Social Network

 We are all social animals. Some are more so than others, but it is hard to imagine life without a network of friends and family members. When I reflect on my social networks, I can see how they have changed over life time. Moreover, these changes have been driven primarily by technology.

While growing up in India, with almost no telephones around, the only way to make friends and make them a part of your network was through physically being at the same place at the same time. That meant knocking on doors, or gathering to play at home or in a field at a previously agreed time. 

 

When I moved away from my town for studies, I could have written letters to keep in touch with the old friends, but that did not happen often. Except for occasional letters to my parents, I did not correspond much. The only time I revived my old contacts was when I went back home.

 

Telephone had arrived by then, but the use was primarily for local calls. My parents were the primary users. We did not use it to chitchat with friends. Also, there was an issue that many of them were not privileged to having telephones in their homes. Walking over to their houses was the only way to maintain the social network. 

 

Then, I moved to US and a whole set of new challenges presented themselves in maintaining the old network. Although public phones were around, we did not use them for overseas calls--- that was way too expensive. Writing letters---using “aerograms”, as they were called, or lightweight stationary--- were the only ways to keep in touch. For more urgent communication, there was a little more expensive alternative, a telegram. 

 

Somehow, through letters, I was able to keep in touch with a selected group of people back home. However, I now had a set of friends in the new country. When not physically meeting them, I kept in touch using telephone calls. All local, mind you, and all on landlines. 

 

The next innovation was electronic mail, or email. Now a letter could be sent instantaneously to whoever had an email address. Thanks to AOL (America-On-Line), I started communicating with people all over the world. Pretty soon, I had the capability to send group emails, so communication with a whole bunch of people became possible. Keeping the social network going was now relatively easy.

 

Then came cell phones and our ability to connect went up. Initially, they were just phones and there was no text function, but I could communicate from where ever there was a cell phone signal. When we had smart phones, I could start texting people so they could communicate at their leisure. Thanks to applications like “WhatsApp”, it was now possible to connect with people in India, or around the world, without any charges. 

 

Social media applications, such as FaceBook, changed the paradigm of social network once again. Now it was possible to post photos that people in in my network could see. Not only was it possible to keep in touch with folks around the world, but also see what they were up to, even in minute details. Interestingly, I could now get in touch with people I had lost contact with. FaceBook was helping me revive old networks and relationships. 

 

Further, people I had physically met while on travel could keep in touch with me long after the event, using FaceBook or other similar social media offerings. This group of new friends included fellow travelers or local guides we had met while travelling.

 

Having an active social network no longer required physical proximity, as when I started. Now, I could keep in touch with a much more extended network around the world.

 

As I look at the situation now, a common theme in my social network, as defined above, is that with a very few exceptions, I have met all people in my network at least once. That is not true with, say, a hobby related network I belong to, Flickr. We all in that network have a shared interest in photography, or, creating visual images, but have never met.

 

Over the fifteen years, I have made “friends” with other photographers. We post photos (or images) and make comments on each other’s work. However, I have never met them, nor do I have too much information on them. Most often, I do not even know what they look like or what part of the world do they live.

 

The progression in technology already makes it possible to meet these people, say through holograms or virtual reality glasses. The only thing missing is the social need. If that hurdle is overcome, there will come the day when we will all be in the same room, virtually. I will meet all my Flickr friends---Mark, Tim, Victor, Renee, Silene, Sonja, Amba, Maarten--- and interact with them just as I did with my friends in the old home town. 

 

It would be like the good old days, except, the much larger network will be international and include friends I have never physically met, or likely to meet.

 

 

 

 

Election from a vision perspective

  

Frequently management consultants are called in to develop a strategic plan for a corporation. I know the process fairly well, because I used to be a management consultant too.

 

A major step in the process is to develop a vision for the corporation. This is based on what is happening in the external world and what the stakeholders in the corporation are saying. Three to five years from now, the corporation may need to look different from what it does right now because the external environment is constantly shifting and opportunities emerge. Such vision is at the foundation of what a strategic plan would look like. It will be a roadmap for how to get there from here.

 

A corporation does not have to deal with alternate-visions. It could be that the workers in the company may feel differently from the management about where the corporation is heading, but in most cases, they have faith that those running the company to know what they are doing. They also have the ability to leave the corporation if they disagree. In an extreme situation, they may go on strike. That however, does not change the vision a great deal, only how the benefits of fulfilling the vision would be distributed.

 

It is different for democratic nations. There could be different visions and the election will give right to someone to implement strategy to achieve the selected vision.

 

What the Democrats were trying to do in the recent presidential election was to communicate a vision for US in face of changing environment, both externally and internally. There are major trends such as globalization, advanced technologies and changing demographics of this country. Their vision would recognize these changes and incorporate them in the way the country would look like.  “We look ahead”, was their mantra. 

 

However, there was a competing vision that was proposed. This vision reminded people that the country does not need to follow global changes in the environment, but can go back to the good old times. “Make America Great AGAIN” is what the opponents said.

 

There is an obvious appeal to that alternate vision. People have a myopic memory as they recall the past. It is almost always “Good old times” and not “Bad old times”.  When looking back, it feels good to remember times when inflation was low, and those pesky immigrants were few. Unlike a corporation, people of the country can change the direction of the country by a simple vote, so that the alternate vision can be achieved. 

 

To a large percentage of people, that seemed to be a much more appealing task then doing something new with no clear benefit to them. It really did not matter that the huckster pedaling the alternate vision was coming up with unworkable ideas. The force of his personality was sufficient.  The story he told was convincing.

 

So, now, hold on to your seats.

Automation running amuck

 I was alarmed when most of the warning lights came up on my Subaru Forester one fine day a few weeks ago. One of them was indicating a malfunction of “Eye Sight” , a vision system that keeps car in the lane and maintains distance from the car in front. Especially disturbing was the sign that we need to check the engine. In addition, among others, there was an "S" blinking in and out, where "S" is the sports mode of driving.

I checked the manual to see what was going on. That was totally futile because nowhere in the manual it said what the Christmas Tree of lights (my name for multiple lights coming on and blinking) meant. When we tried Google and YouTube, there were all types of suggestions: It is the engine, it is the transmission, it is the Vehicle Dynamic System, it is the battery, it is water in the gas. In short, totally confusing answers, written by equally frustrated customers.

 

So, I took the car to the dealer. They hooked it up and came up with diagnostic....it was the coolant bypass valve failure, which, if not attended, can lead to the engine overheating. They fixed it in a few hours and, better still, it was covered under warranty.

 

My question: How can so many warning lights come up for a coolant bypass valve failure? I can see check the engine light but all the rest? Probably, the engineers that designed the system wanted a way to communicate to me that something was wrong, but to use the “Christmas light” approach? 

 

In short, the modern cars have become so complicated that it is impossible, even for an engineer, to figure out their bizarre behaviors.

 

This is not the only case where automation has run amuck. The very same day I had the car incidence, I had to battle the sprinkler system in our backyard. 

 

The old controller was replaced by a system called Rachio which operates through my iPhone, using the home’s Wi-Fi system. The problem was that our Internet service provider had issues and so we had periodic Internet blackouts. That made our dear Rachio get disoriented and disconnected. The problem persisted even after the Internet service was restored.

 

Worse, one of the sprinklers sprung a leak and I wanted to shut the system off. Without Wi-Fi connection, Rachio will not obey. I had to find the shut off valve and manually disconnect the system.

 

Meanwhile, the Rachio controller had multiple lights blinking. I tried to decipher the meaning of blinking lights and reconnect Rachio. That just did not work. Like an endless loop, the system changed its blinking light sequence but came back to the original set. I was going to call Rachio for assistance but then, magically, the system started working.

 

After giving away the simplicity for controlling sprinklers to a Wi-Fi run automated system, I said “hell no” when our new microwave and gas stove (from LG) asked to be connected to Wi-Fi. 

 

Enough is enough. Especially for a senior citizen. 

 

 

 

On automation and redundancies

 Three events made me think about the topic of automation and redundancies. First one was collision of a containership with a vital bridge in Baltimore a few months ago. The second, the crash of an Air France flight (AF447) in Atlantic a few years ago, and the third, the massive global impact of a glitch in a Microsoft software that happened just a few days ago. 

 

The container ship apparently had several power outages as it left the port. Without power, it was not possible to steer the ship and the result was catastrophic. My question is what was there no redundancy bult in the system, so if one thing fails another takes over? That’s what make airplanes so safe.

 

Then there was a curious case of the crash of Air France flight AF477. This modern Airbus A330 was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. As the airplane entered a thunderstorm, its air speed indicator froze and the autopilot stopped working, as well as a fly by wire system which corrects pilot’s errors. When automation failed, the pilots made mistakes and the airplane entered a stall. One major reason was these pilots were trained for using fail-safe systems all the time and their experience in manually operating an aircraft was limited, particularly at high altitudes. 

 

In an excellent Podcast of the event (“Cautionary Tales”) Tim Hartford mentions experiments in which training under full automation led to poor responses for situations where it failed. Almost like it is better to train using automation that is not guaranteed to work always. The humans then know what to do in case of failure.

 

Finally, something that happened ta few days ago….it seems that an error in the Cybersecurity code that Microsoft asked people to use resulted in a massive meltdown in all types of sectors: aviation, banking, and hospitals. This brings forth another issue… how can we give so much power to one company or one software? Here too, there was a human override possible but that did not work well. Perhaps people were not used to manually doing things that were automated. 

 

Automation is inevitable, but these examples show that (1) make sure there are redundancies built in, (2) make sure that humans are trained to take over if automated system fails (i.e., they are trained on non-foolproof systems), (3) do not let one company, system, person become the ruler of the automation game across sectors.

 

Early in my professional career I used to do quantitative risk analysis. There were tools available even then, like Fault Tree Analysis, that would have caught some of these issues before they resulted in tragedies. I am sure there are more sophisticated tools available now then at that time So, why were they not used?

 

Finally, as Tim Hartford mentions, in the coming wave of AI, humans are going to become even more reliant on AI based automation. 

Will that reduce even further the chances of humans learning the basics of how to manual take over if automation fails? 

They called us exceptional

 I just finished reading a book that chronicles the experience of a woman with Indian parents growing up in this country. Titled “They called us exceptional: and other lies that raised us” by Prachi Gupta, it is an interesting read, though a bit too dense and long. It is also a depressing story that ends with her family completely falling apart. 

 

The book is especially relevant to us as we are immigrants from India and raised two kids in this country. I was trying to see how our story matches that of Prachi’s and where it does not, what could be the reasons.

 

In one important way it does not match is in terms of what has happened to our family vs. Prachi’s. We are an intact family that lives happily in California. Nothing as dramatic as what happened to the Prachi’s in the book. It could be just good luck or there may be reasons. 

 

The main reason for Prachi’s family falling apart is her father, who was authoritarian with old fashioned views of how his wife and children should behave with him. The way he treated his wife, daughter and son is frankly shocking. As the book progresses, we find out that he was also suffering from mental illness.

 

To elaborate, in many families in India, wives are still second-class citizens. They are there to cook food, bear children, raise them, and be obedient. Also, the fathers demand their children to become doctors, or lawyers, or investment bankers. Those are, in their opinion, the surest ways of making money, and that they believe would lead to happiness. These beliefs come with them as they emigrate to US.

 

Children are also made to believe that as Indian immigrants, they are exceptional. Unlike the population around them, they have to study hard, ignore any distractions, and become doctors. If they fail to achieve the target professions, they are treated like failures. 

 

Another point that Prachi makes is that as a brown person, she felt like a fish out of water in school and work environment which was mostly white. Surely discrimination exists and one cannot deny how she felt and coped with the situation. 

 

However, there is one point I would like to make in that regard. It appears that Prachi’s parents did not make too much effort to assimilate in America. In other words, they remained “Indians in America” and not become “Americans with an Indian Heritage”.

 

I am a strong proponent of the latter. By assimilating, while not abandoning your Indian heritage, you can have the best of both worlds. There is so much that this country and immigrants from the other parts of the world have to offer. Different cultures, food, music, and life stories. Doing it also gives you confidence in dealing with people who are not like you. It reduces “them vs us” attitude and you may stop seeing every action by “them” as an indication that it was based on racism, when very likely it was not. That has been my experience.

 

One caveat. My experience was based on working at high level consulting firms where having people with a variety of backgrounds is common. I am sure the same situation exists in hi-tech firms as well. If you are in a field where those who work are either less educated or live in a more insular world, the situation would be different from what I experienced. 

 

To make it more complex, in some situations, they are looking for an Indian (say, because they want to make a movie about India) and assume that you are an Indian because you look like one, when you really are an American who has parents from India. You get discriminated when they find out that you are too much like them, and not different. 

An interesting paradox, isn’t it? 

 

Overall, as immigrants, one of the most important challenges we face is raising our children. While there is no one way to raise them, the attitude we have toward our new country matters a great deal in whether they end up flourishing and being happy. 

I am eager to find out

  

The current world is filled with many uncertainties that may not be resolved in my remaining life time. So, what if there is a way (cryogenic or otherwise) by which my body is preserved after I die, and I am able to wake up and peek at the future. Say 50 years from now. Wouldn’t that be exciting?

 

Here are some of the things I am eager to find out.

 

Let’s start with my two grandchildren. They would both be middle aged by the time I wake up. What would they be doing? What type of education did they have? What career did they select? Did that require going to a place called “office”? If they did not go to an office, what happened to all the office buildings? More importantly, how did they manage to make a living in an AI dominated world? Was there a guaranteed universal income that kept them going?

 

I also wonder to what extent AI would have influenced the human civilization. There is currently an extreme point of view that AI would dominate the world and humans will become secondary. Did that come to pass? Or, was AI absorbed in the civilization as other human progresses have?

 

Given the progress in AI and robotics, I won’t be surprised when I wake up that a special service would be available to wealthy folks to that they could live forever. They would be able to get a brain transplant and a robot would imitate their physical structure. For poorer folks, the advances in medicine would guarantee a disease-free life, even if it were just 150 years, and not forever. Is that what is coming?

 

I am also eager to find out what will we use for entertainment and communication in the future? Will there be TVs and laptops? Social media? Would people be communicating through brain implanted chips instead of external devices? How common will be holographic images for communicating, teaching and entertainment?

 

Will anyone physically travel to see a place and experience its culture? The way things are going, every nook and cranny of this earth would have been covered by hordes of tourists, so will people prefer to travel through virtual reality? 

 

What is more certain is the future of routine transportation. When I wake up in 2074, I am almost certain that nobody will be driving a car, or whatever that device is called. With AI firmly in place, every vehicle will be autonomous. The current automotive industry would have become completely different. Will they still exist or AI dominated firms take over the transportation segment of the society?

 

Talking about another major uncertainty hanging over our heads today, I wonder what would the world look like in 2074 after 50 more years of climate change. Would the civilization blunt the rapid change in climate? When I wake up, will I be in some place safe from extremes of rain and heat? Will that be on earth or would I be transported to be a part of the human population that had shifted to moon or even mars to escape the savagery of climate change?

 

In that regard, how common would it be to travel to Moon or Mars in 2074? Would Moon be a routine destination for tourists (after they have saturated every place on earth)? Would Mars be accessible for the more adventurous types? More appropriately, would either of my grandchildren have traveled to Moon or Mars? 

 

Would they have found life outside our earth? I have high hopes that some form of life, even microbial will be discovered in my life time. There are probes going to places like Europa and Ganymede that will send back some confirmation in 2030s. Perhaps JWST will detect some signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. However, it is more likely that we will have a more definitive answer when I wake up in 2074. How exciting!!

 

The universe is a special place. Currently, two major uncertainties are regarding dark matter and dark energy. There are speculations about what they are, after all they make up most of the universe. However, by 2074, there will be definite answers. Then the next question will be how will that affect our concept of ever-expanding universe. Will it eventually collapse? 

 

So many questions. I hope we will have answers to some of them in fifty years.. 

Experiences

  

“Do not acquire things, acquire experiences instead.”

 

I am sure you have heard people say that. I say that. Having downplayed material acquisition and spending time and money on gaining experiences almost throughout my life, I can claim that this saying has traction. 

 

Let me cite some examples of how people generally gain experiences:

 

For many of us, if not most, “experience” involves some form of travelling. It allows you to see new places and enjoy new cultures. Booking.com, a well-known travel site lists attractions, activities and experiences on its website. Packaged experiences. 

 

However, after a while, just sightseeing does not cut it. For some of us, to gain real experiences you must have interactions with locals, talking to them, observing their customs, listening to their music, and eating their food. That is generally difficult to do if you are travelling with a group. In that case, most of the interactions are with the fellow travelers, and not with locals. Yes, some of the tours now have time set aside for a cooking lesson or tea with a local person. However, that seems more like a contrived experience than an authentic one. 

 

For a more authentic experience, one needs to travel solo or just with a partner. Also, one would think that staying in an Airbnb, instead of a hotel, may allow for a more personal touch. But that is not always true. Even an Airbnb rental can be a completely impersonal experience. “Here is the combination of the lock, enjoy your stay.”

 

Perhaps backpacking and staying in someone’s home will bring you closer to local population, but that type of travelling is not for everyone. One person whose book I skimmed through goes one step further. In her quest to experience the changing way of life in India, she spent weeks with some families. That way she really experienced what it was all about. 

 

If you look at the definition of experience, it is: “a practical knowledge, skill, or practice derived from direct observation of or participation in events or in a particular activity.” That opens up a number of interpretations. Let me give some examples:

 

The first one relates to a tour that one of my relatives went on. This was through Italy, a country full of sites to see, food to experience (by my definition) and a very boisterous population. However, for her the experience was being with fellow tourists who cracked jokes and danced after a few glasses of wine. 

 

Then again, so many people travel by cruise ships, often with friends. In that case being with people whose company you enjoy is an experience, whether it involves significant sight-seeing or not. In fact, some cruises are with no destination, just roaming around. They do not even pretend to be providing anything else but company of fellow travelers and facilities. Sure, for many, that too is an “experience”.

 

A really interesting example of what people call experience is something I found out through conversation with a wealthy person from Mumbai. She mentioned that some of the rich young ladies in her home town are after “experiences”. “That’s why they select to buy an expensive purse instead of storing wealth under lock and key as one would if invested in gold or some such commodity.” Hmmm, buying a Gucci for an outrageous price is acquiring an experience and not a thing? What experience would that be? Going shopping? Bargaining with the seller? Making your friends jealous? 

 

So, the personal choice extends to not just how one acquires experience, the way it is normally interpreted, buteven the way it is interpreted.