Viswanathan K's Thoughts

What are “smart” and “connected” products? “Smart” means they have sensors to measure things, software to analyze that data, and memory to store the data. And “connected” means it has ports, and wireless communication capabilities.   Earlier, the software logic to interpret the data and spot patterns in it was written by humans. But increasingly, it’s done by “machine learning” algorithms – the machine “learns” on its own by looking at huge data sets. Now, with 5G, we may be on the cusp of the next wave of changes. As communication speeds increase, it will become cheap and practical to collate multiple data sources (say tractor data with other farm equipment data with weather data) to produce previously unimaginable insights. There’s a lot of money in such intelligence.   In The Great Tech Game , Anirudh Suri says that in such a world, data is king: “Will the next retail innovation likely come from those professionals who have the data to identify new opportunities,...

Alex Danco made a very interesting point about how technology is shifting us away from a world where we owned things to a world where we access things. As we demanded 24x7 access to all our content, sure enough, technological solutions propped up: “Everything under the hood just gets magic-ed away, and provided for us as a service. No files, no updates, no maintenance; just access.” We don’t buy music anymore, we stream it on our apps. Nobody buys maps because there’s Google Maps.   But that anytime, anywhere access comes with a price: “The more you can access, the less it’s yours.” Huh? Take Uber, for example. It has led many to stop driving their own cars: “You just push the Uber button and somebody comes and picks you up. But it’s also not funny, because we’ve all experienced the particularly modern frustration of seeing the Uber drive in the opposite direction, spin around 4 times, then cancel. Access feels like the real thing, until it’s taken away from you .”...

Data is the new oil, they say. That seems obvious when you think of Google, Facebook, Baidu and Tencent, writes Yuval Noah Harari in 21 Lessons for the 21 st Century . And yet, we give our data away so easily: “People are happy to give away their most valuable asset – their personal data – in exchange for free email services and funny cat videos. It is a bit like African and Native Americans tribes who unwittingly sold entire countries to European colonialists in exchange for colorful beads and cheap trinkets.” We are heading for a future described below: “What will happen when we can ask Google, “Hi Google, based on everything you know about cars, and based on everything you know about me (including my needs, my habits, my views on global warming, and even my opinions about Middle Eastern politics) – what is the best car for me?” Or maybe we’ll be asking Facebook or Alexa/Amazon that question, but the point is the same. If we, as individuals and as a society, don’t f...