The New Digital Age by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen

If you are asked to come up with an endless list of possibilities on a topic that you have substantial expertise on, you will enjoy the exercise, and you will indeed come up with an endless list! Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen do something similar in the book titled ' The New Digital Age'.

It is a thought exercise by two people who understand the internet and the world of communication technology very well. The thought exercise is thematically divided into various topics - such as the future of revolution, future of nation states, future of terrorism - but is founded on a few key thought streams - ie - the ability of the governments to control the internet, the quality of encryption technology and penetration of the mobile internet. While it was interesting reading, the leaps they took were inconsistent, in some cases, you could see a prediction becoming a reality in a finite time frame, but in some other cases - there was no basis to say whether this would take 10 or 100 years to be realised. More importantly, with some of the predictions, the internet was only the medium and the technology to deliver the prediction needed to make advances in other sciences - including drug delivery and drug discovery.


The most powerful piece in the entire book was about how governments could use technology to wage a virtual cold war on countries - without ever having to escalate the same in the physical space. The example of the Stuxnet , created by the NSA, to impregnate and disable the Iranian nuclear program was a really insightful piece.

Where it lacked was bold predictions in the use of the internet in crowd sourcing  - as different from creating revolutions - which I think is one of the most exciting areas associated with the internet and really has the multiplier effect that only the internet can deliver.

Overall, worth a quick read, but not really insightful in its entirety. 

Movies that hit and movies that flop

Is movie making an art or a science. A short definition would help here. Science is the process of explaining any outcome as the product of a series of events, which could have only led to a  single definitive conclusion. Each of those events in turn being the product of a series of other events that could have only led to that particular outcome. In short, it can be replicated endlessly to arrive at the same conclusion - as long as all the other variables are the same.

For example, if I make a paper plane and throw it in the air, it is possible that it will ( assuming I know how to make a decent one) be airborne for a distance and then land smoothly. Question is , if I throw it the next time will it land at exactly the same place. Probably not. Does that mean that science can not explain the flight of the 'paper plane'. I am obviously missing something. If it did not land at the same place the second time that is because it was thrown with more/less strength and the wind currents were stronger/weaker and moving in different directions. If you had solved for all that in the first instance, the 'paper plane' would have made exactly the same journey.

hmm...now let's take a movie. The impact a movie makes on us is not physical, it is entirely cerebral. When I watch a movie the first time, it creates a certain impact. If I watch it another time , it creates a completely different impact. If broke the movie into its individual scenes and watched it, it would create far less impact. If I just watched the songs, it would be very different. And so on....Now how does one break up the impact that it has on my mind into discrete bits that can be systematically replicated. How does one make sure that exactly the same impact can be created the next time around. And why is this important.

Art has evolved over the centuries constantly in search of the route to provide entertainment to human beings. The entertainment is important for commercial reasons and livelihood of the artist. The entertainment was important for the very survival of the art. But there have been only a rare few who have managed to thrill consistently and in every generation.

The science of the movie or of any art form is therefore the science of the mind because the impact of the art form is in the mind. Lets dive into the brain and take it one piece at a time. A movie assails all your senses, the visual , the aural, the sense of touch ( specially if you are in India and trying to walk into a movie theatre), the sense of taste ( the popcorn and the coffee) and the sense of smell ( the bathrooms at the theatre !). Lets focus on the visual and the aural here and hope that the ambience will improve enough for us to ignore the rest.

First, controlling the stimuli - a good movie hall will darken the surroundings so that the only visual stimuli reaching you is from the movie screen. This ensures that your visual experience is undisturbed. If the rest of the hall was lit, you would have been distracted by the people fidgeting in their chairs, the ushers moving around and the guy smooching his girl-friend in the far corner. Lets get those blinkers on, and control the inputs to the visual cortex.

The Primary visual cortex is located in the occipital lobe of the brain, which is at the rear of your head. The retinal inputs reach the visual cortex, where they are processed and sent to different parts of the brain. Of the various stimuli that reaches the human brain, the magnitude of the response is the highest to the visual stiumli. That is obvious. Walk around in a new noisy and bustling area, you will absorb the visual stimuli hungrily. The  rest of the stimuli is given attention only when the visual stimuli is no longer novel or if any other stimuli suggests danger. Clearly, the movie makers have figured that out. That is why so much money is spent on the sets, beautiful people and creating a visual ambience.

The visual cortex sends neuronal signals to other parts of brain. Lets simplify that and say that it goes to the emotional ( limbic system) part and to the executive part ( pre frontal cortex). For a movie to completely absorb you, it has to dominate your pre frontal and your emotional brain. The content has to resonate with your emotional self and engage with your pre frontal. What does this mean. Let me give you an example. Watch this video from  The Bourne Supremacy  - Matt Daemon .

The two most characteristic features of this video is that it focuses on a lot of cars to picture the action and the motion, but focuses on only the faces of two men to picture the emotions. For those of you who have watched the movie will realise that the assassin who is after Jason Bourne is not just any assassin, but the one that killed his girlfriend. Jason Bourne knows that and you know that when you see Jason Bourne's eyes meet the assassin's. The assassin  - who is an ace assassin at his job , just like Bourne - failed in his attempt to kill Jason Bourne - and wants to make up for that this time. That is the emotional connect. But even if you miss that, what overwhelms your brain here is the car chase sequence. The visuals are so credible that your fear centers ( limbic system) are ignited and you are in that car chase trying to escape with your life. That generates adrenalin and that overwhelms the pre frontal , such that it suspends disbelief that such a car chase was ever possible, and if it was, that you could ever come out of it alive.


What this sequence does in summary is that it taps into a very primitive neural response , which is that a human being's response to danger is triggered by the amygdala. In order to escape the danger , the amygdala triggers a series of responses - which starts from the hormonal ( release of adrenalin) and ends with flight ( the car chase). At the end of this response, the brain generates a neuro transmitter called dopamine - which gives you a rush of joy, which is the satisfaction of having escaped the danger / the entertainment of having watched the sequence. What was crucial here was that the amygdala was led to believe that it was a credible danger, which came from the visual ( the car sequence) and as a response to that, the amygdala suspended normal pre frontal activity and focused you on the act of escaping the danger ( and therefore solely on escaping the assassin). If the visual stimuli was not of the same standard, then your amygdala would not have been triggered to the same degree of intensity, and your pre frontal would not have been occupied. What this means is that you would have questioned the authenticity of the car chase and would have refused to be drawn into the action. A well shot car sequence was crucial in overwhelming the mind. Once you know this, you know exactly what to focus on. Get the car chase right and you will catch the fancy of the viewer.

Here is a video from ' Scent of a Woman' - Al Pacino

More to come......

Belief, pessimism and rational optimism

To be rational and to be optimistic in this world is a challenge, or so I thought until I ran into 'The Rational Optimist' by Matt Ridley. Matt's primary assertion is that there is no cause for fear, the human capacity to reinvent will ensure that the world will not come to an end....! He then goes back a long way...all the way back to prehistoric man, and traces our evolution, and how at many points during our evolution it looked like we could have gone extinct, or that we should have never made the progress that we made.

Matt attributes this capacity to reinvent primarily to the division of labour and the barter of the output of such labour. He quotes Adam Smith from the Wealth of Nations: ' The division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility, the propensity to truck , barter, and exchange one thing for another'. In short, we evolved because of division of labour. That came about , not because of a smart idea but the general human propensity to trade, barter...exchange goods with one another.

First have we really progressed. In all the pessimism we exude in our daily lives, it is easy to believe that we actually have not done much of that. Here is an example that would put that to bed .....Since 1800, the population of the world has multiplied six times, yet average life expectancy has more than doubled and real income has risen more than nine times. Taking a shorter perspective, in 2005, compared to 1955 - the average human being on Planet Earth earned nearly three times as much real money, ate one third more calories of food, and could expect to live one-third longer...If that is not progress, nothing is.

If that convinced you that this species has evolved , progressed - then we simply need to decipher why we did so, and then establish whether those reasons still hold good today, and vola - you have reason to be optimistic about the future ! Lets go back to Adam Smith and understand for ourselves what division of labour means. At its simplest level - it allows me, the man about the house to do the 'manly' stuff - ie tinkering about with the wires, drive the car and anything else that requires a better visual spatial orientation , while my wife does the cooking and looking after the daughter. Stereotype...probably, but lets save that criticism for later. If I had to cook, I would not be able to make a decent meal, would struggle to get good nutrition and would probably starve to death....pardon the hyperbole. If my wife had to drive, there would be murder and mayhem on the streets and the survival of the human species would be at risk...! In essence, we are both able to survive because we have divided our labour in a manner that is optimal. But hold it, just division of labour is not enough, we should also be willing to exchange the product of the labour with each other - else this would be of no good. I could keep driving and die of exhaustion without getting any food to eat....There is some debate over what came first, but prehistoric man evolved by exchanging goods with each other, one another - suppressing the somewhat innate desire to kill strangers as threats. This ended up generating time for him to be even better at what he was doing, selling his produce for higher real wages, and thereby improving the quality of his life - ie produce more children, feed them better, in short all the good stuff we have been doing for zillions of years.

Matt would have us believe that exchanging the products of our labour ( as we kept sub dividing it) was the primary driver to evolution. Any genetic change that came about was the result of that division of labour, rather than the cause of it. The question is , was that enough for the world to evolve or did it need anything else....It did, and that was for ideas to multiply...by which I mean that if my wife kept cooking the same boring daal /roti daily - life would get progressively boring, I would stop eating out of boredom and die....! However, if she innovated to make a nice matar paneer one day, followed by saaru and palya the next, then we would be really talking. That probably happened when my wife had had a full meal and was driven around enough (!), she ended up having some free time on her hands. She must have then experimented and came up with something that was slightly different from what she made the previous day....and so innovation happened. The key ingredients of innovation are therefore division of labour, barter and a changing environment (which there was plenty of, in those days). Once you had ideas in the head, then to put it in Matt's words - the ideas started having sex with each other - and produced more ideas....and humans were well on the path to evolution.

We come back to our original question. Ok, we have come this far. Why should I feel optimistic about going any further. Well, the key ingredients are still there. We have sub-divided labour to limit approaching infinity, global trade /domestic trade/trade with neighbours continues unabated and ideas abound, including the environment to sustain those ideas. Bottomline, dont be perturbed if the world's population is projected to go 9 billion and if the Chinese are expected to be driving another 400 m cars in the next 50 years, which at current rates of consumption /production mean that food production growth will not hold up and crude reserves will run out . We should feel optimistic that the human species will find new sources of energy to tap, new ways to enhance productivity of land, and as people find more avenues of entertainment, they will have less sex....or atleast with less intent to reproduce.

If this was not so rationally argued, and not so beautifully built on some very insightful data points, I would have dismissed this as just ' belief'. For the uneducated it is still that, the man who has not thought much about the issues, is optimistic that we will find a way out. Why - well because he has innate faith in his god. For the educated who has thought about these issues, it is very easy being pessimistic. Why - because on a daily basis the news media spews out more terabytes of bad news than has been generated in the previous million years combined. However, to be rationally optimistic - ie being educated about the issues , but still believe that there is reason to be optimistic - one has to read this book and then sit down and contemplate on the marvel of the human race, and a smile may just come to your lips.

Matt, hats off. If it was not you, I would have written this. The ideas were there in my head having sex with each other, the labour had been divided (my wife and me had agreed that I could give up driving for a few years, since we were using public transport) and I was all set, having exchanged my money for my imac....You just finished it first. Now for the next big book, someday .....