An amazing conversation with Dr M Vidyasagar, FRS, a pioneer technologist in AI, and Dr Abhishek Puri, a lead user and radiation oncologist using the tech in medicine.
AI - comparing India and China: India's policy initiatives are not comprehensive yet and lag other G20 countries. China, on the other hand, today harbours one of the biggest clusters of AI scientists.
Digital India blunder:
Modi govt involved FB and Google on hundreds of initiatives under the
Digital India programme.“It is but natural that they will use data in every
manner. India does not have a privacy law and a data protection law.”
Saving democracy from Facebook:
The govt should stop using FB, Google and Twitter for
e-governance, and thereby stop providing free advertising for these
companies for print and broadcast media.
Break Free from Endless Materialism and Outwardly Seeking: Our sense organs are designed to face outwards. So they will perceive and interpret all external stimuli. Following a path which shows us how to direct our attention inwards lessens the stronghold that the senses have on us. In the Bhagwad Gita, Lord Krishna describes the senses as powerful horses, which drag our mind. The reins of the horses which are five in number are the five senses, while the reins are in the hand of Lord Krishna. He is the intellect, which helps us to discriminate between what is needed by me versus what my wants are.
RBI survey: More than half the people surveyed expect no improvement in their incomes, job prospects or the economy a year from now.
Just so you don't feel that Google and Tesla are having all the fun with autonomous self-driving AI vehicles, a robotics researcher in Bangalore has modified a Tata Nano to turn it into a driverless vehicle:
Perhaps Ratan Tata should take a closer look at what this fellow has done. Maybe sponsor it for a cross-country self-driving road tour. It would at least be impressive for the trade shows. But "world's cheapest driverless car" also has a nice ring to it. Made in India!
Consider that if a large number of such cheap systems were to be put into operation, they could each be transmitting back information on various situations the vehicle encounters - just like your web browser sends information back each time it crashes. That accumulating pool of information could be continually analyzed to make the vehicle's AI smarter and more robust. The cheapest system would become the most widely deployed system would become the smartest and most robust system.
Given that companies like Uber are already clamouring for driverless cars to improve their business model, one of India's homegrown Uber-rivals might benefit from looking at this robo-Nano invention. The technology could also be adapted for defense applications and even space systems, after being stress-tested in the everyday world.
Maybe if any of Modi's "smart cities" take off, they'd be the ideal place to showcase such smart self-driving vehicles, and such cities could even be designed around facilitating them.
