Prachi’s blog

Post COVID World through my lens- Women’s day 2021

It has been more than a year since my last blog. Though a lot changed due to COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns-unlocks-lockdowns cycles, one thing never changed which is how much work can keep one busy. I think after the medical and emergency sector, IT could be the next sector where people’s work increased multi-fold during pandemic.

It looks funny to see my list of “upcoming posts” while the thinking hat is/was still around them. I would have added a “pandemic drill” in my list of drills. As on the “money, wisdom, and logic” topic, I think pandemic taught us that money is still the currency no.1, however, pretty much everyone (including I least expected to) learnt to deal with digital money and everyone tried some or the other form of minimalist living, especially people whom it was least expected. That is huge.

Though I did not get time to write about those topics which I had shortlisted last year, I managed to forward my research and thinking on them at a descent speed. And though most of my learning around them happened on the Youtube and Whatsapp universities, I managed to mine the most fascinating pieces of knowledge and incredible people just by putting few minutes every day on browsing them, most of it was just listening to those media pieces while waiting in long grocery queues or while doing household work like dusting, cleaning or cooking.

I managed to find 35+ people whom I follow on linkedin and almost 100+ subscriptions on Youtube, who made me feel that it is simply worth living to just listen to these people and their thoughts.

While Gregorian calendar looked funny to me historically speaking and wondering how to design calendar dimension if someone asked me to build an archeological data lake, I came across work of Nilesh Nilkanth Oak and Dr. C. K. Raju, K. K. Muhammed.

Speaking of funniest logical contradictions like popular example of setting an alarm to take a sleeping pill, or living in a five-star hotel in Shirdi, building sskyscraping statues of the role models of simplicity, it started with ideas like door-to-door campaign to spread awareness of social distancing in my society, all the way to a poster campaign to remove politicians’ posters, and Whatsapp group discussion on how we are unable to solve local traffic situation while watching live the Chandrayan II launch and Atal Tunnel inauguration.

While most engineers were busy in automation and optimization of cooking techniques when their cooks decided to work from home, most TV channels in India and many celebrities chose to cook exotic dishes and organizing online “masterchef”-inspired contests. On the contrary, at least 10+ NGOs like “Helping Needy People” and Robinhood Army evolved in my area alone – who went ahead, collaborated with PPE kit vendors and transporters and actually distributed food packets to the needy during the lockdown. Also it was incredible to find people like Mr. Sundaram, Mr. K. Rathanam and Gopal Sutaria (I can say gen-next of Amul’s founder Verghese Kurien) who actually know the mathematical and economical model behind of how much milk really India needs.

The innovation in India rose like anything during lockdown, social media just burst with ideas as small as writing detailed blogs on dishwasher vs maid, or how to reuse washing machines for sanitizing vegetables — till drone based food and medicine delivery. Lockdown was seen as an opportunity by hundreds of startups in India like Skylark and even established food deliveries like Zomato & Swiggy taking up drone projects. To me lockdown gave opportunity to dive into this ocean of most incredible people around us who are doing most incredible experiments with life in general. It could be as local as Dileep Kulkarni and Poornima Kulkarni with most ecologically sustainable living, or as global and into the future like what is Adar Poonawala, Manjit Kaur or Siddhartha Mukherjee are cooking in Serum Institute, CERN and Columbia University respectively.

There is no lack of incredible women I discovered on the “internet university”. Work has crossed boundaries of office and come home to us, leaving less need to choose between work and home. Research and innovation in the gig economy and digital economy is going to open opportunities for women in hyperscale. It’s only up to us to jump and ride on the wave.

Yuval Harari compiled and wrote “A Brief History of Mankind”, almost combining all disciplines of science, arts and commerce. Devdutt Pattnaik tried to map mythology with management and economy. Dr. Anand Nadkarni is trying to relate Psychiatry with the Vedic literature. Nilesh Oak is trying to find scientific evidences of lost Indian civilization. Manjul Bhargava is finding mathematics in Tabla and Sanskrit poetry. Female versions of all these thinkers are yet to come… we can just participate, wait and watch.

Upcoming posts

Sci-Tech

Why we don’t have other drills than fire drills –
- All the other drills we need in India apart from fire drill – Flood & rain drill, bandh drill, terrorist attack drill, bad weather drill, electrical shutdown drill, and we need a much different method of conducting them
Money, Wisdom and Logic
- If “money” is an invented story by humans is ultra-successful, what could be the logic behind wisdom and knowledge not being successful as currencies which could be exchanged?
Why time travel with Gregorian calendar can be very funny
Funniest logical contradictions that we cannot see and how AI would handle them
Indian way of management – from women’s point of view

Food & Lifestyle

Cooking for Engineers
Architecture & Design from a cleaner’s point of view
How much hygiene is enough?
Stories of non-brands

Design thinking for next-gen social media

#1. Three Design principles for designing “empathy”

Article by – Prachi Hunnargikar
X’mas day – 2019

Sharing some of my thoughts on what role can “empathy” play, while considering design principles for next-gen social media.

https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2019320

According to Ann Jarvis, a 19th-century professor in Toronto who founded the ‘Mother’s day’:
“The New Testament presents Jesus as the supreme example of empathy, as one who fully understands both the experience of God and the experience of humanity. Compassion is often defined as an emotion we feel when others are in need, which motivates us to help them.” [Ref: Empathy and the New Testament]

Let’s look at today’s social media: The Facebook, which is perceived as an attempt to mimic the real-world social life digitally.
In this 2014 interview in the Time Magazine, Zuckerberg himself puts it: when you work at a place like Facebook, “it’s easy to not have empathy for what the experience is for the majority of people in the world.” To avoid any possible empathy shortfall, Facebook is engineering empathy artificially. Javier Olivan, Facebook’s head of growth said: it was a revelation: for most of humanity, the Internet is broken. “I force a lot of the guys to use low-end phones now,” Olivan says. “You need to feel the pain.”

However, fixing broken internet or sensing that only half the world can be on internet, or making apps which are low-end phone friendly – is that really “feeling the pain”? And do we have to feel only the pain? What about other feelings like hope, and joy and anger and hate? These are the questions one may need to consider for the next-gen social media. Doesn’t it sound like taking the blue pill rather than the red pill and going from one matrix to another matrix?
Let us imagine for a moment what would taking the red pill look like. Psychology says there is a subtle difference between compassion and empathy. It also classifies three types of empathy : affective/emotional, cognitive and somatic. We have few more , like spiritual and compassionate. A well-known Indian philosopher in the 80’s, J. Krishnamurti explains the difference between compassion and empathy: “Compassion is not sentiment, it is not woolly sympathy or empathy.”[Ref] This Article explains the Bible’s point of view. While Jesus must have had all of them, few more examples can be looked at.

In the Indian & Hindu context, there are many examples of gods taking “avatars” to empathize with humans. As corporate celebrity mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik explains in his “Applied Mythology” series: Lord Vishnu takes dashavatars because: “Different situations are associated with different problems each of which demand a different solution. Hence, the avatars.“ Avatar is supposed to be “avataran”, a temporary descent of an extra-ordinary being, to the world of an ordinary being.
In India, there are many such examples of kings like Akbar going into general public in disguise to understand ordinary people’s problems. (Even though he many times used to delegate such things to ever-the-clever Birbal).

However, this journey is not always one-way. While the infinitely-intelligent and infinitely conscious beings can “descend” into the finitely-intelligent and finitely-conscious humans, such humans may also experience the “ascend”. How would they experience empathy? Do the elite humans experience it different than the non-elites? Like the below scene from X-men:

Also, empathy is not only feeling the pain and not necessarily pessimistic. This video shows how Professor-X feels empathy – pain and hope with the help of Cerebro. While there is some master-class acting by James McAvoy and Sir Patrick Stewart in this scene, connected digital brain is not making it impossible to be realized in near future like the Cerebro.

You don’t have to be God or an X-person to experience greater empathy than an ordinary human. Certain people have experienced it already, not just with ‘other people’, but also with ‘other things’, like the latest popular spiritual guru Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev. He explains about his spiritual experience:

“Till that moment in my life I always thought this is me and that’s somebody else and something else. But for the first time I did not know which is me and which is not me. Suddenly, what was me was just all over the place. The very rock on which I was sitting, the air that I breathe, the very atmosphere around me, I had just exploded into everything. That sounds like utter insanity. This, I thought it lasted for ten to fifteen minutes but when I came back to my normal consciousness, it was about four-and-a-half-hours I was sitting there, fully conscious, eyes open, but time had just flipped.”[26]:04:04

According to Prof. Yuval Noah Harari in his famous book “Homo Deus: a Brief History of Tomorrow”, he quotes: “Is there perhaps something in the universe that cannot be reduced to data? Suppose non-conscious algorithms could eventually outperform conscious intelligence in all known data-processing tasks – what, if anything, would be lost by replacing conscious intelligence with superior non-conscious algorithms? Of course, even if Dataism is wrong and organisms aren’t just algorithms, it won’t necessarily prevent Dataism from taking over the world. Many previous religions gained enormous popularity and power despite their factual mistakes. If Christianity and communism could do it, why not Dataism?”

Bruce Almighty trying to handle prayers

On a lighter note, someone like Bruce Nolan becoming temporary Almighty may explain how an ordinary one can “feel” like the Supreme Being . In the AI-powered connected brain coming to the aid of next-gen social media experience, it may not always become an “Ultron” or “Skynet”. It can be a simple AI-sidekick, as Harari explains. This is a design decision, making the connected brain as a central powerful processing unit or to distribute its power to do billions of smaller processing units. Not only that, the next-gen social media needs to also consider these two distinct “user experiences”. Ability for the elites to descend and ability for the ordinary to ascend, in order to empathize with each-other.

Also, except for Sadhguru’s case when he totally went past “me” temporarily, in all other cases, our subjects did know their true identity throughout. Lord Ram and Lord Krishna always knew that they were Vishnu. On the battlefield of Kurukshetra, Krishna demonstrates it very clearly how “everything was Him”. Similarly Bruce Nolan knows he is Bruce Nolan while he enjoys being the Almighty, and similarly Ultron knows that it is Ultron. In these examples, subjects didn’t lose their identity or got amnesia like Jason Bourne.

Fortunately, with (or in spite of) such a powerful spiritual experience, Sadhguru became “the Sadhguru”, not a dictator, Charles Xavier became “Professor-X” and not Magneto, Bruce Nolan became the new-&-improved Bruce Nolan, and Skynet and Ultron both are destroyed. Still, Isha Foundation does have ~16 million USD assets with 9000 volunteers, “X-men days of future past” movie made ~750 million USD, and worldwide churches and the followers of Jesus Christ are worth more than 100+ billion USD with billions of followers since thousands of years. (You can see Lakshmi at the feet of Vishnu here .) This is what the power of humanity is.

Hence, our next-gen social media designers powered by AI, AR, VR and the connected brains need to keep in mind some of these design principles: 1) Centralized AI vs distributed AI 2) User experience of ascending as well as descending with the help of “avatars” and “uddhars”, and 3) not losing the original identity. This is different than designing the social media according to a particular “ism”.

Till the humanity gets divided into the elites and the useless class sometime in the distant future, for short-term, the architects & designers of next-gen social media need to see how these designs can bring out the positive side of empathy – i.e. sharing of feelings of humans with other humans at different social and biological hierarchies, to give them hope, not to destroy one-another. Since the designers are still human, we can have “hope”. Hope of uniting the humanity and not dividing it. Hope to flatten the biological and social hierarchies by making us forget ‘which is me and which is not me’ without losing the original identity. Hope to rise above & beyond an ordinry Sapiens’ limit to understand the compassion and empathy of the Christ and Vishnu which will make us more ‘them’ and less ‘(painful) us’, so that they don’t need to descend for us anymore.

Additional References:
The Next Great Decoupling: AI Takes Control – by Shelly Palmer
The AI Future – Morality and Decoupling Consciousness from Intelligence by Edward Munro