Same but different

‘The world is changing’. ‘The world is changing, fast’. ‘The world is changing, really fast’.

We’ve heard this or read this enough and more times ever since our unlimited curiosity took over the better part of our limited time. This comes up in almost every context of every conversation. Whether it is the economy, jobs, education, raising children and also pooping. On the last one though, most conversations veer towards the mastery of the Japanese or Singaporeans in leading their masses to bowel divine.

But the more I think about it and the more I see, the more I believe that it’s much ado about nothing after all. There’s no denying the fact that life as we know it will be very different 50 years from now and that we are undergoing true transformation but isn’t that the very nature of life itself? Is anything REALLY changing?

Without getting being tempted into getting wordsmith-ed into this, let me instead share some specific triggers that led me into thinking this way.

Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Jobs and a cheeseburger

Think Rage Against The Machine – before the band was born, this was a real phenomenon. Angry Luddites during the Industrial Revolution would vent their frustration on the machines and break them because these machines took their jobs. Well, nothing good came out of this action. In fact, during this period productivity improved, incomes grew and life expectancy improved. In fact incomes have been rising for a large part of the global population since then. Much is being said about how robots are and will continue to nibble away on our jobs. Very little is said about the fact that the education system is just not geared to identify the mold of a child in order to make that child ready for a job where she/he will be thoroughly fulfilled.

It is a casting problem of global scale. Imagine a job market at demand meets supply bliss point where every skill is made available at an exchange for the right price and at the right time with the seller having the flexibility to choose the time and place of the exchange. It would be a true casting coup!

Although the work that needs to be done to solve many of the world’s big problems is of gargantuan proportion, this narrative about a changing world and the urgency and despondency that is built around it often unnerves me. Not because I believe it, but because I don’t believe it. More about how the world’s  problems and how they can be fixed is here. Hope this gives the reader a sense of optimism.

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/fixing-the-world-bang-for-the-buck-edition-a-freakonomics-radio-rebroadcast/

Culture, People, Society and twitter

I recently happened to watch a movie called ‘Taxi Driver’. As the name suggests, a taxi driver in Manhattan is sick of the degrading society around him and goes out to take matters into his own hands. This is set in 1976. Needless to add nothing has changed in these long 40 years because the same narrative can be set up today also. For anyone born in the 1980’s in India, Wagle ki Duniya is a familiar name. In one of the episodes which also features Shahrukh Khan, one of the opening scenes has this dialogue where Mrs. Wagle says that the traffic makes it impossible to cross the road. This is late 1980s and it looks like nothing has changed! If we listen hard enough, there are unlimited similar examples.

Environment, Climate and airconditioners

In the book Super Freakonomics, the authors have very systematically laid down the reasons why they differ from everyone on Global Warming. Just like the authors, there are several quarters in the world which disagree with the doomsday-ish analysis of global warming. Agree that the earth is changing, but the innovations in renewable energy are now gathering momentum so fast that they are now ready to be scaled up. Essentially, the cost of producing a unit of electricity using renewable energy is now becoming a fraction of the cost using fossil fuels and that is great news that hasn’t yet struck the shores of media outlets. This documentary is a very uplifting reassurance of the change coming our way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmyrbKBZ6SU

The point that I am trying to make is that as much as we are fascinated and titillated by change, we need to separate the grain from the chaff. Is the environment around us really changing or is it just our view that is changing? Is mainstream media taking the drill out of the very basic curiosity of humans? Our view of this change needs to be more broad-based and needs to sift through a huge amount of information and not just InShorts, BBC and NDTV alerts. Not surprisingly, the easiest way to predict the future is read a lot of history. (much like all our friends who work with analytics companies!)

But, I would be naïve if I said that nothing is changing. As a certain Donald Trump is telling us and Brexit is proving to us, the world is moving to an insular state in the belief that it will help them protect their cultures and identities. Just when we were rejoicing about globalization and the world being flat, this worrying trend is not the best of news.

I believe that we can live in this innate and innocent belief that as long as even half of us do what we’re supposed to do with all our heart, our collective problems will not increase!

P.S. – The cheeseburger, twitter and air-conditioner mentioned above is purely for the purpose of decoration and has no bearing on the views mentioned above.