Viswanathan K's Thoughts

I’d only heard the same old reasons as to why the Americans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were tired with the never ending war. Japan showed no signs of surrendering even after the war had ended in Europe. They dreaded the prospect of the death count should a land invasion of Japan be needed. Revenge for Pearl Harbour. Racism – it was OK to “test” on yellow Japan but not white Nazi Germany…   Until I read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia , I’d never heard how the Japanese felt about the matter. Remember, before the atomic bombings, the US had deliberately created bombs with material (napalm) that would start off fires in wooden-housing Japan. What that meant is that the scale of deliberate widespread destruction went far beyond what say the carpet bombing of German cities had done – in Japan, they had burnt cities and then dropped the atomic bombs. You’d think the Japanese, even a few decades would be angry, right?   And yet, many Japanese ac...

ChatGPT, the chatbot, has made a lot of waves. Initially, people had fun. Then they were impressed. Next came the fears that it would be used by kids for writing school/college essays, and that it would do jobs that involved generating content in certain formats (like secretaries).   Then people started testing its limits . And found it could clear the US exam medical students take to become licensed doctors. It could even explain how it arrived its answers! While it’s nowhere near replacing doctors, could it serve as a support tool for doctors? It managed to get B/B+ grade in an MBA exam designed by a Wharton professor. Remember, these were descriptive answer tests, not multiple-choice questions, which makes it very impressive.   ChatGPT in the classroom seems to raise the most concerns. Will students cheat and use it to do the assignments? To do the homework? A game of cat and mouse was on. Some instructors started insisting their students come up with the basic skel...

In the last part of his book Privacy 3.0 , Rahul Matthan presents his view on how the laws on privacy should be framed in India. He points out that the Aadhar horse has been out of the stables for a while now, and has been unifying various databases – from PAN to bank accounts to your mobile number. And it has undoubtedly yielded benefits to all – the UPI system works only because the banks and phone numbers could be connected via your Aadhar ID. The eKYC that Aadhar has enabled cut down the cost of verification from ₹ 1,000 to ₹ 60. In turn, that has reduced the costs of the lending sector, which then opened up the market for low value loans, from ₹ 25,000 onwards to become viable. The potential benefits in the healthcare industry via a system like Aadhar are enormous – one could identify which areas are prone to which diseases; or correlate symptoms to diseases in ways no individual doctor can.   That acknowledged, he points out that in the digital age, more and more comp...

People tend to jump to conclusions. Not just other people, but most of us, as the authors of The Invisible Gorilla explain. There are several reasons for this.   First, it’s got to do with how we are wired: “We perceive patterns where none exist, and we misperceive them when they do exist.” To compound the problem, we are prone to the “illusion of cause”: “(We are) biased to perceive meaning rather than randomness and to infer cause than coincidence.”   A related aspect is that we tend to confuse correlation with causation. In simpler terms, just because two things happen together doesn’t mean one causes the other. The best example of this danger is the ice cream-drowning example: “More people drown on days when a lot of ice cream is consumed, and fewer people tend to drown when only a little ice cream is consumed.” This example, of course, is so obvious that nobody would claim that the consumption of ice cream causes drowning. And it’s obvious to most th...

In an earlier blog , I had explained why India’s policy on privacy was what it was. To that list, Rahul Matthan adds another point in Privacy 3.0 , namely most people didn’t care. And why didn’t they care? Because, pre-Internet and pre-Aadhar, whatever info the government had on us was scattered across different databases and (physical) filing systems, none of which could “talk” to each other. The fact that they were silo’ed from each other ensured nobody, not even the government, could stitch all the info about an individual together.   Until Aadhar came into existence. The BJP government started pushing to have the Aadhar ID added to different databases – from bank accounts to subsidy entitlement to phone numbers… Combine that with the increasing digitization of government records, and suddenly it was very much possible that the government could now stitch together all the info about an individual. Matthan helped frame this concern in an approach paper on privacy for the DoPT...

Nuclear weapons wreak the same destruction wherever they are dropped. But cyberweapons are very different, writes David Sanger in his book on cyber warfare titled Perfect Weapon . From the last blog , you’d remember: “The US went for what the Iranians valued most – their nuclear program – and Iran went for what America valued most: its financial m arkets.”   China was using cyberweapons in a different way. Since everything is manufactured in China, it was possible (and suspected) that they’d be installing spyware on electronic devices shipped world-over. This is incidentally the reason why the US is so paranoid about Chinese companies like Lenovo and Huawei. The Chinese consider this hypocrisy: don’t Google, Facebook and Apple turn over data to the US government? America claims that’s only done when backed via a court order (in other words, there are rules and checks), but the Chinese don’t trust any such measures.   Until about a decade back, there was another key d...

My 11 yo daughter had never been to a rich country, until we visited Singapore recently. This meant several first’s for her. Like seeing what a business class seat was (Domestic flights don’t have them). The size of the seats. Separators between seats. The leg-room. The prop to place your feet so you are almost lieing down when you slept. The huge display screens with each seat. Like all Indian parents, we couldn’t resist telling her that we made her study so she could afford this life…   When we landed at Singapore’s Changi airport, she was blown away. By the airport. “Is this a mall or an airport?”, she marvelled. At this point she hadn’t even seen the Jewel section of the airport. She did see Jewel on our way back, and she was awestruck. Singapore is the only airport that can blow a person away, making it the only airport where one wouldn’t mind their flight getting delayed!   We took a cab to the hotel. First time in a Mercedes for her. Impressed again. But then she added...

In Privacy 3.0 , Rahul Matthan wonders why the Indian constitution didn’t have any mention of the right to privacy. Was it an oversight or a conscious choice? He went over the transcripts of the Constituent Assembly Debates to find out.   RK Sidhwa’s speech from the time shows he had called for the “secrecy of correspondence be guaranteed”. KT Shah had called for something similar even in 1946 – “privacy of the home”. Prevention of unreasonable search and seizure was almost universally considered necessary by the framers of the constitution.   Why then did none of the above, except the point against unreasonable search and seizure, make it to the constitution? The short answer is – path dependence : “Path dependence is a concept in economics and the social sciences, referring to processes where past events or decisions constrain later events or decisions.” Let me elaborate on that.   Unreasonable search and seizure – almost every Indian, esp. those in...

These were the lines  from a song  that had become the flavour-of-the-week for my 11 yo daughter and her friends: “All my friends are so toxic, so ambitionless , All my friends are so rude, and negative.” Aha! They have begun to realize how their peer group is. Perhaps they will recognize next that the lines apply to themselves as well? I can only hope.   The other day, she said something smart for a change (I forget what it was). Seeing that I was impressed, she decided it was time to pile on. “Big brain”, she said, tapping her skull. Then she touched my head, shook her head sadly, and said, “Sorry, it won't fit inside your skull, so there no’s hope for you…”.   At least she knows there's a correlation between brain size and intelligence. Also that the brain is housed in the skull.   Perhaps there is hope for her after all…

We think of the tendency to collect as much data as possible about individuals, and then finding ways to make money from it, as a phenomenon of the Internet Age. Wrong, writes Rahul Matthan in Privacy 3.0 . It started in the 1840’s!   Around that time (1800’s), as towns and cities grew in size and populations, a new problem arose: who was a safe bet to lend to? An American named Lewis Tappan came up with a solution. As a lender, he started keeping careful records of his borrowers’ repayment history and thus their creditworthiness. As his data set grew, fellow merchants would check with Tappan whether their customers were “good for their word”.   Tappan spotted a business opportunity in this: “He began to publish his credit ratings in digest form, selling it to tradesmen all over town.” He had invented the credit rating system. He simplified it further by assigning a simple alphabetic grading system – A, B and C.   Inevitably, the same system was copied acr...

It is hard to remember that privacy is not an inherent characteristic of humans, writes Rahul Matthan in Privacy 3.0 . Just think about the life of our ancient ancestors: people who tended to hide some parts of their life (which is what privacy means) were looked upon with suspicion! What was he/she trying to hide ? Why was he keeping secrets? How could you trust such a person?   How then did privacy eventually grow in societies? Matthan answers: “(Privacy) is born of technology.”   Matthan gives examples. His first one is the printing press. In England, Edmund Curll rode on the power of the printing press to print books for the common man’s tastes – “scandalous entertainment” and “trashy paperbacks”. One time, he published one of Alexander Pope’s private poems despite Pope having explicitly forbidden it. Curll also published five volumes of Pope’s private correspondences: “(The printing press) made it possible to expose private writings and personal corresponden...

In recent times, we have seen the Chinese government take on the Big Tech companies of China aggressively, from Alibaba to TenCent. While the West tends to dismiss this as interference and power plays by a “communist” government, Anirudh Suri reminds us this clash between governments and “large, monopolistic corporations” has happened many times in history, including the West…   In The Great Tech Game , he points out how the Medici family of Florence controlled so much money (they were bankers) that it was more powerful than most kings and rulers of the time. In fact, the Medici family’s credibility was so high that money notes issued by them (practically a form of currency) evoked greater trust than the currency issued by the political rulers of the time. Not surprisingly then, the Medicis faced the ire of many kings and popes of the time, who tried to cut them down to size.   Next, he reminds us that both the Dutch and British East India Companies were so powerful that they ...

I work on anaesthesia machines and ventilators. Since they are used in operating rooms and hospitals, there are well defined instructions on how to clean, disinfect and sterilize them. That includes the temperature at which they should be sterilized: 132˚C. That number initially caught my attention because it wasn’t a round number (130 or 135). Why that particular temperature? How could one be sure if that temperature would kill all microbes, even in the future?   The answer is interesting. All lifeforms on earth, or all that we have checked, from the bottom of the oceans to volcanoes to you and me, are made of the same DNA strands. And DNA strands unravel (break up) at 132˚C. In other words, the temperature for sterilization is based on the facts that (1) all life is made of DNA, and (2) 132˚C is the temperature at which DNA strands break up.   Which then raised another question: why is all life based on DNA?   In Richard Dawkins’ famous book, The Selfish Ge...