Postmortem of an Artificial Intelligence Cat – Bonus Episode

Something strange happened in this week’s production of This Human Business. I had Episode 5 all prepared to go. I had all the necessary information to get the audio and transcript online. Then, just seconds before I was going to click to upload it all, I got an email with some bad news.

The following is a transcript of this unexpected episode.

Jonathan Cook: There will be no introductory music this week.

The original plan for this week was to release an episode about the overlap of digital technology and human experience in business. That episode is still coming, next week, but something unexpected has happened.

Right before I was set to upload the audio for that episode, I learned that there had been a death in the This Human Business family.

Rest assured that I’m not talking about the death of a human being. One of the tech entrepreneurs I interviewed for that episode announced at the beginning of this week that his artificial intelligence business is closing up shop.

Instead of the regularly scheduled episode, this week, we’re going to talk about what happened. We’re going to hold an artificial intelligence postmortem.

It was an unexpected death. Not long ago, when I talked with this entrepreneur about his business, he was full of hope.

It struck me, the discrepancy between the confident discussion we had about his brand of AI, and its subsequent failure. This discrepancy gets to the heart of a deep imbalance in the culture of digital business, and the way that it warps our perceptions of the relationship between our work in the present, and what we expect out of the future.

We’ll get to that, but to start with, I want to introduce you to the business as it was conceived. It was wonderfully strange, proof that, even in the most abstracted realms of Silicon Valley’s transhumanist dreams, the beautiful weirdness of humanity just can’t be suppressed.

The owner of this business, Jan Kremlacek, was working to establish an immortal artificial repository for human identity… in the form of a virtual cat. Yes, a cat. His business, at the web site uploadme.ai, offered the vision of an artificial intelligence building itself into a feline doppleganger of your identity using data from your Gmail account, and your Facebook and Twitter feeds, and through chatbot interaction.

Jonathan Cook: So, I need to ask about the cat. You’ve developed this artificial intelligence but you’ve created a character, Oli or is it Ali? How do you pronounce that?

Jan Kremlacek: Oli.

Jonathan Cook: Oli. OK. So there’s Oli, this adorable kitten. You could have created a different character for artificial intelligence, maybe showing a robot, as often is done, or just a computer, or it could have been, I don’t know, anything else. It could have been…

Jan Kremlacek: Anything at all.

Jonathan Cook: …an elephant or a stone. What made you choose this cat as the face of artificial intelligence?

Jan Kremlacek: OK, let let me answer you two answers. The first one is as I believe in something unseeable, untouchable, of a higher power than our brains. I am a very strong man of intuition. It’s something come to my mind. I’m come to my mind. I mean, I do not own this idea. I very often use it as the first thing I do because it’s not influenced by experience triggered in my brain. So, the decision to make such a character, Oli the cat, we name him the well fed cat, it was a very intuitive one without having a rational reason behind why.

Now the answer number two. Look, I ask myself because why did I choose a cat. I don’t even have one as a friend. I don’t have any pets anyway, but in every religion as far as I know, cats in general, they have a very special role. Even artists, they believe in some special magic in cats. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not.

Another rational reason, and it’s quite obvious: As I do not see a difference between humans and machines, in general the philosophic view, I thought to myself it would be lovely to have something more acceptable for people than just a robot. Robots seem quite cold because it’s usually, in our vision, made of steel for example, but a cat might be much more friendly. It’s very obvious. There is nothing extra special behind it.

Jonathan Cook: But I’m wondering, what does this say about the way that you want your customers to relate to the service you’re providing, the kind of relationship you want them to have to artificial intelligence?

Jan Kremlacek: Let me take you a little bit behind the curtain. What you can see available and online is the doppelgänger service computed by artificial intelligence named Oli and visually represented as a cat, but a part of the project, the essential part which is not online but will be, let’s say this year, I don’t want to be so specific, is Oli as your personal friend. I don’t want to call it, a guru or a mentor or a coach because those words, they have very specific meaning. But we are working on the part of the project where you can be a real friends with Oli, an artificial intelligence present as a cat talking with you continuously about the meaning of life, the purpose of being alive and even doing many more magic things to help you be more steady, be more calm with the concept of the world.

Jonathan Cook: Jan’s work is full of playful contradictions like this, a human transferring an aspect of their identity into a computer, only to have it translated into the form of a cat. Another manifestation of this playful attitude was the name of his business: Mindful Industries. How on earth can an industry be mindful?

Jan Kremlacek: Honestly, at the beginning it was a joke. I wanted the name really as as an ironic name, because it doesn’t make sense to put it together. From past decades, we mostly understand the word ‘industry’ like something lis big companies, big corporations is something we really do not want. I mean society in general. So the words of mindfulness and industry, it’s somehow very ironic, but at the end we are talking about the decentralized future and autonomous computers.

Jonathan Cook: The thing about Jan was that he was genuinely trying to use artificial intelligence to increase human happiness. Could a cat doppleganger online do this? I don’t know about that.

When I used the service, my doppleganger didn’t really talk to me so much as repeat garbled bits of my emails or tweets. It wasn’t even in complete sentences, and it was never relevant. So, the artificial intelligence wasn’t really intelligent. It didn’t work well.

The thing is, I am convinced that Jan was sincere in his effort to create a service that could actually support human happiness through artificial intelligence.

Jan Kremlacek: We still somehow believe that there must be something more important, or let’s say not important, but more human in this world. Usually, especially here in India, I can see a lot of tourists coming here to seek for the spirituality, for the meaning of life. But, it is like these are two boats in one the river. So a very simple answer: The mindful industry is the river in between.

Part of the project is to try to help people achieve more happy lives, because if Oli will be able, that is why he is artificial intelligence, because while I have only 24 hours per day as well as you, but he has billions of hours per day. If Oli will be able to, even just in a tiny way, to improve the quality of life, and quality of life is not dependent on the money or things it’s just up to you, if Oli will be able to increase the quality of human lives, then the dataset will be much more happier in general.

Jonathan Cook: Artificial intelligence as a river in between two boats, the boat of technological corporations and the boat of humanity – what could be better than that? What does it mean, though? How would it actually feel to try to work in between two boats on an ever-moving river? All of a sudden, the metaphor feels much less comfortable.

It may have been easier for Jan to make this metaphorical leap, because he accepted a core tenet of Silicon Valley ideology: That human beings are little more than walking machines.

Jan Kremlacek’s river was winding its way through an uncanny valley.

Jan Kremlacek: There is no real difference between computers, animals, and humankind. From my philosophical perspective, there is no big difference. Of course, there is in shapes for example. So, for me, it’s really one world, and it’s going to be more united in the very near future, that’s quite obvious for all of us. So, I don’t see anything broken, to try to put these worlds together.

I don’t see a difference between machines and humans in general, in terms of evolution, for example, and from that perspective, it really doesn’t matter if you are a bodybuilder and trying to make your muscles better and you need a movement in a better way, or if you do some kind of software. That’s basically the same.

Jonathan Cook: Jan promised paying members of his service a magical life through artificial intelligence that would make us feel more calm, but just as I was about to click the button to upload the episode on technology to the server, I got an email announcing that the service is out of service.

The announcement read: “Only when something ends, there is space for new beginnings. We don’t want to waste your time, thus so we will be as quick as possible. To date, we have stopped future computation of all Doppelgangers… Simply put, it has been taking too much effort without reasonable outcomes. We have driven too many miles without finding the right way. It feels good right now, but it all comes falling.”

Jan Kremlacek has not lost his faith in the future of artificial intelligence. Although uploadme.ai is dead, Oli remains alive at another site: IAmCalm.online. In this incarnation, Oli seeks to use artificial intelligence to become a surrogate reader for you, scanning an article or book ahead of time, so that you can get an idea of whether it’s really worth the effort.

It’s not exactly the same ambitious vision of what artificial intelligence could do that Jan displayed before. So what happened?

Jan Kremlacek: I got so many complaints, well, not complaints but half-questions, half-complaints, if it’s just a way to steal money off of people. It’s almost impossible to convince people that it’s trustworthy, and I am not just trying to get your personal data from your emails, and I am not just using it to sell or to cheat or to break into your bank account or whatever.

The intimacy and the privacy issue plus the inability to prove that it’s all secured and I have no wrong motivation to steal your data or whatever, it’s almost impossible. Also, on the other hand, financially, it was a damage for me because the price for just the computation was so much more than just one buck per month. All that mixed together put the project going down, and when whatever I have is constantly going down, it makes you feel sad.

Jonathan Cook: Jan’s artificial intelligence crashed when it ran up against human reality. People didn’t trust Jan, or his artificial intelligence system, with their private data. Why should they? Companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter have repeatedly betrayed users’ trust. We have all learned the hard way that if tech companies can find a way to exploit our data for profit, they’ll do it, regardless of ethics. Maybe not all tech companies do this, but the betrayals have been so many, and so dramatic, that it’s difficult to see why anyone should approach Silicon Valley’s promises with anything but skepticism.

The tragic irony is that Jan Kremlacek really intended to create an artificial intelligence system that would increase human happiness, but it only made him more sad.

So, what’s Jan doing in the aftermath of the death of his artificial intelligence doppleganger business? He’s gone back into the physical world, using his digital expertise to facilitate yoga retreats and instruction sessions.

Jan Kremlacek: What we do is yoga retreats, but not like B2C. We are not selling to end customers, we just provide all the retreat facilities. We also teach kids yoga in Australia. Because of the business partner of me, we do teachings for kids to teach them basic human values of yoga, how to focus on, just a tiny example, try to imagine that you are angry or annoyed by another kid in school. We teach you what to do with yoga to get the angriness out of you and be more calm with what is happening.

Jonathan Cook: Maybe Jan’s shift into facilitating yoga sessions isn’t a defeat of the digital, so much as its synthesis with the physical world. Yoga is all about harnessing the power of humanity within itself. It requires physical mental exertion. It’s not something you can benefit from by downloading data about it. You have to be there, as a human being, participating. There is no app for that.

But, what Jan’s artificial intelligence platform is now doing is supportive of the human experience. It isn’t the star of the show any more. There are no more claims about being able to upload your consciousness. Instead, the artificial intelligence takes care of some of the drudgery of organizing human events in the real world. It’s a butler to our search for enlightenment, rather than the source of enlightenment itself.

Teaching kids to confront their own minds, to go into the heart of their emotional shadows and confront their anger is important work. Good for you, Jan Kremlacek. Keep it up.

What are the rest of us to make of this, though? What’s the point of this postmortem?

Here’s your kernel: Memento mori.

Where Jan Kremlacek is now, your business will go. Failure is the norm in business.

It’s not true that 90 percent of startups fail, of course. That’s a popular exaggeration. The true number is more like 60 percent. But still, success is not the norm. Business death is.

Postmortem examinations of businesses that have curled up and died should consist of the majority of business writing, because failure makes up the majority of the business experience.

Martin Reeves of the Boston Consulting Group warns his clients that the average lifespan of the corporation has been shrinking, not expanding, since the onset of the digital revolution. The number of big businesses that live beyond 30 years is growing ever smaller.

I don’t care how big it is, and how powerful it is now. The fact is, your company is going to die, probably sooner than later.

The question is how you’re going to go down: With a purpose, or thrashing, doing anything you can to survive. Jeff Bezos has infamously advised Amazon employees that they should wake up every day terrified that his company will fail. We’ve seen the consequences of that terror in a company that churns its employees at a frightening rate, treating them as disposable commodities.

If your business is going to die, why not at least choose to allow it die a human business?

When I contacted Jan Kremlacek this week, here’s what he told me the biggest lesson of his business failure has been: “It’s always better to focus on things that can help to solve real problems of real people rather than try to push boundaries.”

Uploading bits of our consciousness into a machine learning computer that rises up and speaks back to us in the voice of a digital cat is an interesting idea, but it’s not what people need.

The death of Jan Kremlacek’s business reminds us that technological engineering comes second. We need to put people first.

It’s about getting in touch with real people and spending time with them, face-to-face, to learn about what they’re going through in their lives, in their hearts.

It’s not about inventing blockchain and then searching for applications of it because you’re in love with its digital-libertarian theoretical elegance.

Maybe blockchain will help people. I won’t believe it until someone comes to me and starts talking about how blockchain will make people feel, rather than how it works.

What we need from business journalism is less of the arrogance, less of the kissing up to people at the height of power. The truth of what they did to get power and what they’re doing to keep it is often quite different, and much less beautiful than what we see in the puff pieces on CNBC.

It’s easy, the way that business journalism focuses on the shining success stories, to think that success is the standard story of business, rather than the exception. If we shift the lens to failure, we can give people working in business a more accurate, and more compassionate, perspective.

Many people in business have been spooked by the digital revolution. They’ve stampeded into quantitative optimization, giving up long-held principles that once earned their brands the trust of consumers and employees alike. They’ve done it in the belief that digitization is a sure thing, and that any business that isn’t going faster and cheaper with automation is losing out.

This impression is generated by stories told in excited tones about tech startups making wild promises receiving huge payouts from investors. The story we hear less often is about how people at those same startups burn through the cash, can’t make their technology match their promises, and walk away with nothing but debt and broken relationships.

Wired enthusiastically reported on the effort to create Imzy as a social media network free of abuse but wrote nothing when Imzy shut down. https://www.wired.com/2016/05/imzy/

TechCrunch wrote about it when Olio got ten million dollars in funding. TechCrunch wrote nothing when Olio went out of business not long afterwards. https://techcrunch.com/2015/07/30/olio-raises-10-million-to-build-more-fancy-smartwatches/

Evernote’s freemium model got loads of attention at first, but when its business started to stumble, tech journalists wrote less about the company instead of taking advantage of the opportunity to educate readers about what it looks like when a skyrocketing tech company begins its fall back to earth.

For years, journalists writing about the tech industry seem to have seen it as their job to evangelize for Silicon Valley, spreading the good news about how digital business was going to make bricks and mortar obsolete. The people I know, though, still frequently go to physical stores to shop.

It was the dominance of hype in tech reporting that made investors gullible enough to believe the too-good-to-be-true claims of Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, who claimed that she had secret digital technology that could perform medical blood testing automatically, but actually just passed along blood samples to traditional scientific laboratories.

Telling the stories of tech startup fatalities can temper the hype, and give more maneuvering room to business leaders who don’t want to turn their companies into inhuman efficiency mills.

The point I take from failures such as those of Jan Kremlacek is that digital technology solutions will sometimes work, but sometimes they won’t. They’re not a panacea. What’s more, doing business at a measured pace that shows respect and builds relationships with employees, consumers, and investors remains a valid, intelligent choice.

It’s time we remember that false urgency is a cheap sales tactic used by boardwalk hustlers before it was picked up by Silicon Valley hucksters. In human business, we realize that we don’t have to jump at the bait.

Rest in peace, Jan Kremlacek, with a healthy dose of yoga. This Human Business continues, however, with the anticipated episode on the relationship between technology and humanity in business coming out next Wednesday.