Innholdsfortegnelse for January 15, 2024 i India Today

In 2023, the buzzword one heard most often in public was Artificial Intelligence. The amazing things it could do and how it would change our lives for better or worse. The world has not seemed quite the same ever since ChatGPT arrived on humanity’s shores some 13 months ago. Its reception was filtered through the old fantasy that produced equal fascination and dread. Everyone’s imagination went towards a machine that could paint like Picasso, write like Dickens, compose like Bach, discover penicillin and decode cosmic secrets like dark matter, not to speak of more humdrum tasks like playing better chess than Kasparov or writing code. In short, a god-like superhuman or a thinking Frankenstein’s monster. Gross overestimation or understatement? It doesn’t matter. The question that springs immediately to mind is,…

The Indian economy will undergo a seismic shift with the rise of Artificial Intelligence. It is a powerful technological force that will reshape existing business models and craft new ones. Projections indicate that AI will inject an incredible $967 billion into the Indian economy by 2035. As we embark on this new AI dawn, several novel job roles will emerge in the economy, while also over-shadowing many that were previously fundamental. The World Economic Forum’s ‘Future of Jobs’ report delivers an engaging projection for the global job market, predicting substantial changes in nearly a quarter of existing jobs worldwide. According to the report, about 75 per cent of the companies surveyed are set to embrace AI, presaging a significant reshaping of the job market. Impressively, half of these organisations anticipate…

Bharat’s vibrant Bdemocracy is on the cusp of a profound transformation driven by Artificial Intelligence. Many new applications, driven by AI, are rapidly seeping into the fabric of everyday life, and elections are no exception. From micro-targeting voters to manipulating public opinion, AI has the potential to reshape the entire election landscape, presenting both opportunities and challenges for Bharatiya democracy. One of the most significant impacts of AI is its ability to micro-target voters with laser precision. This involves using vast amounts of data, including demographics, social media activity and online behaviour, to build detailed profiles of individual voters. These profiles are then used to deliver personalised content, advertisements and messages that resonate with their specific interests and concerns. Unlike traditional broad-brush campaigning, AI-powered micro-targeting allows for tailored strategies that can…

The medical community has rapidly acknowledged the potential advantages of Artificial Intelligence (AI) since its emergence in the 1950s. In 1959, it was determined that machines could interpret symptoms diagnostically. By 1960, physicians projected that computers could significantly augment their cognitive abilities by the year 2000. Availability of data through connected devices, increased storage capacities, enhanced computing are a few enablers of AI adoption across industries, including healthcare. From everyday health apps to high-precision analysis of complex medical scans for early diagnosis, to helping tailor treatment plans, AI is useful in drawing insights from a large amount of clinical data for better disease management, prediction and designing outbreak strategies. Machine learning, which involves fitting models to data and learning through training, is utilised extensively in healthcare, especially in precision medicine. AI…

The promise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and concerns over its misuse have dominated the public debate with Prime Minister Narendra Modi weighing in on the issue in recent weeks. Few perhaps are aware that his monthly radio programme, Mann ki Baat—which is broadcast in over 40 languages—has inspired research in AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP). This digital archive of audio, video and transcripts resulted in an interesting collaboration between researchers of the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIITH) and IIT Kanpur. They used Mann ki Baat as a multilingual test set in Indian languages to establish a baseline for translation of Indian languages, leveraging neural machine translation (NMT) technology a few years ago much before the current hype over ChatGPT and generative AI took the world by storm. These…

Q. Are you excited to perform in India again? My first visit to India was also for a performance—back in 1980, with The Police. And it was the best performance of my life…. I remember asking the audience to dance, and all the old ladies in their saris got up on their seats with their umbrellas. The Lollapalooza line-up is an experience of a lifetime! I’m not sure if the audience there has seen me before, so I’ll be judging it number by number. But I do hope everybody will be up and dancing. Q. India features in your travel plans almost annually. What keeps drawing you here? Trudie and I have been fascinated by all things Indian—from Hinduism and sitar music to yoga and more! I’ve been coming here…

DEFENCE Why India is treading cautiously on the US-led naval coalition in Red Sea By Pradip R. Sagar The Indian Navy has beefed up maritime surveillance to thwart potential attacks on India-bound merchant vessels even as New Delhi maintains a strategic distance from the US-led naval operations against Houthi rebels in the Red Sea https://shorturl.at/gCDNP FROM THE STATES How Bhubaneswar’s Kalinga Stadium is setting the gold standard in sports infra By Arkamoy Datta Majumdar A peek into the high-end facilities and equipment list of the newly-built Sports Science Centre and Indoor Athletics Centre at the complex https://shorturl.at/ouwFP GROUND REPORT How BJP’s Rajasthan cabinet expansion ticks all the boxes By Rohit Parihar The Bhajan Lal Sharma cabinet is a mix of ex-ministers, both seasoned and first-time MLAs, and veterans who didn’t…

In 2011, when Marc Andreessen wrote, “Software is eating the world”, he was referring to the increasing ‘tech-ification’ of businesses. Since then, companies big and small have been rebranding themselves as ‘tech companies’. In 2018, the CEO of the beauty firm L’Oreal, Jean-Paul Agon, told investors about his company’s transformation to a beauty-tech company. Sundar Pichai declared Google as an ‘AI-first’ company in 2016. Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, AI has entered the mass adoption stage in its evolution. While AI models have been improving our lives for several years now (think of how YouTube helps you discover content, or your reliance on Google Maps for directions), with ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, the magic of AI has become more immediate and accessible for a wide range…

Since the launch of ChatGPT last year, AI has captured the public imagination. Popular narratives oscillate between unbridled enthusiasm about AI’s potential to advance societal progress and doomsday scenarios about the existential risks it poses to humankind. Both narratives are misleading exaggerations. They not only distract attention from AI’s current harms, but also get in the way of building the incentive structures, capacities and partnerships needed to develop AI that is in the public interest. Setting the narrative straight is particularly important in a country like India. Unlike in industrialised economies where many of the dominant use-cases are focused on enterprise solutions, in India, AI is positioned as a means to leapfrog persistent development challenges. As AI applications are developed to fill gaps in public service delivery in critical social…

The karaoke machine is out. An assortment of drinks is laid out. Aromas emanate from the kitchen. A visibly excited Pritam is readying the house for a reunion with his Film and Television Institute of India batchmates. “We haven’t met for years,” he says. “We will be livestreaming it [the get-together] to friends in Kolkata.” Before the party kicks off, one of Hindi cinema’s most sought-after composers sits down for a shoot and interview. His teenage son walks in with a tiny box from the wife. It looks like a compact powder. Pritam calls his wife his biggest critic. His kids, on the other hand, determine his music these days, which means Korean pop and artists like Joji. “My Spotify stat of 4.5 billion streams in 2023 excites them more…

Crazy but wonderful, this superbly written and often hilarious account of how the West sought enlightenment from the East—enabling the East to cash in on the gullibility of Uncle Sam—tracks how from inspired literary beginnings, the quest for wisdom was sidetracked by what the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg called “professional lunatic saints”. Edwin Arnold’s epic poem, The Light of Asia, extolled the nobility of the Buddha’s life, while Paul Brunton’s A Search in Secret India through Ramana Maharshi demonstrated to the sad Saxon soul the lineaments of divine immanence. Thereafter, the graph of spiritual understanding, as this account of crazy but captivating holy personages shows, would shoot up in purple promise only to nosedive in a series of delusionary activities culminating in guns rather than roses. The downward spiral was…

AI is a term that seems to be on everyone’s radar but also one of the biggest mysteries in public discourse. We have all been users of AI both knowingly and unknowingly—whether taking the fastest route using Google Search or Netflix throwing up movies that you may like to see based on your recent viewing. But major developments have happened in the past four years caused by a groundbreaking class of AI algorithms—called Generative AI—which are now reading and interpreting text in the ways human intelligence would. It’s a technological apparition that is expected to alter almost every aspect of life as we know it: from work and employment to the global economy, from electoral politics to justice, from defence technology to policing and surveillance, from the arts and entertainment to…

Once again, we stand at the precipice of a technological revolution, this time spearheaded by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Like a recurring motif in the grand narrative of technological evolution, AI emerges every couple of decades, brimming with promise, only to fall short of our sky-high expectations. However, today, the story is unfolding differently; the most recent advances in AI are not just a fleeting fascination—they are a transformative force that will reshape our world. At the heart of this change are ‘transformers’, a groundbreaking class of AI algorithms. These algorithms read and interpret text in ways previously unimaginable, digesting vast libraries of words, grasping the intricate dance of language, and crafting text that is startlingly human-like. But how do they achieve this feat? Here is an overly simplistic explanation that…

As a science fiction filmmaker, I envisioned that AI and robots would replace the spotboys first—the so-called ‘non-creative’ workers on the film set. However, when the AI revolution happened, I realised that it is, in fact, primed to replace creators themselves! I wondered if a spotboy’s tasks, like serving a glass of water on a film set, are more irreplaceable than a writer’s, who dreams up worlds, examines human conditions and conceives delicate emotions. Four years ago, when I was mounting my first film, Cargo (currently playing on Netflix and featuring a spaceship), I encountered several financial roadblocks. One was the cost of creating the CGI for the spaceship, and the other was the expense of obtaining the one song I needed for the film. I utilised tools available today…

MY NAME IS BARBRA By Barbra Streisand VIKING $47; 992 pages A born songstress, Streisand has been lobbing musical bottles into the sea for a while now: 57 albums, a Broadway career, 12 movies with her in the starring role and, now, a 1,000-page memoir. Streisand takes us for a long drive; we meet her mother who never gave her a compliment; Marlon Brando, who greets her by kissing her back; John F. Kennedy, to whom she says, “You’re a doll”; and Pierre Trudeau, “a combination of Albert Einstein and Napoleon (only taller)”. We find out why she didn’t perform live for 27 years. AM I PRETTY WHEN I FLY? An Album of Upside Down Drawings By Joan Baez DAVID R. GODINE PUBLISHER INC ₹3,472; 128 pages “Long before I…

At a time when Hindu revivalism is on the rise on the embers of 20th-century nationalism, the focus on Banaras emerges with a raw intensity in Radhika Iyengar’s study of the human toll that it also extracts. Her close interaction with the sect known as the Doms, the designated human despatchers of the Hindu dead on the famous burning ghats of Banaras, resonates with a clamour that is as compelling as the blowing of a hundred conches at the water’s edge. It’s fascinating to read of the minutiae of the lives of the families of the Doms in the years between 2016 and up to the present as observed by Iyengar’s journalistic eye, compared to that of the celebrated Japanese writer Yukio Mishima (1925-1970). In his novel Temple of the…

A brand-new museum in Pasighat, Arunachal Pradesh, commemorates a long-forgotten chapter of WW2 in India. The ‘Hump’ was a dramatic logistical operation that maintained an air bridge of transport aircraft between Upper Assam and China’s Yunnan province in order to supply Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang forces in the battle against Japan. Remarkably, from its beginnings in April 1942 till the end of the war, the Hump airlift succeeded in transporting a total of 650,000 tonnes of supplies across this route, an unprecedented achievement that certainly contributed to the Allied victory. It took a toll on airmen and planes though, with an estimated 600 crashes on the perilous route. Many of these were in the hills of Arunachal, and the ‘Hump WW2 Museum’ tells the stirring story of success, disaster, adventure and…