YEAR END REFLECTIONS AT 85 AND MY NIECE “ALEXA”

This year is my 85^th and like others at this age, I spend ever more time thinking about the past. There is more road behind than there is ahead, but it is also important to live in the present and focus on the future.

Looking back, the world of my childhood opened literally 17 days before World War II began. The War ended on my 6^th birthday. Today, we would have a tough time recognizing that world. The changes boggle my mind. Most startling is the impact of technology and communication. As a child we had no television, and not even a telephone in our village until 1950. News came via the local daily paper and a brief radio commentary at noon and in the evening. The only financial news was a page in the morning paper that gave a limited number of stock quotations. Beyond that, the people I knew never gave a thought to financial markets.

Moving on to the recent past and present, some things happened in the last few months that I would like to share. They tied up loose ends from my past and have “connected the dots” to the present and the future in surprising ways.

In 2006, I heard about two brothers starting a tech company in Charlotte to develop “voice to text.” I invested a small amount in their company, “Yap.” Not unexpectedly, they needed new rounds of funding and with long odds of ever seeing even a return of my money, I invested a bit more. Then, in 2011, I got a phone call. The bad news was that Yap would not be able to meet payroll next Tuesday. The good news was that Amazon wanted to buy the company. That deal closed, providing the best investment return I ever made.

I had minimal contact with the brothers in the following years. But in 2022, a Charlotte paper article interviewed one brother, Igor Jablokov, that they had taken the “Yap” team to Amazon and then created “Alexa.” It was a surprise to realize that my small investment had helped to make someone/something as amazing as “Alexa.”

Then, in September at a conference in Minneapolis, Igor was a keynote speaker, the first time we had met in 13 years. He spoke about Artificial Intelligence and the outlook for it. Igor now heads another AI venture located in Raleigh, NC focused on “dual use” applications. He mentioned that he had recently spent a week with Ukrainian troops on their front lines in the war with Russia. This raised my curiosity – why was he there?

The answer to that question came a few weeks later from a chance conversation at another conference. Carl Young is a retired Army Colonel who now consults with the defense industry on military planning and execution. We began to talk about the concepts of Situational Awareness and Situational Understand in the military, concepts recently introduced to me by Matt Doherty and Paul Gump. [See this Post]

Carl explained that our military takes Situational Awareness seriously. It is taught to NCOs and junior officers. Our military makes decisions at the lowest level possible. It is not a hierarchical organization.

Young explained the building blocks of this training. Situational Awareness consists of data; the more data you have the better. Data in context is information. The sum of all information is knowledge. Knowledge plus experience equal wisdom and Situational

Understanding - an appreciation of what to do with the facts. Situational Understanding is critical today, and hard to achieve, because of an overload of data in situational Awareness.

And this overload is probably the reason Igor Jablokov was in Ukraine. Young feels that he was there to assess what information commanders in the field really want. Artificial Intelligence will sort through the data overload and advise the commanders in the field far faster and far more accurately than it’s been done in the past. AI can potentially change the nature of warfare in ways that we cannot anticipate. Just as AI is changing the rest of the world.

Igor also mentioned that “Alexa” was coincidentally their older sister’s name. Of course, I immediately began to personalize “Alexa,” and to think of myself as “her uncle.” Clearly a flight of fancy, but it will be as close as I ever come to helping create the Brave New World we are moving toward. And maybe my small investment will help us have a better, more secure world, even with all the fear that A.I. now generates. It has been a long walk down Tobacco Road from my childhood to AI and Alexa.

A pebble thrown into a pond can sometimes generate ripples that extend far beyond what we ever imagine.