Sunday Posts

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...

It was interesting to listen to Yuval Noah Harri's TED talk and the subsequent interview. The last thing first. He paints a picture where the human species may divide into two, with the rich and powerful forming a different species with designer babies and long lifespans, and others getting relegated to the existence of useless people. By no means, he is alone in this apocalyptic vision of the future. This is indeed a fairly logical view of the future, once one fuses the ideas of technological progress, economic inequality and political domination of the rich together. There is this rather fatalistic view - that future will be better because the past has been and the human beings found a way to better themselves - but this is not the only possibility. Best to watch his TED talk then with this perspective. His central argument that the human beings did better than the other species because of its ability to cooperate flexibly, in a large scale and with imagination needs to...

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...

One strand of argument in many developing countries is that western education destroys local cultures and ways of living, and causes misery and destruction. This is at the heart of some of the most potent social debates that are going on, in India and in many other places. Both sides of the argument present this as a black-and-white thing: Either western education has brought all progress, or it has destroyed all good things that ever was. As usual, the truth perhaps lies somewhere in between. Many well-meaning western academics and intellectuals, who have no intent to harm anyone else, perhaps see anything less than wholehearted appreciation of what they do as an act of ungratefulness. After all, 'western science' is primarily responsible for the great improvements in standards of living in the last three hundred years. What's called Western Education spreads the message of scientific progress and rationality, and this has been the argument for spreading it even for ...

'Progressives' are supposed to be political dinosaurs, popular a century ago but wiped out of public memory since then. Indeed, there were great progressives on both sides of the Atlantic: Teddy Roosevelt was one of the original ones, though he chose to become mainstream before becoming President. One could count the late Nineteenth Century English Liberals as somewhat equivalent, perhaps best represented in the figure of Herbert Asquith, the longest serving Prime Minister of the UK (1908 - 1916) before Margaret Thatcher broke his record. Indeed, since Asquith's departure, progressivism has declined, not unsurprisingly given the formation of Soviet Union in 1919 and various extreme forms of politics thereafter. The power of the broadcast media divided the politics into pro-state and pro-market, and left little of the Progressive ideal of harmonious Public-Private world.  I argued that the current rise of the illiberal politics, from India to the United States, is the ...

There is massive arrogance in the technology circles, captured best perhaps by Marc Andreessen's WSJ article proclaiming the same. The rise of the 'information economy', though a bit of jargon in itself, has boosted such rhetoric: Today, technologists confidently sermonise others on how to do healthcare, education, construction, everything else, and even money. It did seem that this is the final frontier, a scientific thesis that is really un-falsifiable. Until Bitcoin. Bitcoin possibly shows what's wrong with this position. It is not about the technology or the economics of it, nor the failure of Mt Gox. It is about the underlying proposition that software can save/ change everything. It may appear arrogant, but the recent pronouncements of Jon Matonis that Bitcoin is a currency in beta and you should only invest if you can afford to lose ( see story here ), is really symptomatic that software may be living inside a bubble itself. And, bubble in this context is ...

I am starting it over again. It is a complete reboot, and I feel like I have gone back eight years, or even fourteen; the good thing is, I am enjoying it. People love becoming younger without giving up the accumulated privileges. In my case, it is the other way round - it is indeed about starting from scratch while enjoying being older and hopefully wiser - a bit scary but thrilling nonetheless. Being young, I have come to conclude, isn't about the tautness of skin but feeling the weightlessness that comes with such a plunge to the unknown. I have felt this weightlessness before. In 1998, when I walked out of my job to start a small company, I realised the weight my big company business cards had: Suddenly, even with people I used to deal with in my corporate career, I was somewhat of a non-entity. The feeling was hurtful at the time, but sobering and useful in the long run; I did go back to big company work in a couple of years time, but was never as presumptive as I woul...

My standard refrain to my British friends who say India is poor and ugly is that the Seventeenth century British expats to India used to be told the same things about Britain. What I don't say, however, is that I am developing this belief that history has some sort of circularity. This is not to say progress does not happen. Individual human beings are irrepressibly innovative and they keep pushing the boundaries of thought through their behaviour and action. But, somehow, our social actions are much less progress-prone, as if bound by some sort of gravity or the necessities of collective naivety , and the circularity in our social action occurs in spite of individual innovation and progress. Living in Britain in the twenty-first century, despite the many comforts and possibilities of life, it still seems that the history will re-occur. Not unlike the British visitors in seventeenth century in India, I see a society with great material progress and artistic and cultural achievemen...