Progress and Its Perils in India
I was fortunate to recently spend some time in India, a fascinating place with rich history and culture, currently undergoing rapid development. [1] Just like many visitors before me and despite having been to dozens of countries, I found the trip enlightening, but probably in one more way than most. I primarily write essays and short science fiction stories that raise questions about some of the potentially negative consequences of technology I don’t see getting enough airtime in the Bay Area bubble. [2] I have never seen more visceral examples of this than in India, and though each subject deserves its own book, I want to briefly think through a few of them (with pictures!).
Let’s start with this image, which was the inspiration for this piece:
Three major things jumped out at me as I stood here, wishing I had exchanged money at the airport:
- First and foremost, the ridiculous line. Every ATM and bank I passed, even in small towns, over the course of two weeks had a similar one. Those that didn’t were out of cash. Even as I lay awake at 4am, jet lagged and reading Shantaram on a Kindle in the dark; I could look out my hotel window and see the lines, dimly illuminated by streetlights and cigarettes. This stems from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s surprise announcement of demonetization, an effort to crack down on money used for illicit transactions and on which taxes haven’t been paid. While perhaps a noble idea, many people (i.e. every one of the hundred or so I spoke to) question its execution, which has had adverse effects on most people’s lives and the economy, ranging from annoying to catastrophic.
- The partially constructed and/or abandoned buildings. While cranes are plentiful in San Francisco’s skyline, you won’t find many abandoned structures. But this is a common sight in some parts of the US. Many of them are a reminder of the crisis that roiled financial and property markets across the globe less than a decade ago, triggering the Great Recession. India may have been relatively insulated from this particular event, but has its own analogues, resulting in many miles of images like this one.
- The smog. Those buildings aren’t that far away, it’s just that visibility is low in Delhi due to air pollution worse than famously polluted Beijing. This was a particularly bad time to be there, as smoke from Diwali fireworks was added to the mix, but my understanding is that this has become the new normal. There are patches of blue, but much of the sky is a shade of brown or gray. Unless drastic action is taken it appears the problem will likely get worse before it gets better, as India continues to modernize. In this sense Delhi is a microcosm of the planet, and I found the scenes set in India like this one to be among the most thought-provoking in DiCaprio’s Before the Flood. Speaking of floods, though not related to climate change itself, a lot of islands and coastal cities may end up looking like the Jal Mahal, or “Water Palace,” at our current trajectory:
Moving on to a more well-known mahal, indeed one of the most recognizable sights in the world, the Taj:
The Taj Mahal is notably constructed out of Indian white marble, some of the finest quality on Earth, but what you don’t realize (or at least I didn’t) until you see it up close is that it’s also covered inside and out with detailed, colorful designs. These intricate images are not painted, but created from countless inlaid semi-precious stones, flush with the marble surface. I found it as incredible as the 250-foot-tall mausoleum itself. Many descendants of the 20,000 workers who built the masterpiece and UNESCO World Heritage Site still live in the surrounding city of Agra, and practice the same craft as their ancestors. They make everything from ornate table tops to elephant trinkets, to items that better fit my budget and lifestyle, like a set of coasters:
What is of most interest to me, however, is that all of these items are still proudly created by hand. [3] When visiting the store you can see workers using handheld tools to carve the marble and grind down the colored stones. The salesman repeatedly stressed how no machines were involved in the process, which has remained unchanged for hundreds of years. While they are undoubtedly creating art and should be proud—there is value in things made by humans instead of machines, after all—this is difficult, monotonous labor, approximately 60 hours of which allegedly goes into making a 10-inch-diameter plate that sells for $100 before the usual negotiating. Unfortunately given the country’s high poverty rate, manual labor is presumably less expensive than automation, and will remain so for some time.
From an individual’s perspective, do you buy these items to support those engaged in creating them? I did, but I suppose there is an economic argument to instead favor factory-made versions if they are available—should demand change sufficiently, many would inevitably be freed from this drudgery. Of course, what would they do to earn a living then? There is no need to focus on this marble artwork— the same could be asked about the pashmina scarves the region is famous for (and that several family members will be receiving this Christmas)— but clearly what we really have is another microcosm of the world at large, one that we find in more and more industries, and that played at least some role in the outcome of the US election. I think it’s important to speculate on Medium and elsewhere about what humans may do when they no longer have to work—perhaps create art by hand, but at their own pace—and hope these are questions with practical applications for much of the world someday. However, on shorter time scales these can be drastic situations, and the burden overwhelmingly falls on those less fortunate, those with lower incomes who aren’t part of the knowledge economy. [4] A potentially promising answer here, which is gaining some traction around the world, is some type of universal basic income, and I was surprised to learn it has already been tested in parts of India, with positive results.
On the subject of jobs and automation, a popular career in India is a driver, and I spent many hours in close quarters with mine, immersed in something India is infamous for, traffic:
There isn’t a lot of easily accessible information on self-driving cars in India, but in addition to the obvious challenges with traffic, there are others such as less robust network coverage. [5] It’s safe to assume their adoption, for both technical and sociopolitical reasons, will lag behind that of the US, but many still think it could be widespread within a decade. My driver said he has been doing the same Golden Triangle circuit, fighting traffic full-time six days a week, for 30 years. Profound changes are coming.
One reason for the traffic is India’s massive population of 1.3 billion, and the overcrowding goes beyond just the roads—when you have that many people living in an area less than half the size of the contiguous US, or a population density almost twice that of San Francisco in Delhi’s case, privacy becomes a relative luxury. Although it’s not physical but digital privacy that is the hot topic in developed countries, there is also an argument that with an increasingly dominant Android market share, Indians could be more susceptible to invasions of this kind too, given the fundamental differences in the default levels of privacy between Apple and Google products.
Regarding smartphones, for me one of the interesting facets of international travel without a local data plan or SIM card (neither of which I had) is keeping my iPhone in airplane mode, often going long stretches without wifi. I’ve written before about some of the perils of consumer software, and given most apps are useless without connectivity, in these instances you are free to be present, fully engaging with each moment. One such moment was visiting Jantar Mantar in Jaipur, the site of 19 large astronomical instruments built almost 300 years ago, including the world’s biggest stone sundial:
In our highly scheduled lives, where everything is regulated by the clock and attention is the new scarcity, I was surprised to learn that this sundial, completed by 1734, is accurate to two seconds. For many, myself included, days feel longer and time moves slower when you’re having new experiences, and indeed this is a reason why the years seem to get shorter as they go by. These experiences along with being off the grid are my favorite aspects of this kind of travel. But the Samrat Yantra was a stark reminder that our march towards the modern day rat race started long ago. Is it possible to glimpse the tail of its end on the horizon?
A final thought—something else for which India is famous is its diversity of religion, including a prominent mix of Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Sikhism, as well as lesser-known faiths like the Bahá’í, builders of the highly decorated Lotus Temple:
It’s been said that faith in technology is the new religion, and despite my reservations at times, I admit to praying at its altar. I don’t advocate to shy away from technological progress—on the contrary, we should be allocating even more resources to this cause than we are today; the advances made and consequent quality of life improvements have been staggering, and we are just getting to the good part of the exponential curve. However, it is exactly because of this precarious cusp at which we stand that it’s more important than ever to embrace the cliche that with great power comes great responsibility.
One of my favorite Hunter S. Thompson quotes speaks of “a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody — or at least some force — is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel. This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit that has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries. It is also the military ethic … a blind faith in some higher and wiser ‘authority.’ The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister … all the way up to ‘God.’” It is not inevitable that progress is made; we are the ones who roll the stone up the hill. But it is also clear there is no higher authority looking out for us; we must be the generation that looks out for ourselves, and that looks out for each other too.
Notes (Medium really needs a better way to do these)
[1] For the record I am in no way claiming to be an expert on India—far from it, but I’ve worked closely with many there for many years, and hope some will find this interesting.
[2] I ask questions but don’t necessarily provide answers; unlike a lot of people today, I don’t pretend to have them all. I’m also using the Zero to One “any new and better way of doing things” definition of technology. Naturally, some of these technologies were adopted long ago in countries like the US, and they may raise unique challenges when implemented elsewhere.
[3] Sure this could in fact be a total or partial scam entirely aimed at maximizing sales, but even if true wouldn’t change the core questions surfaced, which are widely applicable.
[4] I don’t think there is something inherently better about a job where you stare at a screen all day vs. a blue collar one where you work with your hands; I cringe at the term “real job,” especially given the bigger picture of many white collar businesses. But it is these repetitive manual tasks that are at higher risk of automation; the dozens of brilliant Indian software engineers I work with have job security for the foreseeable future.
[5] Like in other countries, the traffic does mostly clear up once you get on the highways between major cities, but what is most pertinent to the discussion is when drivers can be replaced entirely.
