kalyanimajumdar.com

Tag: non-fiction

  • Done: The Billion Dollar Deals and How They’re Changing Our World-Review

    Published in Free Press Journal; Date: 29.10.2017;

    Review by: Kalyani Majumdar

    Are we just pawns in the hands of a few people that decide the important aspects of our lives, i.e., food, health, work and money? A very unsettling thought indeed. Right?  You might wonder if this is some conspiracy theory, but the book, Done: The Secret Deals That Are Changing Our World by Jacques Peretti, unravels information that are supported by evidential facts and numbers that would surely change your perception of the world.

    Reading this book is like reading a thriller. It is an absolute page turner. Peretti’s lucid writing makes the book even more engaging. The book forces you to ponder upon things that you see, but never gave much thought to, until now. The fine print everywhere is often overlooked by us. If you like connecting dots you will soon observe how secret deals and the secret handshakes decide how we buy, what we eat, how we feel about ourselves, and more.

    While proceeding through the chapters, you might start to feel helpless of the situation, but do continue reading it, as Peretti will take you further down the rabbit hole to show you how deep it goes. You soon realise how different industries are working in tandem. Although, the philosophy is as old as the dawn of industrialisation based on the simple economics of ‘demand and supply’, however, there is a bit of a twist here, as now the industries supply the public with a product that they do not need in the first place, and then get them hooked on it, hence creating the demand, and following it up, with supply.

    The book says “…Drugs companies would no longer be in the game of merely curing illness, but conjuring it.”

    Done, focusses on a trend that is worrisome but is extremely common nowadays. Every little discomfort in our body, even if it is just a momentary twitch, it has now been labelled as an illness, and the pharmaceutical industry has a medicine for that. There is a complete chapter that deals with this topic in the book “…Wellness is an identity for the successful and illness has become an identity for the poor.”

    On page 100, Peretti writes, “…HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) was soon pumped into every conceivable food: pizzas, coleslaw, even meat. It provided that ‘just baked’ sheen on bread and cakes, made everything sweeter and extended shelf-life from days to years. A silent revolution in the amount of sugar that was going into our bodies began to take place.”

    “The public was starting to get fat and keen to embrace a new product… The food industry had the answer… a brand-new concept in food called ‘low fat’.” Done, speaks on the alarming scenario of the future of jobs and the chapter, Robots, explains it so fully “…second industrial revolution – the robot revolution …Instead of ending human jobs, it could lead to full employment with the creation of billions of low paid, routine-manual and non-routine manual jobs …there is zero value to labour.”

    If you are the curious kind, that often wonder why things are, the way they are, then this book is meant for you. It is an amazing book that is comprehensive and Jacques Peretti’s investigative journalism background, shines through. This book could easily be a reference point to understand the future scenario of the changing world order and our place in it.

    Title: Done: The Billion Dollar Deals and How They’re Changing Our World

    Author: Jacques Peretti

    Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

    Pages: 416; Price: Rs 550

  • Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins: Review

    Published in Free Press Journal; Date: 22.10.2017

    Flashback to May 12, 1997. The entire world was watching as Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion was playing Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer. It looked nothing less than a sci-fi movie with the man versus machine scenario. Not to forget this was twenty years back, so smart phones and digital dependency was still limited. Barring the IBM team everyone else was perhaps rooting for Garry Kasparov, for the sheer reason that he was after all the “human factor”.

    Kasparov was defeated by Deep Blue. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) had won over the human factor. Newspaper articles from back then had photographs of Kasparov holding his head in his hands as he looked absolutely flabbergasted by the defeat. The scene from post-match had turned ugly as Kasparov had stormed off and accused IBM of being unfair in designing the high-speed computer just to beat him. He even suggested that Deep Blue, was being coached by the IBM team during the match.

    For the audience witnessing the battle, it was almost as if all of a sudden the prophecies made by the sci-fi movies depicting apocalyptic endings with machines ruling the humans seemed more plausible. But there is a background story to the Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov clash. In fact the 1997 clash was a rematch of 1996 battle. In the 1996 clash Kasparov had defeated Deep Blue and for an entire year top notch programmers were working alongside chess experts to improve Deep Blue. They revamped the supercomputer for the rematch by doubling its ability to search through millions of possibilities for the strongest move. The new Deep Blue version came with the ability to scan 200 million moves in a second and if that was not enough, it could think 74 moves ahead. And if you compare that with human chess masters, they could think roughly around 10 moves ahead.

    With the book, Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends And Human Creativity Begins, Garry Kasparov seems to have finally made peace with Deep Blue as he provides his side of the story and shares his experience of battling with a tireless machine. The author wrote, “I’ve had twenty years to come up with a good way to describe what it’s like for a world champion chess player to play against a world-champion-level chess machine. I’m still not sure I’ve succeeded. Directly competing against a computer at the highest level of a human discipline is a unique experience.”

    The book is both engaging and insightful in its approach to a topic that is as real time as it could be. While AI is seen for its exceptional abilities, it is also looked at as a threat to human workforce becoming redundant. It is a current reality that computers are taking away jobs from humans. Interestingly, Kasparov has taken a very optimistic stance on AI in this book as he has talked about the possibilities where humans and machines cohabit symbiotically with each other rather than against each other.

    There are times when the reader might feel the challenge that Kasparov might have faced while writing this book as it took him back to 1997, again and again, as he mentions, “I am a sore loser… I have been annoyed to discover that I missed a good move in a game I lost twenty years ago when analysing for the book.”

    Title: Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends And Human Creativity Begins

    Author: Garry Kasparov

    Publisher: John Murray/Hachette

    Pages: 288; Price: Rs 599