Tag: technology

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Is future bright or domination over others? Live life on our own terms

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Ancient Oracles and medieval astrology that preceded used to be the prophets of the yesteryears which is taken over by the Tech empires. Award-winning University of Oxford Professor Carissa Véliz in Prophecy argues why we must reclaim that power and shows us how.   For thousands of years, oracles, seers and astrologers advised leaders and commoners alike about the future. But predictions are often power plays in disguise obfuscating accountability and stripping individuals of their agency. Today we face the same threat of powerful prophets but under a new façade: tech.   Not only do modern predictions made by tech … Continue reading Is future bright or domination over others? Live life on our own terms

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 Insight into India’s economic prosperity and dramatic growth

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Arvind Subramanian, a former chief economic adviser to the Indian government, and Devesh Kapur, a professor at John Hopkins University, provides a definitive guide to India’s 75-year development odyssey and dramatic growth. Democracy took root upon its independence in 1947, before significant development, social change and nation-building efforts. India’s development path skewed towards high-skilled service jobs, while a majority remain in fragile informal work. The authors compare relatively successful states such as Kerala with those that have struggled, including West Bengal and Punjab.  They reveal diagnosis of a country that has achieved impressive growth while struggling to translate it into broad-based … Continue reading  Insight into India’s economic prosperity and dramatic growth

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Global push to power EVs, Smartphones and energy transition amid human and environmental costs

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Niarchos in The Elements of Power produces a tale of rapacious colonialism, cold war spy games and extractive capitalism”. Congo the war-torn African country lack basic infrastructure and after many decades of colonial occupation, its people are officially among the poorest in the world. But Congo is rich and hidden beneath the soil are vast quantities of cobalt, lithium, copper, tin, tantalum, tungsten and other treasures essential for the global energy transition- the plan for wealthy nations to wean themselves off fossil fuels by shifting to sustainable forms of energy such as solar and wind. The race to electrify the … Continue reading Global push to power EVs, Smartphones and energy transition amid human and environmental costs

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Free Will and Prediction are vital to intelligence, brain and life itself

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For some AI researchers a large neural net that predicts next words seems to produce a system with general intelligence, although neuroscientists believe that the brain evolved precisely to predict the future- the “predictive brain” hypothesis. Blaise Agüera Y Arcas, vice president of Google, programmer and founder of its research team Paradigms of Intelligence,  in What Is Intelligence, prediction is fundamental not only to intelligence and the brain, but to life itself – by exploring the wide-ranging implications. The radical perspectives on the computational properties of living systems, the evolutionary and social origins of intelligence, the relationship between models and reality, … Continue reading Free Will and Prediction are vital to intelligence, brain and life itself

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Instruments of Wealth extraction which aids the spread of autocracy

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“The magic of Tim Wu’s The Age of Extraction is its simplicity, and breaks down one of the greatest challenges of our age- the unaccountable power of tech platforms, explaining your online life is draining your wallet. Our world is dominated by a handful of tech platforms, who provide great conveniences and entertainment, but also stand as some of the most effective instruments of wealth extraction ever invented, seizing immense amount of money, data, and attention from all of us. An economy driven by digital platforms and AI influence offers the potential to enrich us, and also threatens to marginalize … Continue reading Instruments of Wealth extraction which aids the spread of autocracy

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Chasing peak sugar

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Next time spare a thought when you are adding sugar to your morning English Breakfast Tea or coffee, the challenges faced by sugarcane farming. Inside the world of green sugarcane crops, world’s largest sugar farmers of Kolhapur district in Maharashtra spanning several thousand acres owned by the Maharashtra State Cooperative Sugar Factories Federation and Uttar Pradesh (India) are seeking the help of Artificial Intelligence aided by scientists from the Agricultural Development Trust of Baramati using Microsoft AI technology. Weather station is a tall metal structure with gauges for wind, solar, temperature and humidity are on the top and at the … Continue reading Chasing peak sugar

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Future: Race to invent

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On 17 November, 2023, Sam Altman (38), the enigmatic leader of the AI revolution and the head of OpenAI, buoyed by release of his company’s ChatGPT, was fired on a video call which quickly made headlines around the world. A week later, Altman was back running the company he had cofounded – and most of the directors who voted to fire him were themselves removed from the board, demonstrating his power to bend reality to his will and of how vicious and personal the rush to create this world-changing technology. He set out on a world tour that brought audiences … Continue reading Future: Race to invent

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Embraced by millions, Turbocharged virtual button that changed the world

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Early 2000s, Yelp a start-up came up with a novel and friendly feature for the emergent world wide web. Ordinary users could post reviews of restaurants that everyone could read. As there were very few people who were really interested in writing things on the internet. Yelps engineers needed to give them a reason to. The story of how they incentivised this user-generated content is the jumping off point for Like.  Yelp reckoned people might be compelled to post reviews if they received compliments from others. Did you know, over 160 billion times a day, someone taps a like button. How … Continue reading Embraced by millions, Turbocharged virtual button that changed the world

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Has Silicon Valley lost its way?

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Palantir Technologies, a company that is intertwined with the national security state, Silicon Valley’s utopian tech thinking was always untethered from reality and it’s a good thing that it is now ending. Palantir’s co-founder and CEO Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska claims that in order for the West to retain its global edge – and preserve the freedoms we take for granted – the software industry must renew its commitment to addressing our urgent challenges, including the new arms race for artificial intelligence. Government, in turn, must embrace the most effective features of the engineering mindset that have … Continue reading Has Silicon Valley lost its way?

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Have we lost ability to make things?

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We live in a manufactured world, Unless you are floating naked through space, you are right  now in direct contact with multiple manufactured products. How ofoten we stop to think: where do the things we buy actually come from? American President, Donald Trump, promised in his recent inaugural address, America would soon become “a manufacturing nation once again”. His planned tariffs, will encourage some global companies to relocate factories back to the US.  Academic expert on innovation and technology at Cambridge University, Tim Minshall’s Your Life Is Manufactured is about perils of losing touch with the art of making things .  This … Continue reading Have we lost ability to make things?