Sunday Posts

One way of seeing the relationship between Education and Technology, the most popular way, is to see it a race. The original observation - that the Civilisation is a race between Education and Catastrophe - made by H G Wells, was alluded to in the title of scholarly and insightful book, "The Race Between Education and Technology" (Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, 2007) - and it stuck. The essential idea is quite simple, that technology is advancing and education is the way for the society to keep up, and we need ever more education to get the benefits of advance technology. This is a compelling metaphor. And, also a useful one, as this positions Education at the centre of technological development, clearly establishing a link. Important one too, as we are reaching an inflection point in technological development, where many of the jobs previously done by human workers can now be done by machines or algorithms. It is important to argue, now more than ever, that the bene...

We have our ideas about how a society becomes prosperous. There are some great examples for us at hand - from England of the Industrial Revolution, Psot-War United States, China in the new millennium, and host of other countries in between. Explanations are aplenty too - there are technological, demographic, social-cultural, political and now even spiritual and astrological justifications available why prosperity happens. But, even within the variety of explanations, there are some overarching assumptions, two in particular, that can be seen in every theory. They are Paradigms, in the sense Thomas Kuhn originally used the term, frames of reference that we fit every available evidence into. Whatever explanation we seem to pursue, we seem to accept one or the other paradigm about how a society functions.  First of these two is the Planning paradigm, primarily positing that human societies can be planned from above. This may seem out of fashion now, with the terrible mess that S...

Politics is back on the agenda. For some, history ended in 1990. We arrived at a final, stable, interminable age of Capitalism, a vantage point of predicting the future where every next year was supposed to be better than the last, and constant progress could happen without changing the society. In fact, at that very moment, society stopped to matter, as the profound enabling of the individual meant that we can just pursue our own well-being, leaving the idea of progress to the workings of the market, which took care of itself. It was not very unlike what people thought before the death of God, but a radical departure from the ideas of enlightenment, when, humans became political animals with the slogan of daring to know. It is paradoxical, as at the moment of complete empowerment of the individual, a logical progression of the enlightened ideas, we chose - choice being the main theme here - to give up our powers to transform societies any further and accept the autonomous wo...

I look forward to read Karen Armstrong's Fields of Blood , which is waiting for me at one of the stops of my inevitable work tours. Ms Armstrong's point, as I picked up from the reviews, that religion can not be held directly responsible for violence, intrigued me, because that is precisely what I believe. I, therefore, look forward to engage with her argument and understand the other point-of-view. I am indeed not dismissive before I managed to read the book, but hoping that she has something to offer more than the assertion, oft-repeated, that no religious doctrine is actually founded on violence. It must be noted, at this point, that while this is a common defense (that no religion encourages violence), it is, by no means, the common understanding. A large number of people in the world believe Islam directly encourages violence, given the acts of Islamic terrorists in the recent years. Indeed, a previous generation, having experienced worldwide bloodshed incited by imp...

Nicholas Carr is counter-intuitive, and therefore, must-read for anyone interested in talking technology. I followed his big ideas since his path-breaking 'Does IT Matter?' which was about Information Technology stop being a strategic tool and more like an utility, like Electricity. One could argue that this prediction did not materialise, as we put our hopes on Big Data etc to change the way business is done. However, the follow-up on this thesis, that IT would be available through a pipe rather than the strong-room like infrastructures in the past, certainly did, and today one could look at the Cloud Computing infrastructure as an utility, rather than a strategic asset. His later work, 'Is Google Making Us Stupid' (and the book that followed, The Shallows), created a whole genre of work exploring the effects of technology on our brain and our capacity to think, which bore out some of his early warnings about changing behaviour. In summary, he excels in making the Te...

If my work is about creating an education offering ready for the 21st century, two forces count the most - Globalisation and Automation. The question how automation alters the educational requirements of a common citizen and average worker keeps popping up in my engagements, conversations and work. I spend a great deal of time traveling and talking to people how education must change, how we must look for a different set of skills than the ones we hitherto talked about, and how we must get ready for a tipping point globally when the economic and social structures change drastically under the weight of these two forces. In this context, it is important to think how this change may look like. For this post, I intend to focus on automation, the ubiquity of intelligent machines and how that may alter the nature of skills, and leave globalisation for another day. I have indeed made several blog posts about this in the past - it is indeed central to what I have been doing for several y...

In all the celebrations about the arrival of the flat world, we somewhat forgot, that Globalisation has a reverse gear. This was indeed the point made by Joshua Cooper Ramo in his 2012 Fortune article ( see here ). If that sounded alarmist then, some events recently would reconfirm the death of the flat world that we thought we were living in. So, at this particular time, the frontier of globalism really messy right now. Consider these few things 1. There are refugee boats floating on the sea in Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, caught in storm and running out of food and water. Countries like Indonesia are refusing to take them, letting women and children die. Britain is doing even better, with Murdoch Press proposing to send gun-boats to meet them, as immigrants are like cockroaches, they say. 2. Russia has more or less exited the Power system established after the Second World War and is trying to re-establish the old empire. It has dismembered a neighbouring nation ...

At a recent event, the oft-mentioned terms - Digital Native and Digital Immigrant - were invoked, with the cast-iron borders set by birth on or before 1985. I come from the wrong country here, but that is only part of my discomfort with the doctrine. This, and other generational divides, handy as they are, represent, for me, both a tendency to generalise and at the same time, to divide, representing two wrong ideas at once. My first problem with this doctrine is even more personal than my age. Are the immigrants not the drivers of change and innovation? At a time when immigrants are being called Feral Human Beings by The Sun, the hateful British newspapers which would give up decency for sensation at the drop of a hat, being hunted down by bullies in South Africa, being demonised in Mexico and Germany, they are still proof of human energy and human enterprise, an essential part of what made the world we live in. Civilisations, as much as they may seem to be, are not monoculture -...

Universities are dying, we hear. This is a strange announcement, because more people than ever are going to the universities. The achievement gap between those who go to the university and those who do not are growing. And, going to university has become an universal aspiration, swelling in Sub-Saharan Africa and remote islands in the Pacific alike. This is an institutional form at the peak of its power, prestige and popularity.  The point of pessimism is indeed that the promise this popularity is based on is floundering. The allure of middle class life, that of stable life, job and income, drives the millions to the University. Yet, the middle class escalator is jammed, as Linkedin founder Reid Hoffman says, and not many of the teeming millions going to the university can really realise that dream. The alternate promise, that there will be entrepreneurs, is perhaps all too optimistic - and, in any case, unrelated to the proposition of the university. So, while the universiti...

One does marvel at the technological progress that we have made over the last two centuries. It is all but natural to make this the new God - and expect technologies to appear to solve our problems. When we talk about an environmental apocalypse, it is common to refer to the first environmental conference in the world, which was convened at the end of Nineteenth century to deal with the seemingly intractable environmental problems of the cities - Horse Dung! The conference ended in a failure. Yet, in a few years, automobiles were everywhere and the problem completely disappeared. We believe that the technologies will indeed appear when the problems become urgent. Yet, technological development is not a value-neutral process. It is dependent on the social power, and the agenda of the powerful. This is why we can do advanced robotics but may not have a cure for Ebola. This is exactly why technology can kill - and we know it does - and it is naive to keep an unquestioning faith on t...

India, after sixty years of committed secularism, has turned a corner. The founding assumptions of India was that in order to survive, it must become a secular country. Indeed, such thinking was shaped by the then recent battles with two-nation theory, which the Indian nationalists lost and the country was divided, and the persistent British argument that India couldn't be a viable country because of its diversity. It was all but natural to make diversity a central theme of the constitution that was drafted - it was avowedly secular and non-sectarian and allowed the Indian states to retain many powers - and the subsequent efforts of the nation's leaders were to commit to an 'idea of India' free of any religious or cultural definition. We are now entering the second stage of the process, when the partition, and all the doubts about viability of India, are distant memories. A new confidence has now replaced the insecurities and doubts that shaped the responses o...

William Gibson had a point when he said - the future is already here, just that it is not evenly distributed. The same thing can be said about the past, which refuses to go away.  The city I come from - Kolkata, India - retains a large slice of the past. A visitor may see in Kolkata people who have lost hope. A people who is clinging to the past - they are justifiably proud of their great citizens - but the future has been erased out of all conversations. All the dilapidated buildings, all the great clocks situated all around the city which have stopped working, the noisy tram cars and the procession of Ambassador cars, modeled after a GM model from the 60s which is now out of production, make this a city of all-embracing nostalgia. It is no surprise that the young people leave. They go away searching for better education, jobs, money and lives - to other Indian cities and abroad. They leave behind parents who talk incessantly about them - even their bright future...

If you are coming out of college, how do you start thinking about your career? Or, if you came out of college a few years ago, and have dawdled through various things you don't like, how do you re-think about your career all over again? Indeed there could be numerous variations of this scenario, each person having an individual one, and the key question to ask is whether there are any general rules to think about careers at all. And, if you want to get really deep, you may start musing what's a career anyway. Let's start with the philosophical one. My favourite story about this is the story of the young man who was fishing in a pond middle of the day when he got accosted by a busy type, may be some distant uncle. Horrified with this young man's laziness, the older man advised him to abandon leisurely pursuits and get some productive engagement - education, employment or training whatever. The younger man asked him what would happen if he did that: The older man to...

I have posted about Global Workforce Crisis and Education as its only plausible solution . However, the question remains: If the problem is so obvious, and everyone more or less agrees that good education is the solution, and, more importantly, as everyone seems to talk about it too, why do we have so little done? Indeed, one could say that there has been a surge in private investment in education - in fact, education, and particularly technology-led solutions to education, has been one of hottest sector for venture investment since 2011 - but the impact of it, particularly in improving access and quality of education for poorer people, has been very limited. In fact, apart from the eye-watering amounts that some of the MOOC companies raised (and one could argue that MOOCs are not for everyone, but just the well-educated), most of the education investment has gone into creating top-end schools and colleges, improving the quality and opportunity for the top 5% - 10% of the population...

Has the professional society reached its limits? One way to see the development of western societies in the last hundred years, as Harold Perkin indeed did, is to see it in terms of the growth of the professional society. A society increasingly built on expert knowledge, independence and recognition of the professions, has emerged as an unique structure in the West, creating a 'viable' class structure, and providing a certain kind of legitimacy other than power and coercion.  The key to the maintenance of such social structure was the underlying meritocracy, that everyone has a chance. Professional society was, and always will be, antithetical to the social structure where one is 'born' into privilege, rather than having to work for it. In an age when enlightenment and scientific inquiry undermined the claims of authority derived out of divine will, ability and expert knowledge as defined by 'professions' became the new claim for social leadership and ...

The mantra of the new Prime Minister of India is 'Make in India'. His economic policy hinges on getting Indian manufacturing going, to get to the double-digit growth figures that he would need to deliver his promise of 'development'. And, indeed, this is what it should be: India will need to create 10 million non-farm jobs every year at least through the next decade, to absorb the new people entering the workforce productively. Service industries, for all their glamour, do not employ as many people as manufacturing does (at least in theory) and therefore, Mr Modi must steal some of China's thunder and try to make India world's next manufacturing base. In many ways, this new economic policy is modelled on China. The focus is on investment in infrastructure, reform of labour laws (which means deregulation and reduction of power of the organised labour), making land acquisitions easier for industrial development etc., all the things that China has done with g...

There is a lot of talk on skills in India. Its Prime Minister and other functionaries keep talking about 'skilling'. Indian policy makers have somehow convinced themselves, based on no other claim than managing to waste the largest amount of money in skills education ever in history, that this is one thing that they do well. They are further encouraged to think that way by the myriad skills education providers from around the world who want a share of the spoils and show up at various conferences to participate in the biggest skills 'mission' in the world. And, in this circus of the absurd, everyone have now convinced themselves that the job is already done and the rhetoric should move to the next level: The claim now is that India has the skills and it must now 'make'. Yet, if anything, the availability of skilled personnel has reduced, not increased, in India. This is perhaps because the melee around 'skilling' - a quick capsule of ...