Technology in a changing world

Mukesh Ambani, vice-chairman and managing director, Reliance Industries Ltd., recently spoke at the third SS Nadkarni Memorial lecture held by Investment Research & Information Services Limited. This annual event is organised in memory of the late Mr. Nadkarni, one of India’s foremost investment bankers and for long the chairman of Industrial Development Bank of India.

Excerpts from Mr. Ambani’s talk.

• Technology is power, technology is wealth and control over technology is a source of influence and power. Technology is embedded intractably into the very fabric of our existence even deciding how long a person will live.
• Technology has impacted life in every conceivable way. Changes in technology have taken place at a furious pace in the last fifty years transforming our lives in a manner that surpass the wildest of science fiction.
• The world in the next twenty-five years would bear as little resemblance to what it is today in the same way as today’s world is so different from what it was fifty years ago.
• Eradication of most diseases in the world within reach, accurate prediction of global and local weather upto one month in advance, language differences will cease to be a barrier in communication, people will be able to experience vacations and cultural events while sitting at home, computing power will grow astonishingly by a factor of about a million, gene therapies will would exist for virtually every disorder and man and women would have ventured far beyond the biosphere into the extraterrestrial domain.
• Biotechnology will impact every single form of life and will go on to substantially improve, control the form and control the duration of life as well. It is predicted that by the year 2025, gene therapies will become available for every conceivable disease.
• Biotechnology therapies for reducing the effects of aging will be in vogue, engineered organs will be available for replacement of diseased ones and a complete artificial form of life will be produced. Through decoding of library of proteins in the body, biotechnology will enable mankind to alter the very metabolism of life process. Advances in medical biotechnology promise to increase life expectancy. In ten to twenty years most organs in the human body would either be derived from animals or tissues engineered.
• A man would go to have a knee replacement surgery and end up changing his heart and liver as well for they will come as a part of a package deal. Man will move on the path of immortality. Biotechnology will change the demographic profile of the world.
• Human cloning was not faraway. Designing life is not fiction anymore. It is a question of when. Medical biotechnology will help to screen diseases that would set in after several years and would enable to chose enhancement genes to select height, hair colour and muscular ability of children.
• Biotechnology market will grow by about 100 billion US dollars in the next five years and to 1 trillion US dollar in ten to fifteen years. Though small in comparison to the global GDP of 30 trillion US dollars, the race has started. Biotechnology would help open a completely new segment of the geriatric market comprising of people above the age of 60, who would become productive income earners.
• Information and communications technologies will drastically impact human life and will change the way "we live, transact and the way we relate to the world around us." Satellite, internet, broadband and wireless based information and communication technologies along with digital networks & miniaturised devices held further promise of disseminating knowledge at low cost.
• Vehicles and wallets would become unnecessary for shopping.
• Age of microchip will amplify the reach of human brain. Networking of devices with software would also relieve human effort by helping devices report problems and call for repairs on their own.
• Living in privacy will become virtually impossible as miniaturised web cameras and microphones will observe people clandestinely. Technology will make it easy for government and companies to track down and monitor every detail of personal and financial lives.
• Digital overlay would lead to redesign of places where we live and work and shrunken devices.
• Technologies would also encompass improvements in and innovations of existing technologies. Agriculture we will see precision farming techniques. Industry will see micro-mechanical devices. Transportation will see hybrid vehicles running on electricity and gas and energy will see hydrogen fuel cells. Homes will see robots. Future civil societies will see new relationships between man and machine and will make human beings a part of an electronically networked world.
• Internet would penetrate every aspect of life around the globe, acquiring greater power and presence going forward. From about 540 billion dollars of transactions handled by it today, internet would be in a position to increase this figure to 4 trillion dollars in about thirty years or about one-seventh of the world economy.
• Ambani pointed out that for thousands of years India was in a commanding position in technology and innovation. "Knowledge was an overriding theme and a way of life in ancient India. However somewhere along the historical journey we slipped up." He said it was time to catch up with the advanced nations in the world and added, " India had the opportunity to create a whole new ecosystem driven by the quest of knowledge and technology." He said this could be done by gaining knowledge, creating knowledge, applying knowledge and leveraging knowledge.
• Unlocking the human mind through education is the first step on the path to progress. 70,000 odd engineers produced today were not enough. "In my view we are already getting late in bringing about sweeping reforms in education. It is time that India’s planners liberalise higher education and concentrate on providing free and compulsory primary education."
• Invigorate research to leverage technology. Progressive nations are spending significantly on research. Sweden and America which were spending $ 8 billion or 3.8 per cent of its GDP and $ 208 billion or 2.6 per cent of GDP on research. In contrast India was spending only $ 3 billion or 0.73 per cent of GDP. Science has to be placed at the vanguard of Indian society if India is to let knowledge and technology lead our growth.
• India needs to pursue the application of technology in every sphere and apply biotechnology in a significant way to enhance yields and break the root cause of poverty. Liberate our farmers from the trap of low investment, low yield, low income model of agriculture production.
• India should apply information technology solutions to agriculture. After e-governance, it is agriculture that will present a challenge to the information technology industry from a social contract perspective. India must invest in commercial applications of aerospace technologies and capture a significant share of the emerging cosmic commerce.
• Coming to leveraging knowledge Mr Ambani pointed out India has the unique opportunity to leverage her demographic advantage of a younger population and large work force with information technology skills, which could achieve significant economic benefits. India can be the fountainhead of the new pattern of migration and mobility of information technology professionals to the developed world. This can help India capture the information technology spend in the developed world to drive the Indian economy on an export led path.
• India’s current work force comprises of about 400 million people. This will expand to 700 million people in about twenty - five years. Let us take just 10% of our current work force and outsource work for them from the information technology sector overseas at 10 dollars per hour. This is well below the average wage in USA. For 40 million Indians we can generate trillions of dollars. Imagine the effect that savings and consumption derived from this income can do to accelerate the growth of the Indian economy ------- an opportunity that is worth trillions of US dollars, many times our current GDP. This huge opportunity will necessitate the creation of an overarching communications infrastructure in India or the virtual wiring up of India.