Tenth part:
This leads to the question of development versus environment. We need a golden mean. Can we stop every activity saying it hampers ecology? Examples are cutting trees to build roads. Sure, the impact is marginal. But look on the other side. do we need such wide roads? Can we concentrate on public transport and rail network for transportation of people and goods? Why millions of cars clogging roads and producing enormous amount of carbon dioxide. Policy directions are poor. That is the crux of the two sides of the problem. We many times bark on the wrong tree. For example, cutting trees for roads will not harm ecology. We need maturity, we need to establish standards, practices, create metrics for ecology and society. The first step is to create awareness. It is happening sporadically and not systematically or scientifically.
11th Part – innovations:
Past decade plus has seen phenomenal new innovations. Three aspects stand apart. One 3D printing which is changing manufacturing, skin grafting and dental surgery, construction of buildings and may be cooking food. It is also going autonomous way. The second is the major area called digital innovations. It has brought out very powerful computing systems with enormous capabilities, heralded IOT and sensors which can connect billions of devices and generate peta bytes of data and consequently big data and analytics. 5G will bring thousand-fold capacities in mobile communications with hundreds of operators and great bandwidth. Latency will not be an issue. It provides us giga hertz frequencies compared to megahertz in 4G. So, everyone and everything will be connected- hopefully no rural/urban divide. This will bring resources at our finger tips and on demand. Health, agriculture, retail, home will all be data and digital driven. Are we ready to accept this change? We need to know how it changes our living, more isolated, less friendly and more dependent and addicted? Most physical systems like water / power/ transportation, government, education, cars, manufacturing and control of pandemics will have a digital twin leading to cyber physical systems. The third is the development of AI. We are moving into the domain of cognitive computing. Already machine learning is seeing a lot of use in our systems and life. All these are impacting on our personal, social and professional lives. There are no intermediaries. Humans are not only connected to each other, but also with devices and activities. Robots will work with people to get cobots. So behavior and engineering are interconnected closely. Is the education system at all levels prepared for this?