Excellence in Technology Amidst Paradoxes

DR. ASOKE K. LAHA
CHAIRMAN‑EMERITUS AND FOUNDER, INTERRAIT

I sometimes wonder how things happen! Most of the time, they occur suddenly without any premonitions. Take for instance, the Covid -19! No one had any inkling that such disasters would descend on mankind.

Millions lost lives, fear gripped across the world, and importantly, there were winners and losers in the midst of the pandemic. One important winner is the pharma companies who have developed the vaccine for preventing the pandemic and the entire ecosystem that was connected with the supply chain of vaccines. Yet, no one wants to know the exact reason why that had happened. I believe that there is a public amnesia that forces people to forget things and carry on with the life as holocausts never happened. May be that is a boon since that helps people to seek new pathways and forget about sinister things that haunted us in the past.

I am aware that these things are happening in an era where science rules supreme and rational thinking is the most desirable pathway. It is also an era where Artificial Intelligence is omnipresent, quantum theories applied in every walk of life and data mining is resorted to get in to the bottom of things. Yet, the real reasons for the pandemic termed as the most horrible global development of recent centuries evades a proper answer for its occurrence. Same way, I feel many such developments that had happened in the past evade a proper cause and effect analysis. For instance, why the World Wars were fought, what was the rationale of forming axis to fight war, what was the real damage caused by the world wars etc are still to be explained in clearer paradigms. Reasons attributed by historians, we feel, are Gospel truth. Should we go beyond that postulates and try to see things from a new perspective? That way, every development that had happened in the past can be analysed and interpretations and narratives formed whether such narratives are close to the reality.

Let us now focus on the present. We are all presently going through the negative impact of the middle east war, which disrupted the world economy. We are given to understand that there are two groups in the war. On one side is Iran and the other side, Israel and the US. I am not involving the peripheral players involved, be they China or Russia or European Union. We all know the destruction caused by the war is immense and it is still counting. No one knows when the war will end; yet we are aware of its impact and a stakeholder of that either directly or indirectly. Every household across the world is suffering in one way or the other.

The counting of losses due to war will continue till the war is over and will spill over to post war period also when the losses are more accurately assessed. There is a set of people amidst the war who is gaining. They do not get mentioned in the way. Who are these beneficiaries?

A recent report surfaced suggest that oil industry is a major beneficiary, besides defence establishments, green energy outfits and banks. In future, when the reconstruction work starts, construction sector will get a boost since trillions of dollars have to be spent in the Middle East to revamp the damaged infrastructure, military installations etc.

The biggest economic impact of the war so far has been a surge in energy prices. Around a fifth of the world’s oil and gas is transported through the Strait of Hormuz, but those shipments effectively ground to a halt at the end of February. The result has been a rollercoaster of price movements on energy markets, with some of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies benefiting. Interestingly, main beneficiaries are not oil producing countries. Profit is flowing into the pockets of European oil giants, who have trading arms to gain from sharp price movements boosting profits.

Some of the biggest banks have also seen their profits boosted during the war in Iran. JP Morgan’s trading arm made a record $11.6billion of revenue in the first three months of 2026, helping the bank overall to its second biggest ever quarterly profit.

Across the rest of the “Big Six” banks – which includes Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo, as well as JP Morgan – profits all rose substantially in the first quarter of the year. Overall, the banks reported $47.7bn in profits for the first three months of 2026.

One of the most immediate beneficiaries in any conflict is the defence sector. BAE Systems, which makes products including F35 fighter jet components, said in a trading update it expects strong growth in sales and profits this year. Gulf countries including Iran will have to spend trillions to replenish their armaments. Also, growing “security threats” around the world will push up government defence spending,  which  has in turn created a “supportive backdrop” for the global companies involved in defence production. Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman, three of the world’s biggest defence contractors, have each reported having record order backlogs at the end of the first quarter of 2026.

The conflict has also highlighted the need to diversify away from reliance on fossil fuels. The Trump administration has popularised the “drill, baby, drill” slogan encouraging greater fossil fuel usage. The war has led to renewable investment being seen as increasingly important to stability and resilience to shocks. The Florida-based NextEra Energy, has seen shares surge by 17% so far this year as investors pile in on its mission. Danish wind power giants Vestas and Orsted have also reported surging profits, highlighting how the fallout from the Iran war is also boosting renewable energy firms. A good number of Chinese companies in the renewal energy sector have also benefited immensely from the surging global demand for replacing the fossil fuel, not necessarily in the present but in the future.

My esteemed readers may ask me what I am trying to drive home by mentioning these things. It may seem to be disjointed ideas that have occurred to me. It may be partially true. However, I am trying to weave a big picture. Amidst the faster development of technology, overriding importance of rational mind, and human quest for excellence and desire to leap the technology frontiers, we are lagging behind in predicting the human behaviour, which unnecessarily escalate tensions. Is it true that humans have failed in conquering their own minds?