May

13

AI: finding the metaphor

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Imagine the conversation inside the Silicon Valley marketing department. “The headlines are killing us, Herb! While the scientists down the corridor are dreaming of AGI, we have to sell the damn stuff to someone. And with the best will in the world that gets hard when there is a new story every day about AI killing jobs. And it’s one thing when you automate a car plant with robots, quite another thing when you automate a law office, know what I mean Herb? And then when you automate poets and research scientists and photographers and screen actors– well, it gets to a point when it’s just not enough to say that AI will cure the common cold and read x-rays better than any eyes on earth, you just gotta do something. And what do we do, Herb, when users mistrust us, and feel alienated by our products? Yes, Herb, you got it! We change the product names!“

I am not suggesting for a moment, of course, that a conspiracy of intent has taken place in Silicon Valley. Marketing men no longer meet in the dark and private rooms of restaurants off Market Street for very good anti-trust reasons. They use end to end encrypted messaging systems, instead, Which is why my suggested conversation is entirely fictional. But you do not need to be much of a conspiracy theorist to look at the huge costs of creating generative AI, together with the huge valuations created in recent fundraising to put two and two together and get “dotcom boom to dotcom bust“ syndrome. Since three of the largest five big tech players in the US seem to be betting the shop on AI, with generative AI at its core, and since US economic buoyancy, led by the tech sector, has been a critical factor in the recovery of the global economy from the pandemic, we all need to listen carefully. So how are we going to sell the AI that we have today, call it generative or not, call it AI or machine intelligence, or not? The answer my friends will not be written in the wind this time: it will be written in the titles that we choose for our products and services.

Microsoft started it. Copilot was brilliant. Notice how they dropped that horrid hyphen? Were they under pressure from coders, or trademark lawyers, or from advertising agencies? Whatever the case their decision is now binding in the world of CO nomenclature, which is where AI is now covering its tracks. if you have a Law practice AI environment, call it, CoCounsel (but watch out,Thomson Reuters got there first). I hear talk of a copilot in data fusion, a corecruiter in staff selection, a CoDirector in boardroom compliance. There is a reason for this, best told by my marketing colleagues on the West Coast.

“You see Herb, it’s like this. No one likes to feel threatened. Buy our products and they could eat your job! Never a good selling proposition. While we have been putting more and more AI into process for 25 years, so gradually that no one has really noticed, the great generative AI push of the last 18 months has changed everything. We know that auto pilot can fly aeroplanes just as well as people, but somehow we feel comforted that human judgement, or irrationality, can intercede at any point. So let us position the AI beside you, adding value to what you do, increasingly doing what you do, but we won’t be dwelling upon that in the interim. Let’s concentrate the minds of users insteadon small efficiencies, incremental gains, with the machine intelligence, doing the things that it does best, doing scale  things that we could not do at all, and gradually becoming enabled as the full service process controller, gradually getting ready to slide into the pilot seat. And that, Herb, is when the nomenclature really does work out. The machine intelligence becomes the pilot, and the user becomes the copilot, only needed in an emergency. And while all of this is going on, Herb, we will have time to deal with a little emergency of our own. it’s called the “where do we get the data from “crisis. You know all these publishers, data, providers and so-called proprietary data owners have been bleating forever that we have been nicking their data and using it illegally? Turns out, it’s not even the right data, and for the most part, there is not enough of it. To make our models work, it is becoming clear that we are going to have to find data, originate  data, record data that is out there, but is not yet being collected. And we are having to prepare data for use in different intelligent context, from the cloud to the training set. You see Herb, turns out it’s just like everything else that we do here. We issue the press release on day one to tell the world what we’ve accomplished and how glorious is the new world that we have built, and then wewake up on day two, with the task of actually accomplishing it before us!“

Apr

23

Ivan Klimes: a founder of modern science, journal, publishing

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It has become fashionable recently to praise the work of Robert Maxwell as a great innovator in science publishing. Articles and memoirs have pointed out how he capitalised upon a wider public interest in science as well as greater spending on scientific research to create and commercialise the modern world of science journal publishing. It was typical, though, of Maxwell, not just to have discovered an opening, but to have discovered at the same time, a man who could capitalise upon the opening. The genius behind Robert Maxwell’s genius was Ivan Klimes, who died on April 20 2024 in Oxford. As Publishing Director at Maxwell’s Pergamon Press, he was the mastermind behind the so-called “salami slicing“ of journals to create new specialised outlets for the rapidly growing subdivision of disciplines in the sciences, especially in the life sciences. His broad range of scientific interests ensured the coverage of new topics as well as the commissioning of review articles and books, which brought researchers up-to-date, and in a position to review all aspects of controversial topics. The great monument to Ivan’s work at this time lies in the continuing market dominance of Elsevier, the final home of the Pergamon Press titles that he had created. The debt that they owed him was never acknowledged by the seller of these journals, or indeed by the buyers.

Ivan’s fascination with science, and science communication, came early and remained throughout his life. He started his career as a science journalist in his native Prague, becoming, in those days behind the Iron Curtain, a member of the Czechoslovakian Academy of sciences, and the leader of the union of science journalists. In 1968, he was speaking at a conference in Copenhagen, attended by himself and his wife, when the Prague Spring turned into a Russian invasion. He described driving out of Denmark and across the German border. Turn left for home – or turn right for the English Channel. All of us  who knew him are grateful for the choice that the couple made. In England, he found employment with the IPC Magazine group, working on New Scientist. It was here that Robert Maxwell found him.Two Czech speakers bent on changing the course  of global science publishing in English.

Life was always turbulent at Maxwell‘s Headington  Hill Hall, Oxford, headquarters. Ivan left prior of the sale of the company, dismissed by Robert, and Kevin, Maxwell, then, respectively, chairman, and chief executive of the science publisher. Whether or not this was because of the industrial indiscipline of speaking Czech to the father in front of the son (who did not understand the language) is uncertain. More certain is the fact that they had dropped the pilot who guided them to this point. Soon after they sold the company and embarked upon the frenzy of acquisition and disposal that became the story of Maxwell Communications Corporation.

For a moment, Ivan was lost, and felt deeply isolated. To their great credit, the International Thomson Organisation (now Thomson Reuters) came forward and a plan was developed to create a new science journal publisher with an entirely new look. Rapid Communications of Oxford would not only move quicker to fulfil the niches that Ivan still saw as worth  developing, but it would publish science research far more quickly and get  information back into the hands of researchers with revolutionary speed. Far from  taking the normal 12 to 18 months, the new company promised publication in 6 to 8 weeks. This breakthrough was enabled by the use of a new technology, the fax machine. Typescripts would be faxed to peer reviewers with the request that they were to be returned the same way. As an advisor to Ivan, both in his previous company, and now in this one, I was privileged to watch at  first hand the enthusiasm that he applied, and the enthusiasm that he  engendered in others as they watched him apply it. His openness and his anxiety to serve the science that he loved were infectious qualities. He founded his new company in one of Oxford, oldest habitable office buildings, a mediaeval bakehouse. at the very edge of the river. Standing upright in his first floor office, inevitably meant cracking one’s head against its ancient beams. Yet there, he continued with a succession of new launches, including a groundbreaking, neuroscience journal, until the folding of his company into the Thomson corporate group, and then it’s resale to Wolters Kluwer presaged his own retirement.

In addition to his great skills as an innovative publisher, Ivan was a man of huge, personal generosity, with a real capacity for mentoring and friendship. I can testify to both, having served with him when he was a Director of the British Publishers Association cooperative venture, Publishers Databases Ltd, and having enjoyed his company, and his vision and sagacity while he was a non-executive director of my own company, Electronic Publishing Services Limited. And as a dining companion he left nothing to be desired, especially in the days when he was a routine diner at the Hungarian restaurant, Gay Hussar, where his knowledge of central European cuisines was an education in itself. We should remember a pivotal figure in the creation of the modern science journal,in a  publishing world that has now transitioning into scholarly communications, and for those who knew him, the loss of the most companionable, knowledgeable and empathetic of friends.

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