Thoughts in HD

  The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways earned ₹65 crore by providing access to the data stored in Vaahan and Sarathi databases. These databases contain data about the owner, make, model, etc of a vehicle. The data entry operators entering this data into the system would not have imagined the potential of the resource that he was generating. Some decades ago, companies would shred their papers or sell them to recyclers. The same papers would have fetched much more in recent times.  Humble beginnings More than a century ago, Jon Snow, an English doctor had mapped the residences of cholera patients to identify the polluted water pumps. His analysis of the data of the patients that he had attended to, helped find the source of the problem and hence eased solving the problems  The genius idea of a store manager to start a Customer Loyalty programme as a bait to lock his customers helped him generate information about their purchases, frequency of purchases, season of pu...

Disruptions 5000 years ago, 50 humans set out with sacks of grain on their back, transporting them from farm to godowns. Some years later, with the discovery of wheel, the same work could be done by 5 people. The 45 who lost the job of transportation could now work in different sectors like cutting wood for the wheel, making the wheel, making the carts, etc. 300 years ago, when hundreds protested against the use of spindle as it took away their livelihood, the opportunities arose in the factories to make needles for the spindles. 30 years ago, many rose to protest against the use of computers, fearing that it would render them jobless, children of those protesters then used the same computers to bring in the Information Technology Revolution. 30 months ago, a young researcher demonstrated how Artificial Intelligence could be used to detect and analyse sugarcane cultivation. Though they may reduce human interventions in surveying, Such technologies could help set in the chain of...