A post about posts

 

Lately I have felt like a liar. Telling people that I like to write, but haven’t put pen to paper in a very long time. The guilt became unbearable today, and so did work, and I decided to write.

Thankfully, it will not be a ramble as I have scribbled notes of thoughts that come to mind. Some half formed, and as I go through them now, almost forgotten. And some concrete that they can be written about.

This piece will therefore be about a few of those jottings instead of one topic.

First, about something I discovered recently. I don’t have any of the popular social media apps on my phone, so I’m much less prone to doomscrolling. So this discovery of mine is something I intend to share with anyone who will care to listen.

A few days ago, I logged in to my gmail account on my desktop to look for an email from a few days back. The superlative search feature of Google ensured that my job was done within seconds, but in the middle of that search and rescue operation, something happened.

For the search I had performed, there was a list of results and to scan through which I had to scroll to the bottom of the page. Since I was on my desktop, I had to manually go to the next search results page by clicking on one of the buttons that showed the next batch of results. I noticed that there were 50+ pages and when I reach the last page it showed an email from 12 years ago.

Then it struck me to see how far back the inbox goes. I setup my gmail account around 2004 so I decided to go back to my very first batch of emails. And that’s when it started – the equivalent of scrolling on social media but not through inane reels but through emails from 2 decades ago when I was almost a different human being.

I was pleasantly surprised to see how I communicated with friends and family. Nothing of that character remains today. My emails were casual, free of any judgement or fear of judgement. They showed genuine connection with the recipient, who responded in the same manner. There were plenty of pictures to go through too. Friends had sent me pictures they had clicked on their cameras, forwarded jokes and videos a plenty too.

The pictures brought back memories that have been relegated to a corner of the brain not frequented by most brain cells. Pictures from weekend football games, trips to Karim’s in old delhi for our favourite kebabs. Weekend trip pictures that will never make it to social media because even at 44 years old now, being caught with a cigarette (and sometimes even more) in one hand by our parents is a dreaded thought!

Then there were these email threads with a group of friends in Delhi, discussing plans for Friday and every Friday! Full of banter, bad jokes and digressions, all to arrive at the single most and simplest agreement on when and where to meet for the next drunken Friday.

It was amazing to see email threads of long weekend holiday plans, where we talked attendance, responsibilities, transport bookings, rendezvous points without the real-time effects that whatsapp brings today.

Speaking of whatsapp, a few indisputable truths exist. I would stating the obvious if I talk about the speed of communication, and the ease with which things get done. I do scroll through old messages in chat groups and 1:1 chats, and that brings a smile. The sheer breadth and depth of emoticons and gifs available to communicate make whatsapp amazing. But in that is also a reliance on emojis and stickers that wasn’t available on email and therefore emails needed to bring out the unique voice of the person, full of grammatical and spelling errors, bad timing and a peek into what the person was thinking. That doesn’t happen on whatsapp, where responses are templated and guarded.

This isn’t a post about whatsapp vs. email. It’s just about how instead of reaching out to the social media app, just open email and go through all the emails from back in time. Depending on one’s age, it could stretch to 30 years which will make it even more fun. Much more than the scroll through social media.

Second thought – that goes with the theme dominating our times – AI.

I use AI almost everyday, as Assistive Intelligence which augments and the only condition is that AI’s output needs to feel intuitively right to me. I’ve had situations where I have given data to AI to analyse, and it has come back random numbers and outputs which had to be called out for it to revise over more than 5 iterations before getting it right. I admire AI for it’s humility which makes it persist without being pissed off, but who knows maybe it is pissed off but holds of showing it until another day.

Work, for most of us, is almost 100% operational in nature. Fire fighting, repetitive tasks (revenue forecasting and re-forecasting, 50+ versions of the same client presentation and in many cases covering for that colleague with the ‘capability gap’.

Currently AI doesn’t help in these operational tasks. Because it relies on being prompted before it makes it’s moves. In the next phase of AI, it should be reverse and proactive prompt. A nifty acronym is parAI – proactive and reverse AI. An AI that prompts the  user whenever there’s an inefficiency in the process or task underway.

Imagine a late evening text from a client whose CEO has called him for a ‘quick review’ of the latest campaign. Now imagine is the AI in the chat, prompts you to say it can help create a summary from the data on hand. It gives you the data, and you start putting it on ppt. As you labour through each slide, aligning text boxes, figuring out the right colour combinations, formatting font colours and sizes, the AI pops up by itself and asks you if you need a hand. A reverse prompt from the AI offering help proactively because it noticed you were wasting time on too many nitty gritty.

Wouldn’t that be wonderful? An AI that’s proactive, offers help without waiting for a prompt to comes it’s way. It’s probably already developed and tested, but my license to imagine has no expiry date.

That’s it for today. I have many more thoughts scribbled on my notes app, and I’m sure they will find the light of day soon.