Book Review: Prediction Machines by Agrawal, Gans & Goldfarb

Last time I was in India, my friend Madhu Parthasarathy gave me this book titled Prediction Machines - The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb. It is a Harvard Business Review Press book and so is a bit too much of a business book than one that explores the topic academically. As a result, book's prose is very simple, making the content highly accessible to anyone interested in this topic irrespective of whether they are inside or outside the field. Since it is only about 200 pages long, it is a thin volume, making it an easy read. 

Material is laid out in five simple parts titled, Prediction, Decision Making, Tools, Strategy, and Society, that were all very easy to follow. The authors appear to be moonlighting as business consultants, and so I can understand how having such a book published will help them with their street cred. They seem to be quite pleased with themselves in figuring out that AI is mostly prediction (rather than pure intelligence). They keep reiterating this point umpteen times, though it is not necessarily their own original discovery. Some ideas resulting from this understanding are indeed good & interesting. For example, the cost of computing going down and the quality of prediction going up considerably, can potentially transform business models. In case of Amazon, they may be able to predict exactly who will need what and when, in addition to their affordability. If this prediction is close to 100%, Amazon can start shipping items to people on their own and setup the logistics needed to collect very rare returns if/when needed. Thus, their business model may flip from shop first & ship next to ship first and collect returns. While this is a nice change in the business model that may make business leaders salivate, describing this insight takes up the first ~40% of the book, that covers Prediction & Decision Making parts. Perhaps the authors know that some/many of their intended readers won't even read this book in full or be so distracted that they won't follow even these simple discussions and so they summarize the key points at the end of each chapter. One key point (page 68) reads, "Humans make poor predictions, overweight salient information and do not account for statistical properties. Many scientific studies document these shortcomings across a wide variety of professions. The phenomenon was illustrated in the feature film Money ball." While that is all correct, is this the level of summary that should be provided? It is either meant for "Future business leaders still in high school" or else, we need to worry about the quality of our business leaders' natural intelligence! 

Throughout the book authors touch upon every conceivable area that is connected to AI. This includes Amazon's Echo, robots used in their warehouses, Australian mining industry, self-driving cars, Google/Microsoft type companies' language translation tools, iPhone, Siri, and so on. There are quotes by Nobel laureates, jokes, 2x2 business charts, couple of graphs. But everything discussed is quite superficial, with none of the discussions spanning even couple of pages in the book. The advice they dispense also seems too simple. For example, one of the key points listed is that "C-suite leadership must not fully delegate AI strategy to their IT department". Chapter 16 opens with what is presented as a brilliant insight provided by one of the authors. Apparently, an early-stage ML company was trying to deliver a disease diagnosis tool to doctors and were struggling to get all the approvals needed to be able to do that, since they are basically doing what doctors are certified to do. The author, who is a business consultant had suggested that they deliver a probability number indicating how likely the patient has the disease and leave the yes/no diagnosis decision to the doctor. While we can agree that it is the right thing to do, is this a brilliant insight worth hyping as the opening paragraph for a chapter titled "When AI Transforms Your Business"? Reminded me of the recent John Oliver's Last Week Tonight episode, where he discussed business consultants. Watch 7:30 to 8:02 of this episode. As John Oliver himself says in that episode, I do have friends who are business consultants that are brilliant and who certainly add value to the business they work with, though that may not be the case always!

The last part titled "Society" is limited to just one chapter of about 10 pages (which is pretty much the topic of my entire 1.5 hour long lecture on Ethics & Emerging Technology). Of course, their answers and conclusions are aligned with my beliefs, which is heartening. For example, AI/ML has a lot of potential for increasing income inequality and so societies need to regulate/manage it well. Better AI performance may mean less privacy, without proper regulation, some companies may end up controlling everything in our lives, from production to distribution of all the goods & services. Hopefully this consistent view evolving on multiple fronts will help their intended readers get educated and aligned on these notions. 

I was reminded of watching two travel documentaries way back in the early 90's when I was planning a visit to the UK. Since touring Wales was on the cards, picked up two VHS tapes about Wales tourism from the local public library. One talked about each attraction for 5 mins, provided a summary and a slide, listing bullets of the places/things one should see/do. Then moved on to the next part of Wales. Perhaps it was quite useful/productive to potential tourists taking notes. But the other video tape presented Wales beautifully like poetry. There were no bullet lists or take away summaries. I enjoyed that version so much that I watched it couple of times before returning the tape to the public library. This book belongs to the first kind. 

Book Review: Half - Lion: How P.V Narasimha Rao Transformed India by Vinay Sitapati

In one of the episodes of the Seen and the Unseen podcast I have written about earlier, this author was interviewed few months back about this book. Interview was very good. My longtime friend & colleague Sanjay Padubidri and I were discussing the episode and thought we should read the book. Lo and behold, when I saw him last March, Sanjay gave me the book as part of our regular book exchange program. So, read it, liked it.

P.V.Narasimha Rao was the Prime Minister of India from 1991 to 1996 (5 years that form one full term). This book is about his time and administration. TBH, I am not much into biographies. I generally think more than someone's personal story, I should focus on and learn from their unvarnished contributions. Naturally there are exceptions, and those who like biographies may have different perspectives that could be justified. Though this book is mostly biographical, spotlight was on this gentleman's unusual administrative style, and so it was engaging, informative. 

For those who may not be familiar with Hindu mythologies, there is a story of a demon king (named Hiranyakashipu) who had a pious son (named Prahalatha). The king had boons from the Gods that said he can be killed neither by a human being nor an animal, neither in the daytime nor at night, neither inside the house nor outside the house. Thinking that he has conquered death, he becomes a tyrant. Finally answering his son's prayers, God appears in one Avatar called Narasimha that is half human (Nara) and half lion (Simha) and kills the demon king on the door sill, during the evening hour, meeting all the conditions stipulated in the boon! This Indian PM who had that name, ruled successfully for five years, by being a lion sometime and human being sometime and even a fox or a mouse as time/conditions required, as he headed a minority government throughout his term, that could have fallen down any day (as it was common in the multi-party democracy of India). While his hold on power was tenuous, he managed to herald the kind of economic reforms never seen in the Indian history, that has now lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and has set India on a course to becoming an economic superpower in the coming years. While many other leaders around the world might have brought in economic reforms that transformed their country, all of them had either unassailable democratic majority mandate or were some form of dictators that didn't have to worry about their government falling apart. Doing great/difficult things while you don't have to worry about the stability of your Govt is comparatively easier. Doing it while you don't have such stability is completely different, visionary, courageous endeavor. P.V.N.R managed to pull this off and so deserves a lot of credit that he didn't get for a long time. Thankfully he is starting to be recognized for his contributions now, due to works like this one.

First chapter of the book starts with his death in 2004. Though he was Ex-PM, he wasn't accorded the kind of state funeral/respect in the country's capital New Delhi since his own party leaders (particularly Sonia Gandhi) didn't want him to get a lot of fame/name. He was cremated in his native state of Andra Pradesh, where he served as Chief Minister decades earlier. The book then goes back to his earlier days as a party worker. He was elected as CM (equivalent to State Governor in the US), mainly because he didn't have a lot of personal fandom/base and so the party elites thought he will be easy to manage. They did knock him off power before he completed his CM term and ostracized him for a while. Instead of forming a competing party or accusing the leadership of not supporting him, he remained loyal, focused more on literature, writing, etc. for years. 

Though he was born in 1921, he traveled outside India for the first time only in 1976 to visit his daughter living in the USA. That trip apparently changed some of his socialistic views. After the scion of the Nehru/Gandhi dynasty Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in 1991, when the party came to power, he was made PM, again primarily because he was considered weak with no support base of his own. But decades of his experience in state and the central level had given him enough insights into the Indian politics. Leveraging these skills, he immediately took up major economic reforms with Dr. Manmohan Singh (who became PM more than a decade later himself) serving as his finance minister. Often the reforms were painted as initiatives forced on India by IMF since India needed loans, its foreign exchange reserves were so low, etc. But the ideas for reforms were there for several years without anyone at the helm willing to take them up. PVN made good use of the opportunity, blamed the IMF rolling them out and stuck to it, even after the finance crisis was over. There are lot of interesting stories, tactics related to his administration that are quite interesting. To give another example, India becoming nuclear power is mostly thanks to him. In many of these cases, he tactfully avoided taking credit for them or intentionally gave credit to Nehru, Rajiv Gandhi, etc. so that his party base will continue to support him, while most of the actual changes he brought in were totally opposite to the party's old policies! 

It was heartening to note that the subsequent BJP PM Vajpayee, who was heading the country when India became a nuclear power, gave all the credit to PVNR saying, all the prep work was already complete during the previous administration, while he only exploded the device. PVNR spoke 10 different languages, learned to do computer programming on his own, knew Unix, wrote novels, could use very clever tactics suitable to Indian politics to get things done were all very well chronicled. The author being a an academic, certainly didn't write an all-appreciation ode, but points out his negative qualities, talks about marital infidelity, areas where he failed also well. But after about chapter 10, the initial chronological writing comes to an end and so it feels like the book is starting all over again to go back and discuss specific areas (e.g. nuclear detonation prep, Babri Masjid debacle) that drags the pace down. Still, it is not too boring, and the prose is quite accessible. Though I wasn't living in India during his PM years, along with the rest of the Indian diaspora and many economic scholars around the world, I did follow his reforms closely with a lot of enthusiasm and so was quite familiar with the period and the changes he brought in that were such a breath of fresh air. Current Indian PM has a cult like following in India and these days politicians all around the world have learned to leverage social media to get the limelight on them. But PVNR's admin style was quite the opposite and so it is good to see him getting the credit he deserves through works like this one. 

In case you don't think you can read this whole book, you can consider listening to this podcast episode that covers most of the details discussed in the book very well. 

Episode 283: The Forgotten Greatness of PV Narasimha Rao | The Seen and the Unseen (seenunseen.in)

Book Review: The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner

When our family friend Sriram Tyagarajan mentioned this book titled "The Idea Factory Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" by Jon Gertner, it immediately piqued by curiosity since my first business card after my grad school days looked like the first picture attached! Of course, Sriram (and many other friends on my mailing list) are also Bell Labs alumni, that immediately amplifies the resonance for many of us. I should confess that the few years I served as an MTS (Member of Technical Staff) there were well past the glory years discussed in the book. Still, I remember being mesmerized by the small museum adjacent to the Murray Hill office's cavernous front lobby when I stepped in there for the first time while being there for the job interview, that displayed plaques describing six Nobel prizes the Bell Labs scientists had picked up in the previous decades. 

While I can summarize the book in few sentences saying it discusses the flood of innovations that came out of this institution (that forms the foundations of the modern communication system, and thus has touched practically every human being on the planet), the book is even more than that. So, I'd strongly encourage you to put it on your reading list. Though there were tens of thousands of employees who worked for Bell Labs at its peak, the author has intentionally chosen the approach of telling the story via a selected set of characters that ran the labs or were the leading scientists that delivered the stunning array of innovative products and ideas out of the lab. Mervin Kelly, Jim Fish, William Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce and WIlliam Baker are the main characters that stand in for more than 1,200 PhDs and 15,000 workers it employed as early as in the 1960's. (Reminds me of the 4-part HBO miniseries Chernobyl I saw last year, in which hundreds of engineers & scientists were represented by one fictional female scientist to make the story telling easier. Interesting troupe.) 

In the early parts of the 20th century, the American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) was a US Govt approved monopoly that provided telephone service to customers all over the country. It was vertically integrated with Bell Labs at the bottom and Western Electric company in between, with AT&T at the top. Bell Labs did the research to design & develop the needed equipment, right from telephone cables/poles all the way up to the various incarnations of the switching systems. Western Electric is the manufacturing arm of the conglomerate that produced everything from individual telephone sets to switches, cables to provide an end-to-end telephone system solution, while AT&T ran the operation. The DoJ (Department of Justice) of the US Govt often looked at this monopoly with suspicion and had sued it to break it up periodically, i.e., every other decade. But the company will appease the Govt with some changes/concession to allow it to continue as this one massive organization. As a result, the money generated from the business could fund Bell Labs to support its research efforts exceedingly well, with stellar characters managing the labs and producing inventions that certainly benefited the public that wouldn't be possible otherwise. 

Huge business houses that are supported by Govts is not that unusual. From many public sectors companies (including telephone companies) in India to Chaebols in South Korea can be sighted as examples of this model. But none of them come anywhere close to the level of inventions/products Bell Labs delivered over the years. Can you believe vacuum tubes, transistors, electronic telephone switching systems, lasers, Telstar satellite, the whole field of Information Theory, Unix operating system, the programming language C, cell phone system, were a small subset of just this one institution's contributions to the world? Book tells this story amazingly well. Chapter where a very primitive satellite (that is just a spherical structure covered in a thin metallic wrapper to reflect any electrical signal coming in back towards earth) circling the planet is being tracked for the first time by Bell Labs scientists to test its viability to serve as a communication channel gave me goosebumps! It is humbling to realize ideas like cell phones should NOT have a dial tone like landline phones, so as to make more efficient use of the cell phone bandwidth, originated from here and subsequently proved to be a great fit for SMS texting. Naturally the transistor invented in Bell Labs is the backbone of the semiconductor industry even today and so I also saw my current employer Intel mentioned in multiple parts of the book (e.g. latest Intel devices that are size of a postage stamp come with about 2 billion transistors, and Intel manufactures about 10 billion transistors every second of every day!).

Eventually in the 1980s the conglomerate was split up. The local telephone companies formed what are called Baby Bells, while AT&T focused on the long-distance telephone service. The Western Electric company along with Bell Labs became Lucent Technologies that I joined after grad school. During my time, its stock price dropped from a high of about $80 to less than $2, which is all solemnly covered in the last chapter, including the formation of the spin off company Agere Systems that I belonged to in the early 2000's. Though it is sad to see such a great institution practically vanishing (now the name Bell Labs belongs to Alcatel-Lucent) along with most of its staff, with its buildings where I have worked in Murray Hill, NJ practically empty (and even worse the Holmdel, NJ facility, which was architecturally stunning when I had worked  occasionally, totally abandoned), author argues that the model had served its purpose and is not sustainable in today's age for various reasons. Concluding chapters are touching. Even if you are not in the field of telecom/computers, the content/prose/narration are all extremely accessible for anyone interested in reading this book. As the author says in the acknowledgments, the material, time span, stories are all unwieldy but have been put together in a nice and balanced manner. 

The organization I belong to in our office sends out internal email newsletter discussing interesting details/factoids about one team each month. Just by happenstance, yesterday they asked me for titbits about my team/site that they can include in next month's newsletter that would interest other employees in our company dispersed all over the world. I provided this small write-up closely tied to this book, along with the attached photos of a brick I have at home!

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Allentown, PA is a smaller Intel site with about 230 team members. Two decades back, the division we belonged to in Lucent Technologies (called Lucent Microelectronics) got spun off as a separate company called Agere Systems (in 2002). After few more M&A, some of us belong to Intel for the past 8 years, with blue blood running in our veins! The Western Electric manufacturing facility, which was part of AT&T/Lucent conglomerate had a manufacturing facility located in Allentown. It was the first facility to produce transistors on a large scale in the entire world. Silicon Valley in CA followed. About 15 years back when that building was taken down for new construction, the bricks were given out as souvenirs (and pen holder) to employees. Many of the old timers, like yours truly, have one of these at home! 

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Link to photos I took when we visited the Bell Labs office in Murray Hill, NJ earlier this month:

If you found this material interesting, you may enjoy this series of videos related to the birth & growth of the Japanese semiconductor industries. You can see Bell Labs and AT&T inventions discussed in multiple places. 

Birth of The Transistor: A video history of Japan's electronic industry. (Part 1) - YouTube

Electronic Circuits in Stone - A Video History of Japan's electronic industry - (Part 2) - Re Upload - YouTube

Book review (Encounters with Einstein), movie trailer, podcast..

My friend Amit and I are longtime admirers of the early parts of 20th century that formed the Einstein era in Physics. We are certainly not unique since those decades are still considered the golden years of R&D in Physics and wax eloquently as such by many in several books and articles. So, earlier this year when he read & raved about this book titled "Encounters with Einstein And Other Essays on People, Places and Particles" by Werner Heisenberg, promptly ordered a paper copy. It is a short book of only about 140 pages and is made up of a small collection of essays, and transcription of some of his speeches. It is engaging/entertaining, particularly if you like reading about the development of physics during that time. 

This version is published by Princeton Science Library, which seems to have changed the original title of the book "Tradition in Science", perhaps to cash in on Einstein's fame! Amusing. Hence the first chapter still remains the old title of the book and discusses how progress in science tends to be extremely cumulative over decades and centuries. Starting from Greek philosophers and gliding through Copernicus, Galileo, author argues that Einstein wouldn't have been a great scientist if he had lived in the twelfth century, since the building blocks needed for his work wouldn't have been available to him then. Thus, even what problems we get to work on, is quite constrained by the time/history that precedes us. In a way, it reminded me of the notion of Overton Window in social sciences. 

Next two chapters delve into the development of Quantum Mechanics, particularly from Göttingen pov. It is impressive to read about all the interactions that went on between him, Neils Bohr, Pauli, Schrödinger, et al since we have heard of them only as historical legends that appear as larger than life figures in our high school physics classes. Copenhagen, Göttingen and Munich were the places where a lot of QM developments took place and they were all close to each other, allowing these researchers to exchange letters, travel to give lectures and so on. Before the age of Internet, how ideas evolved and people interacted to workout details of complex ideas is quite inspiring, that continues on the following two chapters related to elementary particle physics. The chapter actually describing his encounters with Einstein shows up only in the latter half of the book. Einstein was already a legend and so young Werner looks up to him, seeks his meeting/blessing for his ideas. But as we all know, Einstein was quite skeptical of QM and so though he invites Heisenberg to his home, has long discussions, expresses his doubts. 

As the WWII was ramping up, it is sad to see him describe as to how even Einstein's Theory of Relativity was opposed by Nazi regime, including some famous physicists claiming it as a Jewish conspiracy to which no major attention should be paid. At times Einstein even avoided giving lectures due to safety concerns and the author says he was even given a red leaflet when he went to attend a lecture, approved by the Govt., saying Theory of Relativity shouldn't be trusted since because of its Jewish origin. Heisenberg says he was so upset and disturbed by that smear campaign that he got very agitated and left the lecture, without even bothering to talk to Einstein. Subsequently Einstein had relocated to Princeton in the US, where Heisenberg meets him one more time in 1954 while he was on a lecture tour in the US. 

If we read up on Heisenberg himself, two kinds of images emerge. One is portraying him as a Nazi sympathizer, who worked for the regime. Other is that he is quite supportive of Jews and was against the Nazi regime, but naively thought it was just a party governing Germany for a while and will go away soon, while he continues his work in Physics. My take is the second one. 

Last couple of chapters on closed theories and scientist's journey into the abstraction, though written half a century ago, still gives some interesting insights into the process of scientific evolution. On the flip side, I found the prose to be quite stuffy and stilted. It was originally written in German. I was trying to find out who translated it into English but couldn't. Perhaps the author translated it himself. Sentences like, "The empirical correlate of compactness is the internal connectedness of many experiments, that is, the knowledge that a deviation of experience from theory in one experiment would also inevitably result in such deviation in many others." is quite off-putting by today's standards. 

Check it out if you are interested in this era/topic. I was looking at the cover image for a while to understand what it is. The back cover says it is "Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2". Oh, yes, nice cover!! 

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On a related note, check out this trailer for a new movie coming out in July of this year: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYPbbksJxIg

Titled Oppenheimer, it is about the Manhattan Project. You all may know about director Christopher Nolan, who made Memento (badly copied as Gajini in Tamil/Hindi), Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, etc. He always plays with time, giving it a non-linear treatment in his scripts. He took it to an extreme in Tenet, making the movie a bit hard to follow. This trailer makes it look like the story telling is very linear in time, which is odd for him. Will have to see the movie to see how the script flows. I was also reminded of a low budget, made for TV documentary type movie on this topic titled Day One that I saw circa 1991, which was pretty good for its time.

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On an unrelated note, since it is pleasant springtime in Pennsylvania, I went on a long jog this morning listening to an episode of Heavy Networking podcast (free to download/listen under the packetpushers.net umbrella of podcasts). It talked about WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider) experiences that was simultaneously entertaining and reasonably technical. Consider listening to this episode if/when you get a chance: https://packetpushers.net/podcast/heavy-networking-679-mountaintop-networking-and-long-haul-wireless/

Even if you are not a nerd/hardcore techie, you may gather some interesting stories about the impact of wild horses on communication networks, and BATMAN protocol that will be good fodder for your next family get together or team lunch! 🙂

Book Review: The Weather Machine by Andrew Blum

 I was reading some article online which mentioned the book The Weather Machine - A journey Inside the forecast by Andrew Blum. On a whim, ordered a paper copy, read and enjoyed it quite a bit. Since I was curious/wanted to learn more about how modern weather prediction reports were being put together, this short (less than 200 pages), popular science book scratched that itch nicely.  

Narration of the material is mostly in simple chronological order which works for this book. First part titled calculation, talks about the establishment of telegraph lines in the mid 19th century and how it enabled different telegraph offices to exchange basic information about how the weather is in their location instantaneously. Before that point, the importance of weather was in the minds of Govt officials and scientists, as it affected transportation of goods/armies. But there was not much one could do to put together even a rudimentary global picture, since information couldn't be moved faster than weather. Once telegraphing became possible, within couple of decades, International Meteorological Organization was formed and met in Vienna in 1873. Newly formed weather office representatives from about 20 countries met and had started talking about international exchange of weather information. Even before 1900, a Norwegian scientist named Vilhelm Bjerknes develops a model (called circulation theorem) to predict how air at different pressures & altitudes will move around earth's curved surface, that made predicting weather a possibility! But he himself had lamented that (manually) calculating weather patterns of tomorrow using his model may take perhaps a month, rendering it totally useless. But it was certainly a good start! In the early part of 20th century, a British scientist suggested building a huge palace or coliseum type structure filled with 64,000 "human calculators" that would compute the weather, which is a great leap in imagination as it suggested parallel processing the weather information for different parts of the earth. 

The second part of the book titled Observation talks about all the different ways in which data is collected today, as there is no weather prediction without observation. It also gets into looking up (to the sky from the surface of the earth) and looking down (from space) and merging the information in 3D, plus time. There still is a lot of manual observations that get reported and conflated. There is also a lot of variation in the quality and type of information collected (simple temperature reported by a human being in an island three times a day, minute by minute temperature, cloud coverage, humidity reported by sensors, satellite data and so on), all of which has to be blended into one flexible/forgiving model that will accept all these variations and will still provide coherent future predictions. Even the quality of data provided by weather satellites can vary widely. He points out a 20-year-old Indian satellite still sending data as it races towards the end of its life Vs. a brand-new Chinese satellite launched just an year back still being prepped to go into full service. 

He has traveled to Norway, Reading (England), various parts of the US to personally see offices, installations, large control rooms, satellite launch facilities, interview scientists and so on to collect the needed information, which makes it quite interesting to readers like me. As per his view, though US is contributing a lot both from funds as well as knowledge/data points of view, the bureaucracy that exists in the US is a mess with jumbled up bunch of acronyms that forms multiple departments that don't coordinate or work well. Comparatively the European setup is fantastic and coherent and so currently is the leader in providing the best predictions. This is why in the US TV weather reports we have started hearing about the European Model predictions more often now.

Author's visits to EUMETSAT (European Meteorological Satellite Agency) office in Darmstadt, Germany and to ECMWF (European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecast - located in Reading, England) discussed in the following Part 3 titled Simulation, are the really neat parts of the book. These chapters discuss the satellites that are getting launched routinely to cover the earth to make observations, and how the data is received on earth. The GEO satellites that are located about 36,000 kms above earth, that move in the same speed/direction as earth and so remain on top of the same spot of the earth, provide the big picture but are considered a bit boring since they are designed to "stay" in one place and continue beaming information continuously. But the LEO, lower earth orbit satellites that circle the earth every 90 minutes going from north pole to south pole and then back up to north pole repeatedly, while slowly changing the longitude with each round so that they can cover the entire planet regularly, are considered much more exciting. During that 90-minute cycle, as they fly over Norway, for just about 10, 15 minutes, they dump Gigabytes worth of data they have gathered over the previous 1.5 hours. This is like downloading an entire digital movie using Wi-Fi, into your home computer from a fast-moving car that drives by your home, but it works reliably, consistently day in and day out! As soon as the data comes in, it gets transmitted to supercomputer centers around the world to be assimilated to produce updated reports. 

In my Ethics & Emerging Technologies lecture, I talk about ML (Machine Learning) models that take past data, make future prediction and as future data becomes available, keep correcting themselves to adjust any predictions that were made but were not correct, so that next round of predictions will be more accurate. Blum explains this flow being used in weather prediction nicely. Thus, they don't take a set of data, run through computation to predict tomorrow's weather and then start all over again. Instead, they have a continuously evolving model of weather prediction that goes on inside the supercomputers. The actual earth is another "model" that is being observed via all the data that is coming in. The observed data is continuously fed into the supercomputer's predictive model to keep correcting its errors. This has been going on for years now and so currently the European model is able to predict about a week's worth of weather changes ahead! As available computing power, precision and types of observations (e.g., moisture/humidity data in addition to temperature) improves, the Reading center wants to keep pushing the envelope further, predicting 7th, 8th, 9th day more and more precisely. Since this provides a clear, linear measure and there are tons of scientists who come to the Reading office from different countries to test & contribute their ideas to improve the model to make the prediction better and better, for now there is no end to how far they can advance the field. This is truly a global, nation/border less endeavor in science that we should be proud of.

Last part titled Preservations talks about parts of the systems that are getting privatized and what negative impact it may bring about in future. It also discusses how mundane receiving weather reports through our smartphones have become despite the herculean efforts involved in the background, diplomatic conferences, mechanics/funding of international efforts and organizations (as per Blum, US funds 20% of the entire world's efforts but also acts arrogantly by dissing down the annual meetings) that rounds off the story. 

As I had mentioned in other reviews, I am still puzzled as to why books don't include a ton of photos and illustrations, as this one screams for visuals but has absolutely none. I had tried to look up the reasons online and came across two recurring themes. 

1. In the years past, adding pictures to books was an expensive proposition and so they were not added to keep production costs low. In parallel, since children's books had lot of pictures, a bit of snobbery developed among authors/readers of non-fiction books that carried the notion that serious adult books shouldn't have pictures. 

2. Fiction writers preferred to paint word pictures so that there is a bit of latitude allowed for readers to imagine what is described in their minds as they prefer, rather than locking down the visuals in precise illustrations. (Just as a side note, there is century long tradition of illustrating stories and novels in Tamil magazines I grew up with, that continues to this day in India.)

I am not able to buy either one of these two arguments for non-fiction books I read. Even in the one book I published, I did include a bunch of pictures that I truly think helped explain things better and the cost was including pictures during the printing process is nothing. Only reason I can accept/understand is that getting permissions and approvals costs a lot of time and money and so authors avoid them. But I wish this trend would change. This book could have used a lot of pictures since there are lot of descriptions of buildings, satellites, people the author had personally visited. He could have just snapped photos with his cell phone and included them in the book (which would have mostly eliminated the getting permission hurdle). Perhaps there are other reasons I am not aware of.

Book Review: The Autonomous Revolution by Davidow & Malone

More than one year back, Madhu, another longtime friend of mine in my "book exchange program" gave me "The Autonomous Revolution - Reclaiming the Future We've Sold to the Machines" by W.H.Davidow & M.S.Malone, saying it should keep me entertained on my long return flight. I got around to reading it only now, and realized his prediction was correct for couple of reasons. Content & narration wise, it is an easy read and so potentially one could finish reading it in few hours. Since it is less than 200 pages long, it is not a big tome either. Second reason is a bit more personal. Since I have been giving this lecture titled "Ethics & Emerging Technologies" for a while now, I had thought/read about most of what the book had to discuss and so the material was quite familiar to me. I was looking for new insights, ideas, concepts that I could use in my future lectures. I did find some but not that many. 

First chapter titled "Autonomous Revolution - A third social revolution" discusses how what is going on now, constitutes the third revolution after agricultural and industrial revolutions of the past. After using the word revolution twice in the first chapter title, second chapter, a bit confusingly, talks about transportation revolution (when cars became common in the 20th century), telecom revolution and says some are calling the current autonomous revolution as the "Fourth Industrial Revolution" and tries to explain why it is not appropriate. While the authors points of how "this time it is different" is well taken, the overuse of the term revolution by themselves and then saying why this is not fourth industrial revolution didn't come across as well articulated clear cogent writing to me. 

The substitutional equivalence that leads to societal phase change is a good insight presented in the following chapter. What this means is when a new method introduced to do the same old task more efficiently, it provides a substitutional equivalence. This is the case when spreadsheets replace handwritten ledgers in a bank, since the work performed is still the same. But when the new technology enables the industry to do its business in a totally different form, it leads to societal phase changes. Thus, when banking has been moved online, eliminating the need for buildings, tellers and so on, that is a phase/societal transformation. While the first equivalent change leads to productivity gains but may not affect the number of people working in the industry much, phase changes eliminate large numbers of jobs permanently. Travel agents, agricultural labor are all examples of this kind. 

Book also discusses non-monetizable productivity increase that adversely affects certain industries, including ours (i.e., semi-conductors). Authors give the example of Intel specifically. As everyone knows, our industry is legendary when it comes to efficiency improvements in cramming more transistors per square millimeter and reducing the power consumption, leading to orders of magnitude better microchips. But since the competition is fierce worldwide (e.g., there is no license or regulatory protection that prevents one country/company from selling its products anywhere in the world), price keeps coming down, preventing us from monetizing this phenomenal productivity increase. But the efficiency improvement is still felt/enjoyed by the whole world in the form of cheaper electronics over the past few decades. Luckily since the volume of sales increased thanks to improved affordability, the pie size became bigger. So, we managed to make a good living. But in cases where the volume of sales cannot increase that much due to market saturation, industry might be doomed. For example, if AI improves newspaper article writing efficiency, the reduced cost is not going to keep increasing newspaper sales, helping newspaper industry to thrive. If self-driving cars reduce the costs involved in providing transportation, the usage may increase a little bit. But most of the car sales will go away since there will be no need to own/maintain your own transportation anymore. Since these changes are coming, society has to rethink how the fruits of these efficiency improvements are going to be shared across the population more equitably. 

Authors do touch upon "algorithmic prisons" we are starting to live in (since social media algorithms limit what you get to consume), loss of privacy and other issues I keep talking about in my lectures and posts. Everyone know they have become big topics of discussion though no one seems to be seriously trying to get out of these constraints, as we are used to the freemium models and don't know how to get out of them. It is not easy to come up with a neat silver bullet solution and so authors talk about well-known solutions like basic income guarantees, end users owning their data and being able to decide who gets to see how much (and possibly getting paid for it), etc. that I also often talk about. For those who may not be thinking about these issues regularly, book may be a good, easy read. 

Book Reviews: Early Indians & The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets

I have a regular book exchange program going on with couple of my friends for more than a decade. One among them keeps giving me two books each time we meet, while I give only one! When we met earlier this year, I received "Early Indians" by Tony Joseph, and "The Mathematical Secrets of The Simpsons" by Simon Singh. While I started reading Early Indians couple of months back, progress had been slow, since family & work kept me busy, and I was also watching way more TV shows than I should have been! Managed to finish both books during these holidays. 

Early Indians - The story of our ancestors and where we came from, is clearly written with Indian audience in mind, published in India and seems to be getting good traction there. Other books on anthropology (at least those I have read) tend to discuss human evolution and migration, out of Africa into various parts of the world, without focusing too much on the national boundaries. But this one tries to answer questions like who are genetically Indians? Where did their ancestors come from? What does the languages spoken in India tell us about the origins of Indians? Until few decades back, such questions are answered incompletely, in parts via archeological evidence. In the past couple of decades genetic research has helped close some of the gaps. Author spends a good chapter on mitochondrial DNA, how father side and mother side DNA can be traced back generations to establish descendance and elaborates the way it helps provide a fuller story. 

While the book is well researched, providing lot of references, author keeps jumping from DNA evidence to archeological evidence to language to references in Vedas back and forth too quickly too many times. It gives the book's flow a staccato quality. As I was wading through the pages, I was losing interest. While I certainly do understand why we need a lore and pride to bring cohesion amongst a nation's population to make a country run well, I am always looking for indications telling me that we are evolving beyond those simpler needs, as one civilization that spans the globe. This may not be realistic looking at current trend lines. But that outlook of mine, made reading about how Indian people are genetically, archeologically, and culturally distinct a bit boring. 

To the author's credit, he brought it all together in the end. He clearly states that all the people in the world share 99.9% of the genetic code and so the differences we are talking about are only about the 0.1% that is differentiates us from each other. Metaphorically he describes India as a pizza (a la melting pot, mosaic analogies used in the US). The pizza base is the "First Indians" that are descendants of the original Out of Africa migrants that reached India 65,000 years ago. They account for up to two thirds of the genetic commonality that exists among the Indian population today. Next the sauce is the Harappan civilization people that spread across North and South parts of current India, when that civilization fell apart about 5000 years back. He sees them as the glue that binds different parts of India together culturally & linguistically. Then comes the cheese part formed by the Aryans that came to India, that had more of an influence in the Northern parts than the South. Their significance is seen in the fact that about two-thirds of Indians speak a resulting language. Final round of varied toppings that completes the pizza metaphor are various others that migrated in, such as Greeks, Huns, that are not spread uniformly but are more visible in some parts of India than the others. 

His analysis on the caste system is that it wasn't anything brought in by any of the immigrants but a political development that had started only about 2000 years back. But interestingly, since the system encouraged endogamy, it created a large number of small populations that live close to each other in Indian cities and villages. Thus, neighbors within an Indian village living next to each other may have more distinguishing traits than say Northern and Southern Europeans. After digging through the details of academic papers, DNA analysis, linguistic and archeological evidence, his conclusions can be summarized this way. Political/communal forces may try to develop a narrative that Indian population/culture is something unchanging and unique that has lasted 5000+ years. But in reality, it is not true as it is always mixed, evolving, changing continuously. This conclusion does sound correct & complete, and simultaneously satisfying. While this book may not be of interest to all my friends (particularly non-Indian), it is good to see such works being published that analyze anthropological questions more methodically & rigorously rather than parroting out unsubstantiated national pride claims from echo chambers.

In between, while I was getting a little bored, switched books and picked up The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets by Simon Singh. It was a breeze and a delight that I finished reading it within 24 hours (spanning 2 days)! I knew the author as I had enjoyed reading his earlier book Fermat's Last Theorem as well and so was aware of this decade old book. I have even read bits and pieces of it before, as I am a superfan of the TV show The Simpsons. In case if you haven't read it before, I'd request/urge you to read the article I wrote about  the show titled 27-Year-Old American Family as it also touches upon the math aspects of the show. 

As I wrote in that piece, this show provides at least three layers of entertainment. On the surface, the brightly drawn characters and the backdrop provides a Tom & Jerry type look & feel, even kids can enjoy. At the next level, it usually has two or three different stories running in parallel that nicely conflate to provide a neat climax that will be interesting for adults. On a deeper level, the show throws in so many arcane references, gags you can appreciate only if you freeze certain frames and spend few minutes to understand what is shown in the background. A specialty of the show is throwing in a lot of mathematical references that 99% of the audience will never get but the remaining 1% who gets them will cherish forever. This whole book is about that math aspect of the show. Among the writers of the show there are Math and Physics PhDs, and M.S. degree holders. While I knew all this before, learned from the book as to how the writers sincerely work to find places in the story where clever math puzzles, and factoids can be inserted. In addition, though I had known about Erdős number and Six degrees of Kevin Bacon before, didn't know about how low the combined Erdős–Bacon numbers are for some of the Simpsons writers! Just not to bore everyone, let me just provide a link to this Wikipedia page that lists remarkably low numbers for actors Colin Firth and Natalie Portman, and the lowest number for Bruce Reznick, a mathematician. Book discusses who, got to what number, how, in a very interesting chapter!

Since I had written about the math aspect with examples in the article I linked above, and have also talked about few topics discussed in this book in my Thought Experiments book (e.g. Hilbert & Cantor's work on infinity), I will restrain myself from repeating any of that stuff here. You don't need to be a math wizard to enjoy this book. 

When I realized the final chapter was about another TV show called Futurama, which was also created by the same Simpsons writing team, I thought Simon Singh was running out of math material solely derived from The Simpsons to fill the whole book. But to my surprise, that chapter turned out to be quite neat since it discussed a whole new mathematical theorem and proof derived from a Futurama episode storyline that has been published as a math journal paper! To someone like me, who used to be frustrated by the lack math or any technical depth in Indian cinema (of yester years) even when warranted, TV shows resulting in Math academic journal papers is naturally a pleasure to hear about! As David Cohen's (Writer for The Simpsons and co-creator of Futurama) blurb for the book states, "This book blows the lid off a decade-long conspiracy to secretly educate cartoon viewers". Certainly, read this book, my book and the article link above. You will laugh loud and live long! 

Happy New Year!

-sundar.