Some cards had lettered ranks, extra information and showed the average score for the entire world, some cards showed none of this. This diversity was designed very carefully, and what we found was interesting, though not that surprising.

Card "B" an unrealistic, yet appealing way to be ranked.

The most motivating card was the one with the most goals.  Card “B” as shown above contained the participant’s score up top, with each person on the ladder also possessing their own rank, the lower the rank the better. I suspect this card was chosen because of the diversity of information and the ability to visualise the future feelings of success in many ways. The rank below the participant’s name was connected to its own goal, the goal of becoming first. While the visual position of the participant on the ladder compared to their friends was its own goal as well. Many people who participated in this experiment also said that adding the world average into this particular representation would have made it more motivating. This effect seems to be deep rooted in our psychology.

We speculated further and created a simple rule: People are more motivated by extra possibilities for positive comparison.

The rank, the comparison to friends, the score, the city average, and even the world average, all give people the capacity for positive comparison. But this doesn’t stop a depressed pessimist from finding the demotivating factors in card “B” (as some anecdotal data we collected has shown), though they are unlikely to play the game in the first place.

This image is amazingly pessimistic. Disorientating and demotivating.

Looking back I realise that this is the way I motivate myself. The times when I am most willing to continue something, is when I can see the detail in where I stand. Just this week, the microbiology lecturer showed us a breakdown of how students scored overall. And while some people, especially those who failed, would be disheartened, with my 'decent' performance I found my mantra shifted, I was comparing myself to others in the room, I felt good, but I also felt like I could improve. I wanted to 'win'.

This is not true for all people. Card "B" while overwhelmingly popular, is just that, 'popular'. Motivation, we have found, is deeply rooted in past experience. When I performed this same experiment on a passer-by at my local shops, he did not place any cards into the motivating pile. When I asked him why, he simply replied "Games ruined my life." So I smiled that awkward smile, and thanked him for his time. At least I learned something, and didn't give this poor chap mobile-game-Vietnam flashbacks in vain. People vary far more than we expect. Maybe that should be rule 2?

With that now in mind, we have a whole second set of data to gawk at! The demotivators!

Card "L" a minimalistic card. Enough said.

Card "J" a disturbingly realistic card.

Makes you think about your place in the world.

Or not, I don't really know.

The most demotivating cards were card “J” and card “L” shown above. But each seems to be demotivating in its own way. Card “L” is simply the opposite of card “B”. Lacking in almost all detail. This representation of the participant’s score is not even that, not even a representation (it is not realistically scaled). Such a lack of detail makes it impossible for people to visualise their goals, to imagine what it would look like or feel like to improve.

Card “J”, however, is an interesting case. It is a realistic representation of scores in the world, but it also, only includes the world average. While we can only speculate, I feel it has something to do with existentialism. There is so much space between you and your apparent goal, you cannot help but feel a little bit overwhelmed with the task at hand when looking at this card. Even Forbes suggests that you should start small. This card forces you to look at the big picture as it is.

This speculation, if I’m right, leads to some interesting concepts about philosophy, and entrepreneurship. Being an entrepreneur is not just about being an opportunistic, business-minded individual, it is even more heavily characterised by the motivation entrepreneurs can draw upon in order to accomplish their goals. There is a reason why many of the biggest problems humanity has ever faced, and is currently facing, are not being tackled by entrepreneurs alone.

Of course entrepreneurs try their best to solve ‘problems’ such as income inequality, but their lack of an existential view on the issue, or perhaps an existential view’s lack of motivational potential, leads to these talented people chasing after shadows. Trying to tackle inequality by educating a minuscule number of people will not solve the problem of a privatised and monetised education system, or stop capitalism’s desire for an ignorant, impulsive population. (Check out this delicious right-wing propaganda for more details!)

But how can we have the best of both worlds? The large scale change with the small scale motivation? That is where Catch (our business) hopes to succeed! By using the motivating qualities of card "B", we hope that more people will be ready and willing to solve the real problems humanity faces, now and into the future.

But will we succeed? Another question, another fun little experiment, I almost can’t wait!

Oil and Water

Some companies produce a product and sell it directly to the people, or to distributors who then sell it to the people. These companies are the ones we see most often, all the ads we see, the stores we enter, the apps we download mostly fall into this category. This entire business position is, however, simply the surface layer of a much richer market. Selling to other companies.

I remember I was shocked to find a picture of a magazine online, this catalogue of products was completely different to the ones I normally see on the rare occasions I go shopping.  This catalogue of products was targeting other companies, and contained things like industrial equipment, bulk services, logistics products and technology. I thought I was delving into a whole new world, a secret layer of oil sitting atop the water. But I soon learned, after speaking to the CTO of MyWave, James Ladd, that these two worlds can collide. And in that collision, value is created.

MyWave is a technology company for sure, and a perfect example of how dynamic a technological product can be. MyWave has developed Frank, an intelligent assistant much like Siri, but with a greater problem solving ability and a greater skill set. Frank can soon be downloaded and used to find restaurants nearby, check the prices of the housing market, and do much much more. An example of what Frank offers can be seen in this video:

The technology for creating Frank has been around for quite some time, though the ambition for taking on such a project in a market which already contains assistants such as Siri and Cortana, is quite recent. MyWave is one of the few companies who has this ambition.

The business, an ‘other incorporated entity’, lives in Australia, and flaunts its female CEO, Geraldine McBride, something rare for a technology or app company to have. She claims that their company’s point of difference, their unfair advantage is the fact that their intelligent assistant gives users control over their data collection, and which brands can use it. This point of difference alone has raked in as much as $4 million, which they have used to double their Melbourne based development team. Her point on privacy, however, I feel is merely the water sitting quietly beneath the more important point of difference, the unfair advantage for the other market, other businesses.

Frank is a different sort of intelligent assistant, not only because it values privacy. The clever people at MyWave, led by their CTO, James Ladd, created this intelligent assistant to be transferrable and adaptable. Frank can integrate into any other app which requires a pseudo intelligence to operate. Something which is not valuable to the everyday citizen, but extremely valuable to corporations. Here is a keynote where McBride explains further:

This value has already been confirmed with MyWave gaining their first customer while still in development. SaveAwatt is a New Zealand based company which allows power companies to access markets which they would normally never be able to access. Most people will never switch power companies as long as they don’t move house, simply because the hassle and bureaucratic complexity is too great for the everyman. But SaveAwatt found their secret weapon. Using MyWave’s Frank. 

With Frank people can switch power companies automatically, without the hassle, and SaveAwatt can get ludicrous commissions from power companies who now have access to the market.

MyWave’s technology, while not solving any problems on its own necessarily (there are many intelligent assistant apps around), has an enormous capacity to assist other companies in solving other problems. This is all because the development took adaptability and transferability into consideration. Frank can be used for the purpose of another app, in situ, something which has not been done with an intelligent assistant yet so far.

In a sense, MyWave and Frank do not represent how technology is profitable on its own, because quite frankly, creating yet another intelligent assistant is not particularly exciting. MyWave’s Frank represents how the ability to integrate, to assist a wide variety of clients, and remain adaptable is essential for gaining the lead in the app and technology industries. Geraldine McBride has said that they are a leader in intelligent assistant privacy and customer management, but I completely disagree. I believe Frank is a leading example of adaptability, something more valuable than money itself.

I feel this picture sums up life for most of us.

Because, as we all know, even though something might be better suited to our needs, if acquiring it is difficult, we really wont bother. Humans are lazy, stupid things, and that is why businesses and customers need something adaptable, like Frank.

Start up, Cash in, Sell out

Future technologies, especially those portrayed in post-apocalyptic sci-fi, the source of all my fears about the world, are often extremely dangerous. It is as if the writers joyfully turn to the Earth and imagine how our fragile ecosystem, economy and society would respond to some future threat. Some notable examples are: alien invasion, super-virus, alien super-virus, meteor, nuclear war and artificial intelligence.

AI is cause for concern. It is a future technology which walks to the heights of life’s complexity, on a road never previously travelled. And while AI may be disastrous in the future, as Elon Musk and others predict, here and now AI is innovative and profitable.

A Melbourne based private enterprise has essentially used artificial intelligence to cure blindness.

Aipoly is at the forefront of implementing practical AI technology. They have developed an app using machine learning to identify objects in the world using a smartphone’s camera, and then tell the user what these objects are by saying them out loud. Aipoly is now able to identify over 5,000 objects. Here's how it works:

The app uses algorithmic processes in what is known as a convolutional neural network. This network is inspired by the biological visual cortex, so in a sense this app is acting almost exactly like another set of eyes. This neural cortex, much like our own, is trained with over 300,000 images until it ‘learns’ what each object is called. Which I personally think is freaking amazing.

The official description of Aipoly is as follows: “Aipoly is an object and colour recogniser that helps the blind, visually impaired, and colour blind understand their surroundings.”

But as with all new technologies, new opportunities present themselves in unexpected ways. The company has noticed that many of its app sales come from Japan, where they have found people using their application to learn English. As a student who had to drop Chinese in order to survive another year at university, I would pay extensively for a tool such as this.

This technology has possibly hundreds more uses we don’t know about yet.

And Aipoly is providing this all, for free.

Initially I thought this was a little strange, this technology could so easily be monetised. Even if the app costs 50 cents, thousands, or possibly millions of dollars would come their way, with little inconvenience for the customer. I decided to look up their Australian business number, because articles allude to this company being Australian based. And I found nothing.

I searched further, and it seemed that out of the cofounders: Australian entrepreneur Marita Cheng, Swedish developer Simon Edwardsson and Italian entrepreneur Alberto Rizzoli, one of them may have registered the company elsewhere. But the Italian, Swedish and even the American registries yielded nothing. Singularity University, the place where development is taking place, would surely have answers about business structure. But alas, I could not find it.

This situation is very interesting to me. This new and innovative technology, so easily profitable is being given away for free by a company with no official record (as far as I know). From this it could be deduced that Aipoly is a marketing front, for the real but secretive business.

Selling their technology to other companies.

Yes, the conspiracy is alive and well with this particular company. It is known that large conglomerates like Apple and Alphabet love to buy new technologies, and monetise them.

Just recently I was looking at an app designed by a British student that summarised news articles called Summly. I was even going to write a blog on it, but I quickly found out that his technology was bought by Yahoo for $30 million in March of 2013.

Which leads me to an interesting thought.

If the goal of your enterprise is not to develop a product, but simply to rise into the echelons of the upper class, then climbing up the ladder may not seem appealing to you. Instead, if you create a valuable technology, the giant deities of the corporate world will name you their champion and pull you up into paradise. No climbing needed.

They are corporate deities indeed, here is one example on a channel just full of them:

This could be completely wrong. There is every chance that Marita Cheng, Simon Edwardsson and Alberto Rizzoli are developing this app for free out of the kindness of their hearts. And the apparently vague and mysterious business structure is simply due to my own incompetence.

But then again, being kind does not put food on your plate, or buy you that new car.

At least, not in this capitalist meritocracy.

I think the co-founders of Aipoly know this, and are just waiting to be pulled up into the clouds. They are spreading their app across the world and proving its value. I think it wont be long before a conglomerate such as Alphabet comes knocking. But only time will tell.