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Man and Superman: Two Distinct Species

In order to give focus to some major changes she sees on the horizon, Sramana Mitra has written several pieces that grew out of her original article, Man and Superman: Human History Bifurcates. Please share your thoughts and help get the conversation going. 

In the first segment of this series, I said that human history is about to bifurcate into two distinct classes: the wealthy, powerful, highly educated class that will come to dominate the future; and the useless zombie class that will be the planet’s majority.

Let’s explore this in some detail.
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Man and Superman: Human History Bifurcates

I recently wrote a series titled The Future and also gave a talk on The Future of Capitalism.

In those, I said that I am optimistic about the next couple of decades. I believe, strongly, that entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial capitalism can be democratized, and wealth can be created in the middle of the pyramid using capitalistic principles. In the next 2-3 decades, the potential for distributed capitalism is very high and the outcome should be extremely positive around the world. That is the mission upon which my current work with One Million by One Million is based.

However, there is tremendous inequality due to technology and automation on the horizon. In the 30-50 year timeframe and beyond, technology and automation will create tremendous disruption. 60-80% of ALL jobs will, likely, get automated. Now, that is a scary situation.
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Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Rich Green, Chief Product Officer of SugarCRM (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I think where they’re doing phenomenally well is in advertising targeting.

Rich Green: Yes, is it because they’re just smarter or because they have a simpler problem to solve? Is it much more controllable?

Sramana Mitra: I think you’re right. It’s a simpler problem to solve. It’s structured data versus unstructured data. A lot of that advertising stuff is structured. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Rich Green, Chief Product Officer of SugarCRM (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to switch back on that and say that in the CRM world, you will see very solid adoption and very quickly IF it works. Sales people are motivated by making money. If you can create algorithms and technology that will help them in making money faster and quicker, they will adopt your technology like crazy.

Rich Green: The if thing is extremely important. In fact, one of the things we’re bearing down hard on very aggressively in this first generation of release is accuracy. When you go out and build a dossier on an individual, you’d better be sure that the thing you’re providing to that salesperson is accurate. It isn’t enough to provide bulk. It has to be highly tuned. They’re much more interested in fewer bits that are absolutely accurate >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Rich Green, Chief Product Officer of SugarCRM (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I happen to know enough about what you’re talking about. I know it’s not simple at all.

Rich Green: Yes. In terms of practical near-term use, these kinds of technology are already under examination by a very large customer. That’s some examples of where we are now.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve done a bunch of startups and we also have startups who are doing similar things. Since this stuff has not really penetrated into the customer accounts, there is a question that is hanging around. Will this work? In the history of AI, there are certain things that are working. We’ve obviously crossed the threshold of that question. If you look at the field of media buying, it has become a fully automated procedure. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Rich Green, Chief Product Officer of SugarCRM (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that you are bringing in their activities on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter where they may be publicly doing something?

Rich Green: Yes. You went through an array of names, but I can’t comment on them. That’s a very good example of the kind of data sources that we aggregate and structure in the system in the context that allows an individual to build a system or portfolio and be able to glean insights.

Sramana Mitra: One of the things that neither Facebook, LinkedIn, nor Twitter allow you to do is to look up people’s handles with email addresses. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Rich Green, Chief Product Officer of SugarCRM (Part 2)

Rich Green: The history of enterprise applications is you enter information in the application and you get to analyze it by looking at it and reporting on it. That’s pretty much as sophisticated as it gets.

In the consumer world, think about Google and how much information do you provide to Google versus how much you get out of it. The ratio is one to near infinity.

To really further CRM and relationships, you need to change the ratio of information that you input into the system versus the information that you can glean from the system. One of the first steps in all this is to dramatically change that ratio. It’s essentially a world search problem. You enter a small amount of >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Rich Green, Chief Product Officer of SugarCRM (Part 1)

There is a lot of buzz in the CRM space on how AI will augment the effectiveness of sales people. This interview is a comprehensive deep dive into the issues driving the problem, both promises and challenges.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself and to SugarCRM, especially to what’s been happening in the past couple of years.

Rich Green: I’ve been at the company for about a year. I’m the Chief Product Officer. I came from an Internet of Things company where we had energy monitoring devices with cloud controlling systems. Before that, I was the Chief Technology Officer for Nokia in charge of all the >>>