Category: Technology

How do you feel when you get paid freely for doing no work? In my previous post, we had discussed the possibility of Universal Basic Income (UBI) proposed by Thomas Paine – the price tag that we have given for the new era of the unemployed because of the emergence of automation and technology. It may surprise you to know that a partial UBI already existed in Alaska since 1982 and that a version of basic income was experimentally tested in the United States in the 1970s.

So let us understand the dynamics of universal basic income. A study, released by Oxfam, showed that just 57 billionaires in India have the same wealth as that of the bottom 70 percent population of the country. To give a global perspective, just 8 billionaires have the same amount of wealth as the poorest 50 percent of the world population. This statistics gives the extent of global income inequality. Now wonder we have just 32 million of 3210 million population of the world owns over 40 percent of the world wealth.

Anyway, what is the need of this universal income? It is predicted that automation will create nearly 15 million new jobs by 2025, but at the same time, wipe out nearly 25 million. The 10 million who is going to lose the jobs in the process would be the people who would find it difficult to upgrade their skills or those who are too old to switch the jobs. But how would they survive? Will the world of technology be morally responsible for supporting them?

Even some of the biggest technology tycoons including Elon Musk who are talking about changing the world for the better seem deeply concerned on what the very same technology could do to jobs in the long haul making universal basic income “necessary.” It is not just the individuals who are concerned about this. The entire political spectrum is concerned about this huge income disparity. The idea of unconditional or universal basic income is like social security for all. The cause of this thought is not just from the rising income inequality arising from technology dominance. It has the origins from the decades of stagnant wages, the transformation of lifelong careers into sub-hourly tasks, and world-changing events like Brexit and the vision of Trump. All of these concerns are pointing to the need to start a permanent income guarantee for everyone that could take care of the basic needs of an individual.

How will this make sense in the new economy? If we look at the operational aspect of this concept, it is a negative tax. An interesting process in which those earning below a certain point are given an additional income, and those earning above a certain point are taxed on additional income. To cut it short, even Ambani would receive the same amount as a person below the poverty line. Only difference it that Ambani will pay far more than that amount in new taxes for the government to pay for it.

But what about people then choosing not to work? Isn’t that a huge burden too? It is an interesting topic to debate. Let us look at implementing this in a developed market like the US where the data is handy. According to Gallup in the US, 70% of workers are not engaged in what they resulting in a productivity loss of around $500 billion per year. With UBI coming in, this disengaged workforce will say “no thanks” to the labour market enabling an opportunity for the rest of the people who want to do the jobs they want. The result is a transformed labour market of more engaged, more employed, better paid and more productive workers. Fewer people are excluded, and there’s perhaps more scope for all workers to become self-employed entrepreneurs. In addition, there are proven positive effects on social cohesion and physical and mental health.

Based on the evidence we already have and continue to build with the trial run of such a scheme in Mongolia, Finland and India, I firmly believe unconditional basic income as a new equal starting point for all. For resource-rich countries like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, it will be an efficient method of utilisation and transfer of resource incomes. For populated countries like India and China, it will help the reduce the leakage of subsidies provided by public welfare distribution.Lastly, in developed economies, it will compensate for the advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and other technologies that have questioned the future of work.

In addition, there are proven positive effects on social cohesion and physical and mental health. Based on these evidence we already have and with the trial run of such a scheme in Mongolia, Finland and India, I firmly believe unconditional basic income as a new equal starting point for all. For resource-rich countries such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, it will be an efficient method of utilisation and transfer of resource incomes. For populated countries like India and China, it will help to reduce the leakage of subsidies provided by public welfare systems. Lastly, in developed economies, it will compensate for the advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and other technologies that have questioned the future of work.

If things work out as planned by the governments, we might have a better place to live with more equitable distribution of wealth.

A few months back I had been to a prominent hospital since my dad had to undergo an orthopaedic surgery. During my stay at the hospital, I got quite accustomed with the staff and they showed me an uncommon tranport mechanism. It moves the patient’s blood samples and prescription medicines across the hospitals through Pneumatic tubes. They are systems that propel cylindrical containers through networks of tubes by compressed air or by a partial vacuum. Even though it is an age old technology, of the late 19th and 20th century, I was impressed with the precision and the swiftness of the transport. Can such an integrated system be the framework of our future transport? Can this be the older working model of the proposed hyperloop powered by pneumatic energy?

Since the introduction of trains and cars in the early 19th century, nothing much has changed in the industry. We still rely on the modified forms of such transport mechanisms. But is the future going to be the same in the coming decades?

The transportation sector as we see it is around 5 trillion dollar industry. In the next few decades, it will be one of the industries that may see innovations. Such innovations could include driverless cars and public transports, intergalactic or interstellar travels and hyper loops. The hybrid of a Concorde and a railgun and an air hockey table – the hyperloop is expected to take the centre stage of this transformation. Even though it is not an innovative concept, the idea has gained enough of traction. Even India plans for its working hyperloop in the coming decade!  The first outlay is expected from New Delhi to Mumbai in 70 minutes flat, or three times faster than a commercial flight (a max speed of 760 miles per hour). The pilot funding of expected at $120 million. On the revenue side, a single tube could carry 1.44 lakh passengers daily at 40-second intervals with an average ticket price of under Rs 600 (around 10 dollars).

So how does it work? According to Elon Musk, the propounder of the system, it is a tube over or under the ground that contains a special low-pressure environment. The cars are propelled through this tube with high-speed fans that would compress and push the air for their propulsion. These cars would be floated in the chamber with Air bearings that would make these capsules to levitate in the tube to reduce friction. The entire system will be driven by solar power.

Now let us look at the economics of this transportation system. According to World bank the per-mile cost of building this loop is pegged at around $40 million per kilometre compared to High-Speed rail project at $56 million per km.

Can this technology play a bigger role to play in the future of freight transport too – an industry that powers the global trade? Given that we’re planning to move containers and pallets on-demand at speeds far in excess of today’s rail and highway options and far less expensively than by air freight, an integrated framework of such seamless nodal transport would be the future of not just human transport but of the goods too. This will reduce the inventory costs and have a better supply chain around each nodal city. Technically this is mentioned in economics as agglomeration – clustering of people and firms. This can lead to more innovative delivery mechanisms of medical/perishable goods and motivate regional economies for greater specialisation, thus reducing the overall cost and quality of global freight transport.

A few days back, I came to know about my cousin in his 40s who is planning to get his kidney transplanted. He had an acute kidney failure because of his lifestyle and was waiting for a kidney from a donor. I was disappointed by seeing his pain and the inconvenience caused to him by dialysis. This is not just one story, we have millions waiting across the globe for organ transplantation.

Humans have around 10 different organs in our body that can be transplanted. These include kidneys, heart, liver, pancreas, intestines, lungs, bones, bone marrow, skin, and corneas. As per the Donate Life Foundation, 80% of the global organ demand constitute the kidneys with an average wait time of over 3 years. In 2016, for the first time, the organ transplants performed in the United States alone crossed 30,000. But, as we speak approximately four times of that number still awaits lifesaving organ transplants. Furthermore, around 22 people die every day waiting for an organ. From an Indian perspective, 5 lakh people across the India die each year due to non-availability of organs. One out five need a liver, but only one in hundred receive it. Two out of five need a kidney, but only one in twenty receive it.

Even though 8-10 brain dead potential donors are available in Intensive Care Units of any major city hospitals around the globe, the taboo of the donation still constrain the effectiveness of donation. Can the new stream of tissue engineering change the fate of modern demographics?

Yes. The fundamental change of making synthetic organs is going to allow the ageing population of the world to work until a later age before taking their pensions – an imminent concern both in developing and developed countries. The stunning fact is that the majority of the organ transplants are happening over 40 years of age.

To give an economic perspective, today almost one in ten are over 60 years old. By 2050, one in five will be over 60. On the other hand, when we consider the state support for the non-working age population, in 1950, there were 7.2 people aged 20–64 for every person of 65 or over in the OECD countries. But by 2010 this support ratio fell to 4.1 and is projected to reach just 2.1 by 2050. This demographic shift will put undue pressure on the working age population. To avoid this scenario, the option left for the government is to reduce the support to older demographics. This will force the old age population to remain fit and healthy and thus remain productive up to an age over 80. This leaves the septuagenarians and octogenarians to maintain a healthy lifestyle and if required replace the damaged or non-functional organs with fresh ones which would be available both from donors or through tissue engineering. Since we have seen a macro perspective of donations, let us see how tissue engineering is going to solve this problem?

Right after identifying the pluripotency (ability to develop to different organs) of stem cells after cloning Dolly, bio-engineering has gone to a different level of creativity. A few days back, Organovo world’s first publicly traded 3D bio-printing company, announced the medical success of the bio-printed liver and kidney with promising results. Like the complex, multi-cellular tissues found within a person, these human tissues are created through cell division; they mature and integrate into the tissue, forming connections with surrounding cells and contributing functionality throughout their lifespan. As individual cells within the tissue age, they eventually undergo cellular senescence and death—much as they would in a living tissue inside the body. This is the ultimate approach to the shortage of donor organs – manufacture and transplantation of bio-artificial organs. The latest trend is the chimaera – a mixture of cells from more than one species growing together as a single animal – resulting in human organs being produced in other animals. By perfecting the art of growing such chimeric replacement livers, kidneys and pancreases inside the animal hosts, the organ shortage may end. It may so happen that we may be ordering a homo-porcine kidney on Amazon soon by end of this decade.

Not so long ago, I remember when I bought my first car. I methodically jotted down my priorities and all the available choices. After several discussion and debate with my better half, I arrived at the one that best met my requirement. I met a dealer in my area and he made the deal. Though it was quite simple then, the new era of digital sale is not the way it used to be. Does this decision of selecting my car getting transformed in the digital era by algorithms?

Today almost all the consumers have become promiscuous on their brand because of the choices available for them. This is just not the case with the brands that we buy every day but even with the brands that we aspire to buy in future. Today’s customer has the option to connect with myriad brands—through new media channels beyond the manufacturer’s and the retailer’s control or even knowledge—and evaluate a shifting array of them, often expanding the pool before narrowing it. After a purchase these consumers may remain aggressively engaged, publicly promoting or assailing the products they have bought through social media collaborating in the brands’ development, and challenging and shaping their meaning. This constitutes the digital identity of the brand. There are three basic elements to the brand identity. The first one is the value the product or the promise that the product tries to fulfil. The second is the aesthetics or the design element of the product. Finally, the fulfilment, which constitutes the economic model of the entire supply chain. These are the factors that structurally drive the information about a brand on the digital environment. This information with the inputs of recommendations that are provided by the digital media forms the basis of our decision making. In such a case, the choice that we make is our own or driven by someone else?

For example, today we have the youtube channels where a child un-box toys to the delight of toddlers around the world (The Ryan’s toy review) and a Swedish gamer with millions of teenage fans (PewDiePie), running one’s own virtual TV channel with multi-million followers and a few billion cumulative views. Have you ever wondered how they get to the top echelons of viewing? – The trick is done by the internet channels through suggestions or recommendations customised to you. The brain of such channels is – the recommender algorithm. The pioneers of this technique are the early adopters of this technology such as Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft which help them to make into the top 10 of the world’s most valuable brands. These are the companies that we touch, speak and feel every day and decide what we consume. If you really think the word of mouth marketing is gone, it is not. Today’s word of mouth is the social media. The key reason why the social media giants such as Facebook and Snapchat are so valuable is just because they are the identities of the new digital human.
The recommendation algorithm is used in a variety of areas including movies, music, news, books, research articles, search queries, social tags, experts, collaborators, jokes, restaurants, garments, financial services, life insurance, romantic partners (online dating), and you name it, it is there. The social media platforms and the e-commerce sites analyse the user’s past behaviour based on the links the user had clicked or the products he had purchased and similar decisions made by other users. This recommendation system can either constitute a top-down approach, in which the broad interests of the user is captured on a regular basis and then compared against the behaviour of other users. The recommendations to the user will not only include his interests but also interests of his peer groups. This is a collaborative approach and is the way google works. Using the huge user base it has google applies recommendations across its platforms. So now you know why once you play a specific video, you get similar videos on youtube.

The other option is a bottoms up approach by identifying the attributes of the product recommended in a standardised form (i.e., the key parameters of search) and identify similar products based on the defined attributes. A nice example is the music genome project. The project gets into the essence of music at the most fundamental level. Over 450 attributes such as gender of lead vocalist, prevalent use of groove, the level of distortion on the instruments, type of background vocals, etc. are used to describe songs. These attributes are mapped to the user preferences to make musical selections of a certain genre based on the user’s preferences. The output is the patented music streaming service powered by the music genome project the Pandora Internet Radio. The movie databases such as Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB also uses the same technique.

Obviously, there has to be a hybrid approach. Netflix uses this approach. It makes recommendations by comparing the watching habits of similar users as well as by offering movies that share characteristics with films that a user has rated highly. This recommendation technique is now extensively used on internet-accessing smart-phones also for GPS navigation and location based services.

But what is the flipside to these recommendation algorithms? They will take off adventure and serendipity on our choices. These algorithms will slowly discourage exploration. Soon there will be a method to the madness and the human behaviour will become more predictable. Amazon will suggest similar books to you, Netflicks will show you the similar movie, SoundCloud will play the similar songs and obviously you will end up taking the same route to the office. So who wins in the end? It would be these internet giants that control the users and their preferences. These goliaths will be able to muscle with the sellers, (I would say the car company, that want me to but the car in future) who want to access the users through their platform. So it is neither me nor my car company that would benefit. It is the broker that wins. This will catapult the oligopoly of our internet companies that touch our daily lives to a different level – driving them to not billion dollar enterprises but trillion-dollar enterprises.

After celebrating the new year, I decided to give my wife a break and hence devour in one of her favourite restaurants. We went to a Japanese restaurant and ordered grilled meat Yakiniku, one of the full-fledged Japanese steak. When I asked the manager about the quality of the meat used in the steak, he conveyed to us that the restaurant uses meat only from sustainable sources. I smiled at him and started to think what would define the sustainability of food consumption, especially meat. I started to wonder how the food platter will look 20 years from now? In the modern era of culinary laboratories such as El Buli and fine dining chefs from Michelin’s, where we refine the science of gastronomy, should we be a little more sensitive about the methods of sustainable agriculture?

Let’s explore how as a human race, we have mastered the techniques of the production and consumption of food. If we take the case of arable land,  one-third of such land is used for agriculture and 70% of that land is used for growing only meat. Is this an efficient way to harness the productivity of nature? On the consumption side, we are doing a commendable job. The world’s population is predicted to hit 9Bn by 2050 and the food demand is expected to increase at least by 60% for cereals and 85% for meat (according to World Bank). How would we satiate this enormous appetite for food?

The post-world war agricultural development in developed countries and green revolution (not so sure whether we should call it a red revolution or green revolution), which encouraged the insensitive use of fertilisers and pesticides in agriculture, have contributed one-third of freshwater pollution with elements such as phosphorus and nitrogen. The insensitive usage of hybrid and GM crops has extinguished the local varieties resulting in soil degradation and sky rocketed sales for the Monsantoes and the Potashcorps of the world. The highly acclaimed “positive effects” of these changes are levelling off in terms of production and pests are getting increasingly resistant to disease. Taking into account the current production rates, our current agricultural output will not meet the projected demand of the world.

Moreover, it would be an amazing fact to note that around 50% of the antibiotics are used in the cultivation of crops and rearing of livestock, not on humans for which they were intended for. By the way, these antibiotics are not being used to fight diseases that spread among animals but to increase their weight, ensuring higher meat output. Interesting paradox !!!

Water stress and desertification that have been the results of global warming are reducing the amount of arable land available every year. Dramatic changes in the consumption patterns of protein rich food in emerging economies such as China and India are going to catalyse the slaughter of livestock day by day. Another interesting anomaly to note is that 20% of food produced or harvested is lost owing to insufficient processing, storage and transport. To give a perspective, every day around 4.4 million apples, 5.1 million potatoes, 2.8 million tomatoes and 1.6 million bananas are thrown as waste. This is not just a waste of produce, but also is a loss of the factors of production.

So how would future generations address these problems? It would be interesting when our kids get us bugs for a protein rich diet. Are we ready to accept the bugs instead of beef?

Even though Creative ideas like Lab-grown meat, 3D printed food on request and the meal in a pill are still in the labs with exorbitantly expensive bills, such technologies will be the way forward for coming generations.  The concoction of algae and living tissue from a livestock currently brews in a sugar scaffolding at a cost of US$32500 to make a piece of burger sized meat. Can the brew be a little cheaper on a larger scale? Something yet to be seen.

But another alternative that can be seen in future could be vertical farming. When the technology becomes more efficient, the current industrial and technology districts may alter it’s size and shape to semi-agricultural factories producing year round produce or carniculture through indoor farming. Even though we haven’t been able to perfect the formula for baby milk since last 200 years, we would be forced to perfect the formula for a meal in the pill if that could partly solve the instant food problem for the rich.

What would be the economic impact of these technologies?

The current consumption of meat is over 200 pounds per person per year in US. (In India, it is just around 6 pounds). It is estimated that around 200 gallons of water are consumed in the process of making a single pound of beef and around half of it is consumed in the process of making poultry. If there is a shift of the Non-vegans in developed economies to any of the alternate sources of protein, the process will have a huge impact on the economics of natural production of food.

If we consider the alternative to eating “cold-blooded bugs”, a change synonymous to the shift of our generation from incandescent bulbs to LEDs, the future food platter would be more sustainable and nutritious. The process of manufacturing bugs consumes so less energy and a lot less land considering the factors of production for other sources of food.

May future generations consider options such as having bugs instead of beef and a deeply learned computer controlled vertical farming, that reduce water usage through hydroponics, thus reducing greenhouse gases.

Hail the kids who would decide that for us !!