Quick notes: 21 lessons | Solar pumps...

• AI and big-data: Godsend for totalitarian regimes.
  
  In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data-processing. Democracy diffuses the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given twentieth-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all the information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is part of the reason why the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy.
  
  However, soon AI might swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. Indeed, AI might make centralised systems far more efficient than diffused systems, because machine learning works better the more information it can analyse. If you concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database, disregarding all privacy concerns, you can train much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial information on a million people. For example, if an authoritarian government orders all its citizens to have their DNA scanned and to share all their medical data with some central authority, it would gain an immense advantage in genetics and medical research over societies in which medical data is strictly private. The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century - the attempt to concentrate all information in one place - might become their decisive advantage in the twenty-first century.
  
  As algorithms come to know us so well, authoritarian governments could gain absolute control over their citizens, even more so than in Nazi Germany, and resistance to such regimes might be utterly impossible. Not only will the regime know exactly how you feel - it could make you feel whatever it wants. The dictator might not be able to provide citizens with healthcare or equality, but he could make them love him and hate his opponents. Democracy in its present form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech. Either democracy will successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form, or humans will come to live in ‘digital dictatorships’. - Yuval Noah Harari -
  21 Lessons for the 21st Century



• Ties with Chinese Communist Party: Alibaba is the force behind hit Chinese Communist Party app.



• India turns cautious on MNCs collecting data: MasterCard and Visa, the two biggest card networks in the U.S., as well as lobby groups that represent Google and Facebook — both of which offer payment solutions in India — spent months fiercely opposing the directive (on data localization). They were joined by as many as 30 U.S. senators, who urged India to rethink its stand on data localization. “We see this as a fundamental issue to the further development of digital trade, and one that is crucial to our economic partnership,” the senators wrote.



• Cabinet nod for long-pending KUSUM: The scheme consists of three components: 1. Setting up 10 GW grid-connected renewable power plants, each of 500KW to 2MW in rural areas; 2. Installation of 1.75 million standalone off-grid solar water pumps to fulfill irrigation needs of farmers not connected to the grid; and 3. Solarisation of existing 1 million grid-connected agriculture pumps to make farmers independent of the grid supply and also sell surplus power to distribution companies and get extra income.



• E-Waste: India generates more than two million tonnes of e-waste annually, and also imports undisclosed amounts of e-waste from other countries from around the world.



• Decimated credibility: Catholic Church credibility on the line at abuse meeting



• Hans target Africa: Chinese 'Ivory Queen' Yang Fenglan jailed in Tanzania