Circa: 2013–A Technologist's View Of Past

Dr SRIDHAR MITTA,

CEO, WIPRO GLOBAL (R&d)

I am Dr Sridhar Mitta,

67, retired but re-engaged–thanks to the continuing demand for mind farming in the

borderless world of the Twenty-first century.

hspace="0" width="181" height="269">T face="Arial">he surge, according to techno-economists and people who predict the future of

work, will continue for at least another 15 years. I am happy as it is enabling me not

only to make both ends meet, but also keeping me fruitfully engaged. The downside of

technology over borders has of course been, the loss of personal touch among people. We,

in our times, had a lot more of 'physical' (P2 as the current generation seems to label)

interactions. That is all gone now. There seems to be more comfort in handling most of

life's transactions over P1 links that deliver Real Feel Net Physical experiences. I have

little to complain, sitting here today, already 13 years into the Twenty-first century.

When I was a child, the way to communicate

with some one was to write a letter and post it. Major events and happenings of life like

some birth or death in the family, and dad-send-me-cash etc. were handled through things

called telegram. Most of you probably have not heard of it or, those who have had an early

life experience with a concept like that, have selectively disengaged from that memory.

When I was a young boy, the telephone appeared in a few households and some businesses. It

was not all that common. It took a long time for it to penetrate every pocket. It actually

took almost a lifetime!

When I traveled all the way to the US to

get my Doctoral degree in 1971, (do not laugh, but that is the way things were before the

Internet destroyed formal education of that kind), I remember sending home a 'cable' to

inform about my safe arrival. I never got a chance to speak to my mother.

I returned to India in 1972. The telephone

by now had become more common but quaintly, it was a stationary frog like apparatus with

long cables protruding from its back, connected to an antiquated, 'physical' jack on the

wall. People were using the instrument with reverence and in turn, it even gifted them

with social distinction. If you were to make an STD call, you had to call an operator

first, tell her the number you wanted. She then made you wait for a while before

connecting you to your desired station. Queues were the order of the day and delays were

frequent. So, the service provider, which used to be a government monopoly, decided to

make money out of scarcity. You could pay extra to jump the queue. Sounds mentally

depraved-if one looks from today's era of technology abundance.

In 1957, the satellite-the first forerunner

to today's Sky Stations-was launched. It virtually took 50 years for its true potential to

be realized. The most dramatic impact was on the antiquated telephone system. It happened

in three steps. First, the queue went. You no longer had to wait to get your call through.

In the next step, they were no longer fixed to a place-someone even coined the term

'cellular' telephones. But, I remember, they were expensive in the beginning. The first

two steps were evolutionary. In the third step, in 2005, a revolution took place.

Breakthrough work done by a UCLA student in

Cape Town and a retired Professor of the Indian Institute of Information Technology at

Hyderabad changed the monopoly pricing of telephone companies who were charging atrocious

tariffs for cellular phone usage. The work done by this duo-who never met-actually made

the concept of 'one-life, one-phone' affordable. Actually, I am surprised why nobody took

the cue when Citibank came out with the revolutionary idea of universal banking. In my

younger days, no one could transact in a bank where you did not have a physical account.

You had to open an account in not just a bank, but a physical and a specific branch of

that bank. You could certainly have something called an ATM card-but that just enables you

to draw cash. Each time you moved, you had to start a whole new relationship with another

bank. Meet a new manager, get new set of introductions, and finally open a new account.

Then there were international monetary

restrictions that did not make things any easier. Citibank foresaw the true meaning of

borderless banking from both a technology and an economic perspective and pioneered the

concept of 'one-person', 'one-account', 'go-anywhere' banking. Why couldn't the phone

companies do it earlier?

Anyway, let us now come back to the

discussion on 'one- life, one-phone'. The phone-for-life of early times was not designed

to handle both voice and image. This happened only later, thanks largely to the work done

in the labs of the Mind Map Corp. It was born out of the collaboration of three companies

that do not exist any more. One was a company named Intel. It had worked on the concept of

video-phony toward the end of the last century.

The company had made a lot of money by

creating some thing called a microprocessor chip. Intel had suggested that long-distance,

high-fidelity real images could be hauled across the world using desk-based computing

devices called PCs and the Internet. It was Mind Map that made the transition from the

Intel's PC Vision to the Wall Mounted DigiScreen (WMDS) that, today, do everything from

two-way broadcast to event reception.

But the real breakthrough in technology

during my own lifetime has been the coming together of telephony, computers, and what

started as an obscure concept called Virtual Reality. True understanding of the impact of

that convergence does not become real without a very personal experience. I want to share

one with you before we close this module of the telezine.

Two years back, I had a small swelling on

my left hand. It did not bother me much till it actually became a lump and an old

colleague asked me to take it seriously. So, I took an appointment with a surgeon in John

Hopkins to see me at home in Bangalore via the teleport of my WMDS. Trust me, in my

younger days, such things were unheard of. Consultation with a local doctor in Bangalore

meant a visit to the hospital even if it was a purely diagnostic issue. The surgeon from

John Hopkins had good news and bad news. The good news was that it wasn't looking like

something I needed to get an immediate hospitalization for. The bad news was that it

certainly needed further investigation. He wanted to touch and feel the lump rather than

just look at it via the teleport. Now, did that mean a visit to John Hopkins? No, he said.

All I had to do was to visit the Mallya Hospital in Bangalore and they had the additional

software not just to teleport a 3D rendering of the lump, but also the algorithm to convey

the sensation of touch and feel simultaneously at both ends through a mathematical model.

When I expressed joy and astonishment, the surgeon laughed and said that the algorithm

that made such things possible actually came from someone called Dr Subroto Bagchi from

the Indian Institute of Science right here in Bangalore! Next week, I visited the Mallya

Hospital. The whole procedure took less than 30 minutes. The technician covered the area

for investigation with an apparatus that was fitted with micro probes and fly eyes. In a

moment, the surgeon in John Hopkins was on the WMDS. I watched him actually move his hands

over my lump that was shown on his screen. His hands were covered by normal gloves-but the

operator told me that they only looked normal. Actually, they were fitted with sensors

that conveyed feelings in a two- way manner. I understood the implication as I started

experiencing the weird feeling of someone touching the lump. The sensation moved to other

spots as the surgeon's fingers moved on his screen.

The equipment that make such processes

happen with nonchalance in places like Mallya Hospital, are still very expensive today. I

am sure that these will soon invade every other sphere of our lives and that will drive

prices down. Now, in the story that I just shared with you, what is the fundamental

context in which technological convergence has reshaped the state of things ? Well, the

context clearly is the 'concurrency of time and space'. For the best part of the Twentieth

century, people worked toward and achieved time concurrency. The telephone helped.

When telephones and computers came

together, time concurrency took on increasingly varied manifestations. We also saw the

early manifestations of space concurrency. After my wife video-chatted with my daughter in

the US for the first time in 2004, I am told the humankind finally buried the ancient art

of letter writing. However, flying a bunch of speaking images was hardly my concept of

space concurrency. My conviction in the possibility of a tidal wave of applications that

celebrate the time-space concurrency was total after the small but meaningful encounter at

the Mallya Hospital.

What are the social implications ? They are

vast and probably more profound than we can comprehend today in 2013! Will we see misuse

of technology? We surely will-as much as we have seen misuse of any technology human

beings have ever created. At 67, I feel, somewhere people will find a balance. Even when

we had such harmless things as the telephone, some people put it to strange but

imaginative use. Once upon a time, there has even been an instance of a US President who

lost his job because he had put the innocuous instrument to socially controversial use.

Such things will certainly not overshadow the enormous positive impact that is waiting to

be harvested as technology finds context in the years ahead.

Note: To experience the feelings

of this article, get connected to mitta@wipinfo.soft.net.



Try after June 1, 2013!