Buzzword Factories

Search Engine algorithms, Social Media, Online news have all made buzzwords more popular than before. And that hurts serious innovation.

Buzzword is a word or phrase, especially one connected with a particular subject, that has become fashionable and popular, and is used a lot in newspapers etc, as per Oxford Dictionary. They are now seen in most news articles, powerpoint presentations, resumes, youtube videos and websites. The shallowness associated with these creates disappointments, biases, perceptions that often cloud serious work.

An excellent example of this is AI. Today we see this more often than normal English word like bread. While the world is yet to successfully deploy autonomous driving / self sustaining Robots / make creative content at scale, we already seem to have artificially intelligent everything in our lives already. How is that even possible? Can any of the machines we use today, think on their own/ address situations they haven’t encountered before/ use intuition/ perceive threats and act subconsciously/ survive on their own…?

It is this disconnect that discredits AI due to the overuse of the buzzword. While every technology goes though its own hype cycle, the reckless use of buzzwords makes people look at everything as ‘Snake Oil’. Excess money chasing fewer startups and resulting funding of flaky business models canvassing buzzwords, does not help.

While all this happens, it should not affect serious exploration of what machines can learn and make our professional and personal lives easier. Just as all the buzz and the ups and downs of crypto currencies do not stop exploration of real world use cases of distributed ledger technology.

Let the buzzword factories do not discourage you from appreciating the true fundamental value of these technologies.

Steve Ballmer of Microsoft predicted that Apple will never get any significant market share ( his estimate was 2–3%). Warren Buffet avoided tech stocks for decades and today Apple is his biggest holding.

Every new thing is not Apple but it’s not a Blackberry either!