Viswanathan K's Thoughts

We know that any technology or invention can be used for good or bad. The bad effect is easy to see when it is a direct consequence – guns kill, for example. Direct. But it is harder to see the bad effect when a technology or invention sets off a chain of effects, and it is the last effect that is bad.   This question in my 13 yo daughter’s History book opened my eyes to this: “How did the Industrial Revolution lead to colonialism?” The answer goes like this. The Industrial Revolution increased production tremendously while also making a lot of items affordable. This set off new needs: (1) more raw materials; and (2) new markets to sell those surplus goods. What started as exploration to find places for the above-mentioned needs eventually resulted in colonialism (Why settle for negotiated bilateral deals? Wasn’t it more advantageous to just rule those places?).   It won’t be wrong to say that the Industrial Revolution was great for the West, and terrible for th...

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...

Capitalism, in combination of industrialism, led to more and more inequality. Eventually, as Anirudh Suri reminds us in The Great Tech Game , that inequality led to a backlash and to the rise of Marxism and communism. And then communism lost favour, with the fall of the USSR.   Today, we seem to be on the cusp of history repeating itself. Well, not repeating. Rather, as Mark Twain famously said: “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”   Suri elaborates. The tech companies of today have become unimaginably rich, with the likes of Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook becoming trillion-dollar companies (not a typo, that’s “trillion” with a “t”). At the same time, these companies don’t generate employment on the same scale as manufacturing behemoths of the past. They do more with far, far fewer employees. Which is why Suri worries: “As technology and capitalism combine to create some of the same structural inequalities and class conflicts, ne...

Games like chess can and have been played online. Not just friends playing with each other, even tournaments have been conducted that way. That creates a problem, writes Joe Posnanski: “Because computers are so much better than people at chess now, there’s a big, big problem with cheating. People playing online will often use a chess engine to defeat people and build up their ratings.” This has set off a cat and mouse game: “Chess.com has instituted ultra-sophisticated methods of tracking down cheaters and then closing their accounts.”   Some time back, the rising star, Hans Niemann, defeated world champion Magnus Carlsen. An upset, no doubt. But Niemann didn’t get a single point in the rest of the tournament. So this guy can beat the world champion but not even a scrape a draw in his other matches? Then it happened again… soon after, Niemann beat Carlsen again. Carlsen was convinced Niemann was cheating – he didn’t say it officially – but he tweeted something that indi...

In his terrific book on the impact of software on the world, Coders , Clive Thompson points out that: “In recent years, a welter of computer languages aimed at children – like MIT’s popular Scratch language – and initiatives like Hour of Code and robotics competitions (have sprung up).”   In the US, privacy concerns have hit even such for-kids options. In Chicago, for example, public schools suddenly found the plug pulled on many such popular options because, hey, they violated some students online protection laws. “Among the software products that violate the law, CPS (Chicago Public Schools) now says, are programs like Code.org, which is widely used in computer science classes, and Adobe applications used for artistic design and newspaper page layouts. That left has many high school newspapers unable to produce their print editions. Also off limits is Scratch, software to create interactive stores, animations and games.” Most for-kids languages these days work online, ...

Based on this series of blogs on the livewired brain, which was based on David Eagleman’s Livewired , you’d be wondering whether/when our technologies would become that way. Would they become capable of changing themselves based on their “experience” of the world?   Actually, our software algorithms have already become like the brain, at least the ones we call Machine Learning. Voice recognition (Alexa), facial recognition (how your phone unlocks itself), and anything that feels like AI falls in that bucket. But the hardware doesn’t change itself. Human engineers and designers still have to make deliberate changes to the hardware.   Let’s say we do get to a point where even the hardware can re-do itself. Sure, it’d be great in many ways, for obvious reasons. Then again: “Note that a future of self-configuring devices will change what it means to fix them.” Huh? Eagleman points out that we already face that today! While “construction workers or car mechanics are rar...

In the fight against coronavirus, you’d expect that tech solutions, as in smartphone apps and location tracking, would be vastly superior in the land of Silicon Valley (and the West in general). But as with all things coronavirus, it’s the East that has used tech better… In January, when China issued the lockdown in Wuhan, they used old-fashioned barricades. But by the time they reopened Wuhan on April 8: “At checkpoints throughout the city, police and security guards demanded that anyone seeking to come and go present a QR code on their mobile phones that rates the user’s risk of catching the coronavirus. Green codes granted unrestricted movement. A yellow code required seven days of quarantine. Red meant 14 days of quarantine.” More and more countries have created such apps to track coronavirus. Many of them don’t just help the government, they even notify users if they’ve been close to infected people. The most downloaded such app till date? India’s Aarogya Setu app, ...

When it comes to predicting the (big-picture) future, everyone gets it wrong. Even those who try to confine themselves to parts of the big picture get it wrong. Karl Marx on social trends. Or Malthus on sustainability (he thought mankind was going to starve because, “Hey, human population is expanding too fast”). How about predictions on technological trends? They are just as wrong as all the others. There’s even a “law” called Amara’s Law related to this: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” Rodney Brooks cites GPS as an example of Amara’s Law. Started in 1978, GPS was intended to “allow precise delivery of munitions by the U.S. military”. And the underestimated long term use of that tech is what we have today, from driving directions to sharing one’s location on WhatsApp to tracking one’s cab on Uber to synchronizing clocks (yes, they use it for that in physics labs, electrical grids and even st...

Circular reasoning may lie at the heart of why all the criticism hurled at Facebook (and to a much lesser extent at Google) doesn’t trigger any change. Fred Turner elaborates by explaining what Facebook and Google believe in… truly: “It started with, “Don't be evil.” So then the question became, “Okay, what's good?” Well, information is good. Information empowers people. So providing information is good. Okay, great. Who provides information? Oh, right: Google provides information. So you end up in this loop where what's good for people is what's good for Google, and vice versa.” Replace “information” with “connecting people” above, and you get Facebook. Turner has a pretty good description of the current “ethics of engineering”: “The ethics of engineering are an ethics of: Does it work? If you make something that works, you’ve done the ethical thing. It’s up to other people to figure out the social mission for your object.” But today we increasingly see...

Technology and the arts. Sounds like one of those “never the twain shall meet” cases, right? While that is indeed true an overwhelmingly large amount of the time, every now and then someone joins the two and the result is pure magic. Steve Jobs said it perfectly with the perfect image in the background : “We’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. To be able to get the best of both. To make extremely advanced products from a technology point of view, but also have them be intuitive easy-to-use, fun-to-use, so that they really fit the users.” Apple’s VP of Design, Jony Ive, on the iPad: “The face of the product is pretty much defined by a single piece of multi-touch glass. And that’s it. There’s no pointing device. There’s isn’t even a single orientation. There’s no up, there’s no down. There’s no right way of holding it. I don’t have to change myself to change the product. It fits me.” So why don’t more companies aim for this tech-a...

You’d think the term “tech companies” would refer to any company in, well, the technology sector: so pretty much any engineering company. In other words, the list should include everything from Apple to Intel to L&T to BHEL, right? Wrong! Take the company I work for: General Electric, or GE. As Ian Bogost says : “GE makes almost everything — from light bulbs to medical imaging devices to wind turbines to locomotives to jet engines.” And yet GE is not considered a tech company! You can see that when Bloomberg’s Shira Ovide and Rani Molla recently wrote: ““Non-tech titans like Exxon and GE have slipped a bit” in top valuations.” In fact, when the markets closed last Monday: “At the close of trading this Monday, the top five global companies by market capitalization were all U.S. tech companies: Apple, Alphabet (formerly Google), Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook. Bloomberg, which reported on the apparent milestone, insisted that this “tech sweep” is unprecedented, even...

In an awesome lecture titled “The Disembodied Universe” in his book, The Accidental Universe, Alan Lightman says that: “What we see with our eyes, what we hear with our ears, what we feel with our fingertips, is only a tiny sliver of reality. Little by little, using artificial devices, we have uncovered a hidden reality.” We’ve learnt that time isn’t absolute, teeny tiny molecules encode the instructions to build life forms, and that matter behaves like both particles and waves! And then Lightman points out where all this knowledge is taking us: “It is an irony to me that the same science and technology that have brought us closer to nature by revealing these invisible worlds have also separated us from nature and from ourselves. Much of our contact with the world today is not an immediate, direct experience, but is instead mediated by various artificial devices such as televisions, cell phones, iPads, chat rooms, and mind-altering drugs.” Talking of how glued we are to o...

How many people would it take to connect any two people on the planet? Via a friend of a friend…of a friend chain? In 1929, the answer was called out to be “ six degrees of separation ”. Recently they tested that via (what else?) Facebook! Laugh all you like, but Facebook’s sample size is 1.59 billion users which I am pretty sure is way bigger than whatever sample size they used in 1929. The answer ? In 2011, Facebook analysis yielded an average of 3.74. Today, when even more people are on Facebook, the answer has shrunk to 3.57. This isn’t the first time Facebook has been used to analyze social theories. The dataset that Facebook has is unparalleled for such analysis. On the other hand, that raises privacy concerns…. Talking of tech companies, they sure do weird things. Often out of paranoia. Like when Google got into mobile long before the iPhone based on their fear of Microsoft dominating mobile and locking Google out. Today, with the dominance of Android and iOS, that see...

When it comes to their kids, parents struggle to strike that balance between providing a better life than what they themselves had v/s spoiling the kids rotten. But the next time we feel some other parent over-did the indulgence, maybe we should remember what Alex Balk says : “For all the eye-rolling we do when we consider how children of a certain class are spoiled these days…it’s probably not a terrible thing to do to take a step back and examine where this exasperation comes from: Are we envious? Angry at ourselves for wishing we were handled so delicately during our own youth?” Every generation has a gadget/device that causes parents to fret as to how it is ruining their kids. First TV, then cable TV, and now smartphones. The other day, my 4 year old put the phone casing to her ear, and said, “This is my smartphone”. Smartphone, not phone. Because she’s never seen a non-smartphone! Balk again nails what worries parents about smartphones: “They speak to a larger concern ...

Until very recently, several German publishers were at war with Google News. Why? Because they said Google News had become a news hub with links to articles that were created by others who were not getting enough credit (read “money”). Jeff Jarvis was contemptuous about their stance : “(They) stomp their feet like pouty kindergartners missing a turn at kickball, whining “that’s not fair” and yelling that everything wrong on this playground is the fault of another kid, then running to hide behind the skirt of the teacher.” The reality, as per Jarvis, was that they “cannot compete in the marketplace”. In his book, Adapt , Tim Harford talks about the “fitness landscape”: “The fitness landscape is a jumble of cliffs and chasms, plateaus and jagged summits. Valleys represent bad solutions; mountain tops are good.” As if finding/creating peak wasn’t hard enough: “The peaks keep moving - sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly.” And then Harford makes a very interesting observat...

Towards the end of last year, Apple and Google had announced that the latest versions of iOS and Android (iOS8 and Android L at that point) would be designed such that even Apple and Google themselves couldn’t decrypt the data on your device . This was done to convince the public that law enforcement agencies couldn’t snoop on your data (No, this wasn’t just a claim: it is the way the maths of encryption and decryption works). If you are wondering whether to trust a claim based on maths you don’t know or understand, well, at least you’re honest about your lack of understanding of the topic. That honesty makes you better than the Washington Post editorial board! The Washington Post editorial (WaPo for short) starts with a legitimate concern: if nobody but the device owner can decrypt the data, wouldn’t this be a boon for terrorists and criminals? They then acknowledge a valid counter-argument: “But there are legitimate and valid counter arguments…They say that a compromis...

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, had wanted it to be the “sum of all human knowledge” . Instead, it’s turned out to be the sum of all male knowledge : 91% of the people who edit Wikipedia are men! This made no sense: anyone can edit Wikipedia, so why would the numbers be so skewed? Turns out that it’s related to the fact that far more men than women write software! But wait, that doesn’t make sense either. After all, software is a very young industry and requires brain, not brawn, and involves AC work environments, not factories or oil rigs, so shouldn’t it be more gender balanced? And yet, some time back, when all the major tech companies in the US released numbers on their (lack of) gender diversity , the male employee percentages were staggering. Google, Apple, Twitter and Facebook all had 70% males; Yahoo had 62%; and eBay had 58%. But wait, it gets worse: for each of these companies, the “tech” jobs were even more skewed in male representation! Ok, but what’s that...

Evgeny Morozov calls Silicon Valley the Teflon Industry : “no matter how much dirt one throws at it, nothing seems to stick”! Part of the reason, he says, is that any criticism gets “framed as a debate over “the digital”: “This is where the “digital debate” leads us astray: it knows how to talk about tools but is barely capable of talking about social, political, and economic systems that these tools enable and disable, amplify and pacify.” And then there’s the lingo of such debates: they involve words like “information”, “networks” and “Internet”. Which, let’s face it, are terms synonymous with progress. And that would make any critic of the same a Luddite! Morozov is also pissed with Silicon Valley’s grand mission statements about changing the world and making it a better place. As if that’s the only thing driving them, not profits. Branding (bragging?) aside, he points out there are privacy risks with the: “data-centric model of Silicon Valley capitalism seeks to conve...

When Jeff Jarvis posted this pic below from a Texas school by Mark Simmons , he didn’t expect that the ensuing debate might well turn this pic into the Rorschach Test to identify if you are a Luddite or a geek ! If you’re wondering how, consider your reaction to the pic before reading on. Now take a look at some reactions to the pic, both from Jarvis’ article as well as the original Simmons’ pic. Jonathan Hébert said: “Real life interactions and physical activities would help more people instead of looking like zombies.” Jarvis himself: “New technologies bring new norms. The future is theirs, not ours.” Daniel Baker suggested: “Set up technology-free zones. When kids are outside they should be socializing and playing, not glued to a screen.” Paul Dickson had this to say: “They can have friends all over the world. Odds are, those might be a lot more interesting than the doofus in the next seat.” Some felt that this was: “Creating a generation of social misfit...

There was a time in the technology industry, not very far back, when companies dominated for long periods, often decades. Like IBM. Or Microsoft. Then the Internet arrived, with its “power vested in me by nobody in particular” philosophy, as stated by Marc Andreesen, founder of Netscape! And the rules of the game changed forever. Neil Gaiman described it as follows: “The rules, the assumptions, the now-we're supposed to's of how you get your work seen, and what you do then, are breaking down…The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are. So make up your own rules.” As Joshua Topolsky wrote , today, even 6 years feels like an eternity in technology:  “Only six years ago, the vast majority of people had no idea that a phone could do anything other than make a phone call. The concept of "apps" did not exist at all. The idea of using a phone as a GPS unit or a camera was laughable. Twitter and Facebook were nascent distractions. Netflix...