Good tech is like good design

Did you know that Apple has custom microchips to improve battery life on its phones? You will only know that fact if you watched the latest WWDC. (which means you’re a nerd 😛). But for non-nerds, they will not notice. At best they may sense their phone runs faster than before. And leave it at that. When using tools (which technology is.) people just want the tool to do its job. Learning why the tool is designed or made in a special way is not that useful to you. For instance, if you just use your car for your everyday commute. You do not care why the internal combustion engine is designed the way it is. Only petrol heads will know why. Same as the technology nerd learning Apple’s custom microchips. Which brings me to the main topic of this blog post. That good technology is like good design. Where the tool just works. And blends in the environment. Almost invisible.

Netflix is one of the most technologically advanced company on earth. They have programs designed to shut down their servers. So, their service is all was ready for a blackout. Have special server boxes they give to ISPs so your show can load faster. And always know what content you want to watch next. But for everyone else, Netflix is just the place where you sit down on your couch after work. And watch some BoJack Horseman. As you scroll through their selections of Tv shows and movies. You are training one of the best recommender systems in the world. Netflix has top-notch data, science teams. Working on how to keep you on the platform for longer. But all of this work you will never notice. As you just want to pick your tv show to wind down. But that’s also why you don’t notice. Because Netflix spent so much time perfecting their system.

Imagine the amount of work involved to develop a system like that. You need to label all of your back catalogues. Which contain hundreds of thousands of tv shows and content. Then after that, you need to group of this content somehow. So, you map relationships between the pieces of content. Afterwards, you to show the content to the user. Then the user picks from the selections. And you adjust the recommendations from there. From that description that is a lot of work. To have a system like that up and running. And most people don’t notice. Which is the whole point.

Like the car metaphor from earlier. If your car worked all the time. You will not need to know how the car worked. Or you need to do is put petrol into the car then off you go. But if it does not work you be forced to open the truck. And check out the engine. Maybe you must fix a leak or jump start your car. But the car is no longer a black box that you can use without knowledge anymore.

Nowadays most companies now use computers to run their business. From accounting to digital marketing. But most companies don’t advertise saying that they use computers. But it is a given. So, how do you know that most companies use computers without checking? Simple, how do you email the company? Where did you find the customer support number? How did you get your receipt? They all require computers. Like the good design metaphor from earlier. Good design is almost invisible. But when it goes wrong you know full well that the company uses computers. Could be because of a hack in their system, Computer maintenance. And many other issues that focus you to know that the company uses computers as that is stopping you from using their services.

Also, most business systems that keep the company running, can be simple. Many small and medium companies. Can just use Microsoft Excel and emails to keep the company going. As anything related to numbers can be done in excel. And anything related to communication can be done with email. Also, if people are in close quarters then email is redundant. But you don’t see companies advertising, they use excel to run the company. Mainly because it’s just a tool. Just to get the admin stuff done in the company. In a chicken shop, the most important thing in your company is chicken. Not the software you use. As the software is a means to an end.

Now I’m going to start crystal balling. In the future, I think AI will eventually end in the same scenario. Where we have AI tools that allow most companies to use AI, without PhD levels of knowledge. This is already the case. In excel and google sheets, machine learning is used to give suggestions to improve your spreadsheet. By adding graphs or changing the format or colours. But we are still a long way away as we still have tons of companies calling themselves “AI-first companies”. Like I mentioned earlier no one calls their company “Excel-based” or “Windows-based”. As it’s a tool. And lots of AI that people are hyping about can be done on an excel page. With a line and graph. So once the hype eventually starts to decrease and lots of brick and mortar or less high-tech remote companies, start to use machine learning tools in their business. Then we can see the larger-scale uses of AI. As right now AI is concentrated in the large tech companies. Which makes sense. As they have the money to hire the experts. And have the data to funnel it into the machine learning models.

So maybe in the future, we will have machine learning tools and programs will be as normal as having Microsoft Excel. Or having a computer itself. Then people can move to the next up and coming technology. Like quantum computing or nanotechnology. And people start calling their start-ups. “Quantum based computing”. The “Uber for quantum computing” etc.  The cycle of hype can continue with them.