The Hindu Business Line : You can't hide an elephant

Yet, eight myths stand in the way of the US's ability to grasp what's happening to it, writes Ashutosh Sheshabalaya in Rising Elephant from Macmillan (www.macmillanindia.com) , a book that's about `the growing clash with India over white-collar jobs'.

The myths are: the Americans have to somehow ride it out; relocation of white-collar jobs began after the dotcom bust; the US's jobs will go to many places and it does not really matter where; India is home to a low-end software coding industry; India's success is easy to duplicate in other developing countries; India is like Japan - high impact on a few sectors but slight overall; pressure on India to stem the jobs drain would be straightforward; and such a seismic shift in power has no precedents.

The author delves into each of these myths elaborately in separate chapters.

The book provides many examples of the West trying to thwart what's inevitable.

The author narrates how the State of Indiana, US, that had outsourced a project to upgrade its jobless claims system to TCS, buckled under anti-outsourcing lobby's pressure to rescind the contract later.

The move was aimed at appeasing voters, media and the unions, but as a result the State had to spend more taxpayers' dollars, points out Sheshabalaya.

Because TCS's $15.4-million bid was as much as $8.1 million lower than those of its rivals, and its withdrawal provided opportunity only for 65 local jobs, that too just for four months.

"In other words, 65 Indiana jobs were extended for four months at a cost of over $8 million."

Another example is of New Jersey - that it now spends "28 per cent more supporting a welfare claims processing system, after compelling contractor eFunds International Corp (which has most of its staff in India) to hire 12 US residents for the order."

The author laments in a section titled `hiding the elephant's hide' that "the gap between fast-changing global realities, and complacent, sometimes racist, prejudices, on the part of the Western media, is growing".

He cites as examples the small adjustments that Dell and Lehman Bros did, which the media hype represented as big reversals.

Thus, despite headlines such as `Dell calls switched away from India', and `Dell cuts back India customer service venture', the company clarified that it would not be sending fewer calls overall to its Indian operation.

Similar was the pullback of a 26-person help-desk from India to the US by Lehman Bros, which elicited raving reports that glossed over the fact that most of Lehman's Indian outsourcing was still unchanged, and that the number was even going to double to 900 by 2005.

Among the many numbers one gathers from the book are these: Average salary increase of 14 per cent in 2003 in India was twice that of the second-placed Philippines; Russian software exports of $300 million in 2002 was on par with India's sixth or seventh largest IT firm and less than what GM alone outsources from the US to India; China's civilian engineering graduates number just 50,000 a year, compared to India's 2,90,000; and Indian computer training companies are teaching 20,000 students in more than 100 centres across China and "Indian firms will eventually control 40 per cent of China's IT services exports".

Compulsive read!

Nerds and jocks

SIT back and watch Frankenstein, The Matrix, Terminator, Total Recall, Minority Report, Independence Day, Aliens, Star Wars, Blade Runner, and The Lord of the Rings - all through Mark Rowlands's The Philosopher at the End of the Universe, from Ebury Press (www.randomhouse.co.uk) , because the book aims to explain philosophy through science fiction films.

"This book is the first, or at least one of the first, in a new genre - which we might call sci-phi," suggests Rowlands in the introduction, where he refers to his previous book that had defended the idea of humans having `already evolved into functional cyborgs or fyborgs' and that we are all like networked computers.

Thus, we meet, within the pages, Keanu Reeves playing Thomas Anderson, alias computer hacker Neo. "It's the old story," opines Rowlands about The Matrix.

Humans create artificial intelligence or AI, and it starts thinking too much about its superiority and then decides to terminate the relationship with humans, you'd learn.

But AI has a crucial weakness: it's solar powered; and so, humans decide to `scorch the sky', which must be some kind of nuclear winter, postulates the author.

However, AI is getting smarter by starting to use human beings as batteries, and so starts harvesting humans as a power source! Living in egg-like containers, and fed with liquefied remains of other humans, yuk, they supply `bioelectric output' for computers and robots.

"AI creates an extremely lifelike virtual reality - known as the matrix."

Quite abruptly, Rowlands pulls you out of the thriller to discuss the theme of a seventeenth century thinker Rene Descartes.

"If you cannot be certain that you are not dreaming now, then you cannot be certain that the past few hours have not been a dream... . Suppose you are having a dream, then from within the dream, is there every any way of telling, or being certain, that you are dreaming?" Gasp, gasp...

Okay, from there, hastily move on to find what Arnie does in the Terminator sequel. He heroically sacrifices his own existence "to stop CyberDyne industries inventing the computer that will end up trying to kill all human life".

Aren't cyborgs merely steel and circuitry, without any minds, asks the author?

So, "While they might do what we program them to do, true intelligence is beyond them."

Elsewhere, Rowlands classifies computers into nerds and jocks. For the former, the example he offers is Deep Blue.

"Traditional computer systems are extremely nerd-like. The basis of nerd design is a fixed, although often complex, program made up of strings of symbols."

But nerd systems are absolutely hopeless at anything outside their narrow domain, such as a visit to the restaurant with a beautiful but finicky companion, notes the author.

What about the jocks? These computers are designed along neural network lines... a.k.a. connectionist or parallel distributed processing.

"The way they work - pattern mapping - also allows neural networks to do something most people assume computers can't do: learn."

Entertaining philosophy!

Tailpiece

"This mask will help you survive the office surveillance system."

"How?"

"Its eyes are open, always!"

Books courtesy: Landmark www.landmarkonthenet.com

Books2Byte@TheHindu.co.in

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