FBC – 49 – You’ll Never Guess What This Technology Is For

You'll Never Guess What This Technology Is For.

Today I learned a very interesting fact about a technology me and you use every day. Yet, we had no idea what the real reason behind that technology is…until today.

So today I wanted to talk to you about something. This is what I find fascinating in life. You will learn something new every day and you will come across something that's so amazing, like a masterpiece of creativity that you have to tell people about it. But the thing is when you think that we we've invented everything and every possible business model and everything that could be done has been done, it's not true.

So I'll give you an example. I met this woman. She was working for an airline company called Lufthansa. So I thought she was like a flight attendant or something but she said she worked in the back office and stuff. And she explained something that I had no idea existed. And maybe you didn't know either but it turns out that if a company has a problem, like let's say for example Air France, who are a competitor, has a problem and their plane is grounded.

They can't fly because the plane is broken or whatever. My assumption was that you know if you're the competitor you're just like “oh yes that's more business for me” right? It turns out that it's not the case because you know their competitors have to collaborate. As a consumer I never actually thought about it. So if for example an Air France plane is grounded while some people were flying to let's say New York or Paris, the flight cannot leave Paris but on that plane there were people who were going to Kansas. Some people were going to Miami, San Francisco and lucked out.

So basically, all the connections will be will be disturbed. So instead of this instead of saying well you know tough luck my friend, the companies have to collaborate so that if they have that big problem, the other companies are going to lend them a plane.

So that was her job. She was working in the exchange or marketplace, whatever you want to call it where they have planes at their disposal and let's say American Airlines has a problem and they need a plane for like a month or something. Then they're going to lend them a plane and they're going to pay for it and stuff which is going to make sure that the air traffic stays fluid because one plane can mess up whole bunch of other planes. So for me that was something really cool that I had no idea existed.

You'll Never Guess What This Technology Is For

I love seeing stuff like that whereas I'm like wow you know what? I had no idea this existed. So you just have to look at what kind of problems people have and you try to solve it. The other thing is there is one thing you want to do when you have a website or a blog or anything where you need to create content. You pay content creators because it’s a full time job It takes a lot of time to create content.

And the best thing you can do when you're in that position is to be able to create user generated content. So you provide the platform and you let people create the content. So the best example of this is Facebook. Everything you have on Facebook has been created or curated by people. It's not Zuckerberg adding stuff in there. It's you and me. So you need to find a way to do this. Once you master this then you know you’re gold! And I admire people who can do that.

I was having a chat with my buddy Alexi. And he mentioned something about those like “re-captures” you have to feel when you're on a website to prove that you're human. So I looked into it and what I discovered is fascinating. And it basically incorporates the two elements that I just spoke about a few minutes ago which was the creativity of what people actually managed to pull off. And also the user generated content. So let me explain what I what I found in there. It's a very fascinating.

We found a very interesting article and the article was about a lawsuit against Google. These people were complaining about being used by Google to perform some actions without being paid. So they were complaining that they were working for Google for free. And what they were complaining about is the captures. These really annoying things that you have to deal with you know.

And it turns out that the captures are actually used by Google to improve their artificial intelligence. All right so how do they do it? That's the very interesting part about it. And that's what I think is genius. So when you have to fill a capture, you know you go on this Web site you want to add or leave a comment or something, you need to transcribe these words that you see on the screen in this box.

You'll Never Guess What This Technology Is For

So you're all familiar with this. So very often you have two words. So it started with words in the beginning. OK. So you had a word that was your first word. And then second word was you know that's the first word was Bob. And the second word was Susan all right. So you will have to go and Bob and Susan. What you don't know is that the first word Bob is the only thing that is actually being used to identify you as a human.

The second word, Susan is actually the country. So you're actually helping the artificial intelligence. The code is something that they couldn't decode. OK. So though the whole project was that google were trying to digitize books. And it needed to find a way to do it. So let's say in this book with someone's handwriting or something, someone wrote Susan but the machine is not able to read that.

So they're basically going to ask you what does that mean. And if enough people say it means Susan, then the machine will learn that this means Susan. This is brilliant because ten years ago the estimate was that two hundred thousand combined hours were used every day on the planet to solve captures. And what the company did was that it was digitizing books, and in order to save money, save time and stuff. I mean two hundred thousand hours a day isn't what it is.

It's crazy right. And they were taking advantage of what was basically a niche. And secondly what I told you, user generated content because you would not willingly be doing this but you were basically unknowingly digitizing everything they needed.

So Google saw the potential of this and they purchased the first company in 2009 and from there well things evolved even more.

And I just think it's brilliant. It's absolutely brilliant. Then afterwards you know the morals and the ethics of stuff like people were moaning that “oh you're using US citizens as cheap labour. This is outrageous” and blah blah blah. And I think well Google won the lawsuit saying that billions of people or millions of people who spend five seconds then it aggregates to be like a lot of hours but individually people only spend a few seconds and they ended up getting away with it.

But anyway it's just the whole concept of like how did that first person think about it and then create to his or her new niche and then afterwards used user generated content that I find absolutely brilliant. And I just learned something today. That's what I like. You know you wake up and you learn something you’re like wow. Because sometimes you know it's in front of your face.