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Ravikumaran Govender
Group Digital and Technology Officer @ Momentum Metropolitan | Driving Digital Performance
Ravikumaran Govender serves as the Group Digital and Technology Officer at Momentum Metropolitan Holdings Limited, where he plays a pivotal role in steering the company's digital transformation initiatives. He is based in Johannesburg and has a robust professional network, boasting over 500 connections on LinkedIn.
Education and Experience
- Education: Ravikumaran studied at the University of Edinburgh Business School, which has equipped him with a strong foundation in business and technology.
- Professional Role: In his current position at Momentum Group Limited, he focuses on leveraging technology to enhance business processes and drive innovation within the organization.
Contributions and Initiatives
Ravikumaran is actively involved in various initiatives aimed at fostering a culture of empowerment and collaboration among employees. His recent posts highlight events like the 2024 Centurion Digifest, showcasing innovative thinking for the future of the company.12 He emphasizes the importance of teamwork and purpose-driven leadership, often sharing insights on how to motivate and energize teams in a corporate environment.34
Through his leadership, Ravikumaran is committed to cultivating top talent and promoting a culture of connection within Momentum Metropolitan Holdings.
Highlights
Beyond the allure of science fiction narratives and the hyperbole of Silicon Valley (soon to be Texas) founders, there's a question emerging in the frantic story of AI.
AI's rapid evolution has reshaped our understanding of computing possibility, assuming a role of a modern oracle. However, there's been a challenge with the way it's been presented to us. The world of AI mainly large language models that are hugely expensive in both capital and energy. Every question goes to this current genius with an apparent IQ of 180...soon to be 1800...but which has fundamental flaws in its ability to really be useful to us day to day. The problem is that, for everything that they know about the world, they just doesn't know individuals, well or at all.
The combination, however, of last weeks WWDC and an illuminating chat with one of the more perceptive thinkers on this platform (she knows who she is) sparked a useful metaphor for how to think about the potential future of AI: The GP and the Specialist.
Today, every single question is sent to a hugely expensive to train, super-intelligence, an incorrect optimisation and resource allocation for what people actually need - akin to a bazooka deployed to deal with a fly. But it's also not easy to integrate into daily workflows because it just doesn't know enough about us to proactively ease life's cognitive load. Similar to relying on a super specialist physician with decades of training and experience to deal with the spectrum of family aches, pains and sniffles. And like all super-specialists, you need to go a distance to get to them.
Apple's "small", on-device model appears to be fundamentally different, a primary care GP with an IQ of 100 (which is significantly more than Siri has been for the last decade), that will probably improve with time, but which is easily accessible right next to your home and, most importantly, knows all your details...and secrets...but would of course never divulge these to anyone. The laughter surrounding the name Apple Intelligence might be misplaced...it could genuinely be different enough to warrant the new name.
What we really need when it comes to making life easier is probably the GP, not the Specialist, because 90+% of the time, you need the adequate intelligence which knows you well rather than the cutting edge savant stranger. And, like in modern health system design, this means that our requests and support from AI should be predominantly handled by the close to home, on device GP which can decide whether can solve this issue or whether it needs to call in the big guns of the specialist. And when it comes to designing overall experiences, and protecting privacy, do we trust anyone more than Apple?
The everyday useful future of AI is probably IA...intelligent augmentation. This intelligence depends as much, if not more, on knowing us than knowing the span of the world's data. And that IA is probably going to reside on our devices.
Seeing the 2015 concept for the Waymo autonomous car, the Firefly, at the Museum of Computer History was quite the eye opener, especially when you compare it to the actual Waymo 1 Autonomous taxi's currently working their way through the streets of San Francisco.
Apart from the significant size difference, the actual vehicles on the road don't really stand out from the human piloted ones alongside them whilst the Firefly looks, well, pretty small and almost a throwback to smaller vehicles of a bygone era. Might we even say that it looks a tad unsafe, being so small and wrapped around its passengers?
Today's vehicles are designed around making them safer - crumple zones, airbags, driver aids and other electronics - in the event of the accidents that are a feature of humans being in the drivers seat. We use materials for security, at the expense of weight and thus more energy needed to propel them.
The Firefly however appears to be designed along the lines of biology, where the aim is to avoid collisions altogether. For the world that we currently understand, it appears positively flimsy, yet that is the kind of design that we can turn to when we are quite sure that vehicles won't hit each other. We lighten them significantly so that they require less energy, making them easier to electrify, and we redesign the interiors around space and comfort.
This can't happen with the Waymo 1 because they still operate in a world with human drivers and human error. But we may come to a time where we are able to replace materials with information...cars that are able to communicate with the vehicles and other road elements like traffic lights around them and, with their significant processing advantage, are able to then safely transport us around cities reliably and efficiently.
We're still at the onset of the incorporation of technology, data and the physical world and the significant changes that these will bring to the various activities that we currently take for granted. Perhaps it won't be long before we see the Firefly and similar on the roads and won't have the feeling that this can't be safe?
