The foremost trait of Izak was his ability to judge people's character. This had made him a roaring success in the start-up arena having funded five of the top ten most influential start-ups in the last decade. To others, it seemed that Izak always knew to invest in the right ideas. However, Izak had a wholly different view about this. He always invested in the right people. He believed that the right people with a not-so-great idea could do wonders as compared to the wrong people with the brightest of ideas.
"How do you get to meet so many of the finest people of the industry, Mr. Izak? ", He was asked by one of the attendees during a conference some years ago.
"Umm... Maybe because I invested too much time on the wrong ones.", He replied with a smirk.
He had always been remarkable in his ability to see through things and their outcomes on a long-term basis. He was again betting on this ability to seed class-A funding on an idea by four young entrepreneurs who had barely graduated. Out of a team of 10 angel investors in the startup summit held last year, he was the only one who had supported them.
"You'll see Neena, as will they. It is one of the best investments I have made in my entire life." He said to his secretary nodding towards other investors who were busy discussing topics that Izak detested.
Now, after almost one year, they went from a team of 4 and a crappy prototype to a team of 30 scientists and engineers with diverse skill sets, and a model that was now being tested on the road. His team had built a state-of-the-art autonomous electric vehicle, especially for the Indian roads. The car was being called P-7 (since it was their seventh prototype). And almost every detail about it was kept under wraps and highly confidential from everyone outside the organization. None of this would have been without Izak's investment and connections to the right people in both academia and the industry. Most of the lead scientists working on P-7 were either Izak's previous colleagues or acquaintances.
Izak was himself a graduate in artificial intelligence, back in the days when the subject itself was in its infancy and a computer agent solving a two-dimensional maze was considered to be intelligent. Things have had a drastic change twenty years later when AI has become omnipresent in society. However, he had an aversion towards all the talk about replacing humans with AI agents. He always believed that there had to be a synergy between AI and humans. That was one of the key reasons why he had gone in favor of this particular startup.
There were other strong contenders as well that had really stepped up the game when showing their prototypes of autonomous cars. All of them were about replacing the human element in order to make the drive safer, road safer, lives safer, etc., etc., etc.
"Making roads safer, that is surely an important issue Neena. I agree. But you can't just remove the element from the equation entirely. What we need is to grow together with AI. Not the other way round where the AI outgrows us.", He had replied to Neena's question regarding his feedback on the other contenders' ideas.
"People bought cars for many reasons. One of the most important of them was the thrill and enjoyment that the journey gave. Commuting from one destination to another is just a part of a bigger whole.", He said as he geared up to continue his monologue.
"You see those guys. They also want to build a safer car by removing the human driver. But, they seem to have given a lot of details on how humans interact with the car. I understand that many of the things they pitch are difficult as hell. But I like that they want to make a synergy between humans and their AI agent."
The P-7 was being made with interaction in mind. The P-7 had myriads of tiny LEDs embedded throughout its surface that enabled it to interact with the outside environment. On the inside, the dashboard had a glossy finish with an interactive screen at its center. It had a seating capacity of four, with rotatory seats. The seats themselves were designed intricately to help the occupants interact with P-7 in an ethereal manner. The seats were composed of an intricately woven web of tiny pieces of an advanced fabric that responded to minute electrical discharges. It almost looked like the scales of a fish. The fabric could expand up to a certain limit when an electrical current was passed through it. When the electrical current was removed the fabric would move back to its original position. To Izak, it seemed like a high-tech version of memory foam. To its occupant, the domino effect of numerous tiny fabric pieces expanding and contracting in complex ways produced a feeling that the seat was alive and breathing. This seat was the medium through which the P-7 could communicate with its passengers by varying the patterns of electrical discharge according to different scenarios.
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Dominion Of The Adversary
Science FictionSomething big and dangerous is about to come. Maybe it already has. It's omnipresent and it's about the shake the life of the protagonists to its core.