Category: Non fiction

  • The Rise of the Robots

    Martin Ford

    The bad news – it would seem that the robocracy is inevitable. The good news – this is a very well written book!
    In most robotics and AI narratives, what gets lost is the nuance as folks very firmly root themselves in polarising camps on the future of our species. The reason why this book worked for me was because its focus was less on the dramatic headline (what) and more on why it would happen. It is a very well researched book and sets about debunking popular schools of thought in a very clinical manner. The author is also wise enough to call out the things he is not sure of and mention alternate points of view, as well as objective enough to not fall for the hype of everything that’s new and supposedly disruptive.

    Though he does begin with the now ascertained fact that the first wave of automation will take away the routine and predictable jobs, he also warns that it won’t stop there. Even what we would call the higher end jobs will be safe only for a while longer. He is clear that this is a wave of disruption different from what we have seen before because the cognitive abilities that get developed will be replicable and scalable. He also demolishes a couple of currently popular coping mechanisms – consistent re-skilling, and man-machine collaboration.

    The second half of the book focuses on the economic and societal implications of the rise of the robots. He predicts the fall of middle class demand as well as economic mobility, as incomes stagnate or disappear completely, and warns that economic growth would not be sustainable since robots cannot be expected to be consumers, and the plutocracy (top 5% of the population) which has the money can only consume so much!

    The solution he believes in is some version of a universal income which would ensure the participation of a larger segment of the population and give some semblance of prosperity to everyone. But he also sees several challenges in execution.

    Beyond the broader narrative, there are some fascinating statistics and anecdotes – the development of Watson, the scarily increasing time it takes for employment to regain its original levels after a recession, the sale price of Internet behemoths (YouTube, Instagram, Whatsapp) framed as a cost/employee, and so on.

    While the outcomes may not really be palatable to anyone who belongs to the species, it doesn’t take away from what a fascinating read this is!

  • The Sovereign Individual

    James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

    One of my favourite books is The Moral Animal. It does a great job of explaining the connection between the mental organs and behaviour, and does justice to the explanatory line on its cover – “why we are the way we are”. I liked it a lot because it did a stellar job of helping me understand the reasons behind my mindset, relationships and interactions with the world at large. While that book helped me understand myself, this one helped me understand the world much better.

    Considering that it was published in 1997, this is as much a prediction machine as it is a brilliant book. It took at least till the middle of the last decade for even the internet to manifest itself in the form we are now familiar with. Therefore, accurately predicting the rise of e-commerce and cryptocurrency (referred to as cyber currency) is a feat in itself. The projections are not just in the field of business but cover social, economical, societal, political and even moral aspects as well. For instance, the rise of nationalism, filter bubbles, the twist in increasing income disparity (from between nations to within nations) because of lack of access are all themes that are being played out now. (more…)

  • Arrow of the Blue Skinned God

    Jonah Blank

    If you read the book solely for the connection to mythology, you might come away disappointed. It happened to me for most of the book until I framed it as a travelogue which happened to connect to the Ramayana and its principal characters in quite a few ways. In that frame, barring a couple of questionable occurrences, (“feni in Kerala” made me wonder whether calling Bruce Lee a cricketer was actually sarcasm) it does a wonderfully lucid job.

    The book was published in 1992 and it is always a pleasure to travel in time through books because, to quote the author, it “presents a picture of a certain place at a certain time, as seen by a certain person at a certain stage of his own life”. It is quite an interesting time to read this because 1992 was a landmark year for the powers that govern the country now. I’m referring to the demolition of the Babri Masjid. That’s where this journey starts.

    I think the problem was in my expectations. I thought this would be a linear journey – both in terms of the chronology of the events in the Ramayana, as well as in terms of covering the geography featured in the epic. It doesn’t work that way. While there are definitely quite a few interesting explorations of the geography, the book is more a study on the deep impact that the epic has even today in the life of an Indian. Not just at an individual level, but the societal, cultural, and political aspects as well.  (more…)

  • Travelling In, Travelling Out

    edited by Namita Gokhale

    I haven’t read a travel book in a while, and there couldn’t have been a better book to welcome me back into the genre. I think it was the mention of Mishi Saran, whose Chasing The Monk’s Shadow I really liked, that made me aware of this book.

    What I loved about the book is its exploration of what travel could mean. That takes the book far beyond the standard travelogue writing. Journeys can be of different kinds – the simple physical movement from one place to another, to the exploration of the self within, “thought to thought”, to seeing things in a different light and so on. This book has all that, and more.

    Devdutt Pattanaik sets the tone well with the exploration of the idea of travel seen through the lens of Hindu mythology and civilisation and brings up the concept of parikrama – returning to the point from where we started. Ashok Ferrey throws in a fantastic light touch immediately after that – fortunes changing with time. This humour finds a neat continuation in Marie Brenner’s take on holy India for the 5 star set. The tinge of cynicism is given full throttle in Mayank Austen Soofi’s time travel in Nainital, but balanced beautifully with nostalgia and wistfulness.
    Bulbul Sharma’s journey to the hills is as much a journey within, and it talks of a place that almost stands still in time. This theme resonates in the detailing of Nobgang by Bhutan’s Queen Mother. A darker turn of places where light does not enter is Ipsita Roy Chakraverti’s exploration of the haunted fort of Bhangarh, and her writing forces one to acknowledge the limited understanding of forces unseen. Both MJ Akbar and Rahul Pandita throw light on yet another nuance of places in India that have remained outside of time, and people who continue to be exploited.
    Mishi Saran’s “A House for Mr.Tata” is a poignant tale of a place changing even as its memories remain firm in the minds of those who inhabited it. The closure missing in this is exactly what happens in Urvashi Butalia’s partition based “The Persistence of Memory”. Indeed, some journeys are for exploration, and some others, for closure. (more…)

  • Blockchain : Blueprint for a new economy

    Melanie Swan

    As bitcoin and its ilk start becoming mainstream, I think the book would serve as a good primer for those who would like to learn about the underlying technology – blockchain. It also provides a catalog of existing projects across diverse domains.

    Without doing a lot of technical deep diving, it not only provides an understanding of the concepts and features of blockchain, and highlights the current uses of the technology, but also provides a broad view of the different kinds of applications that could be made possible in the near future.  (more…)