Thoughts

  Tech withdrawl Feel at 0200 am | 13-05-2017| Dubai Airport Business Class | Emirates | Mumbai – Dubai – Seattle – Anchorage   First time in many years I find myself devoid of any electronic device on person. Thanks to the ban on taking any electronic device to the USA means your laptop, your iPad and your mobile phone, yes if it is a phone that is bigger that 16 cm have been neatly bubble wrapped and will transported in a separate packet which I need to collect at Seattle. A full 14:30 hours flight without a mobile phone feels a little odd may be that is the only reason I am using a pen and paper top make my notes. For once I felt that may be my son should have purchased a smaller phone for me, or may be I should have carried an extra smaller phone as a backup! Frankly though I have not realized it – a mobile phone has been part of me for a very long time that I suddenly am suddenly feeling a sense of insecurity, a sense of something

Background Almost every other day there is a news article explaining how Artificial Intelligence (mostly wedded to Deep Neural Networks) will take over the mundane task of driving your car. The positive articles suggest that this vehicle automation will make us all do -better- things like read newspaper while being (auto) chauffeur driven and the negative articles say that these will take away the jobs of taxi drivers (invariably taxi is equivalent to Uber!). Depending on  whom you speak to you get an answer suggesting anything from 6 months to next couple of year. But almost all seem to be very positive about the possibility of robo-cars on the roads. It is not that they have not been tried, they have in a very very controlled scenario (equivalent to prototype) and when it has been left semi-loose we have had reports of them getting a little scenarios which we humans do. So there is still work to do. Will it become a reality? May be in some places, but very unlikely in a city