Is there any limit to Information Technology?

What is the final frontier of information technology? Has it reached its peak? Going by the latest reports coming out from various corners of the world, the future of IT is a mixed bag of hopes, challenges, concerns and, if one can say so, of despair.  Let us start off with the most optimistic assessment: the growth of the sector is seamless and no force on earth can stop its momentum upwards. Every incremental innovation is going to add value to the quality of life and technological excellence accumulated over the years. The other day, I read that 5G communication configuration will redefine how people work, think, indulge in entertainment and leisure of their choice and liking, how surgeries are conducted, etc. 

If the claims of Qualcom are to be believed, 5G will hit the market sometime in the middle of next year. While the details of the new technology are still wrapped up in mystery, Qualcom has put in the public domain how the new technology will get rolled out. It will be faster and swifter and can be deployed for a vast array of operations and manoeuverings, such as driverless cars, pilotless aircraft, robotic surgeries, equipping the mobile telephony with a number of complex and delicate tasks, including Internet of Things. Let us wait for the rollout of the wonder chip to make assessment of its impact.

No one can deny the fact that technology is playing an important role in electioneering. In India, electioneering has become high-tech with every passing election. A new crop of industry has sprung up around the elections in India, besides the normal chorus of advertisements, public relations, speech writings, handbills, wayside speeches, by using electronic media to beam the eulogies of every political party. A hybrid of advertisements and news packages also had been surfaced known as paid news, though there are restrictions on printing and telecasting such news. But there are surrogate methods through which you can camouflage the paid news through crafty journalistic gimmicks.

Why have Indian elections and political parties suddenly become techie savvy? I am not talking about the mobile telephony that transmits to every voter about candidates and political parties, what they have done and what others have not done. Some political parties in the coming elections in  states like UP have created information superhighways, which attempt to break down the  details of each constituency village/ municipal level, block level and so on.  Such databases contain details, such as the number of voters, caste formation, predominant families and their areas of influence, schools, colleges, religious places, educational background of each voter with value-added information about their likely political leniency, how they can be influenced, profile of opinion makers and their outreach, what could be the pitch point to swing the votes and so on. One political party has engaged a foreign consultant as their campaign chief. Experts say, this has not happened earlier in India and predict that henceforth technology may become a differentiator in deciding the outcome.  

It is also important to see how information is collated. A good part of the assets and other endowments of the villages are drawn from published sources like data from the government sources, research outfits, think tanks, etc. A substantial chunk of  the data collated are primary  information collected  with laborious efforts by employing scores of youngsters to go from household to household, shop to shop, etc. They say that such data can be extrapolated to find the swings and moods of the voters.  What it portends is that the coming elections will be a warfare not necessarily based on decibels, demagogue and posters, but also aided by technology, brain power and subtle strategies.  

The use of technology does not end there. It can be of considerable help in election analytics and in predicting trends and swings. I am told a political party has appointed an agency to assess the mood of the electorate on a weekly basis. The agency has been tasked to find out the acceptability of a list of potential candidates based on the feedback from the people. How such exercise would help in winning elections is something one has to wait and see. 

This also can open up tremendous business opportunities, particularly in the IT domain. Creation of such a technology platform is not that simple. Having regard to the fact that we have several layers of elections, such as Parliament, assembly, municipal and panchayat and all these elections are keenly fought, one can very well imagine the type of business that the elections may garner in the future. Many such services can be outsourced to other countries, where elections are fought.  

Let us surmise the contemporaneous relevance of their findings to the information technology. We have to introspect how much IT is intruding into the privacy of individuals, groups and states. The word “hacking” seems to have emerged as more potent than warfare. We are experiencing how great forces have succumbed to hacking. But there is the other side also, which some others call it as ethical hacking. Wikileaks is an example. Those who support such ethical hacking claim that such invasions into privacy do more good than harm to the society. Opinions differ. But still people who hold such opinion are in multitude. They point out the revelations of covert and overt operations which the Wikileaks have put on the public domain are most relevant and expose the underbelly of political and diplomatic manoeuvering. The paranoid created in the US elections because of hacking refuses to die even at the last hour of election, making a prediction hazardous. Public mood is changing by the minute.  Not many months ago, the US has imposed a ban on import of digital technologies from China fearing presence of embedded spyware and malware and chips that can indulge in espionage without having easily noticed.    

The fear of hacking and manipulating the outcome will not let us to switch over to the system. That is the limit of information technology that I am talking about. I will be the happiest man if it does not happen since information technology is my bread and butter and technology is my enabler and benefactor.