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Railway security system has its eyes on you with AI-based cameras
National transporter ramps up project to instal AI-based cameras that can recognise faces
Dhruvaksh Saha New Delhi
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The next time you are at a crowded railway station, look around. Cameras that recognise faces are watching, joining Indian law enforcement's increasing reliance on advanced surveillance technology for security and crime prevention as activists worry about the impact on privacy.
The Indian Railways, which carries 7 billion passengers annually, has its own police force and surveillance systems to secure and monitor stations, trains and other facilities. The national transporter has put up facial recognition system (FRS) cameras at more than 200 stations, but is using only a portion of their surveillance strength. It's running a pilot that will make
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But if entry jobs go away, it will create a massive unemployment and educational crisis, and choke the pipeline of young people who can replace the our obsession for software and STEM, it was not only computer or software engineering graduates who joined tech firms as software engineers. Legions of mechanical, electronics and even civil engineers did the same. There is a whole world to build out there outside of software. Manufacturing firms desperately need engineers to run their machines, there are bridges to be built, roads to be repaired and data centres to be run. For instance, Google recently announced a $10 million grant, among other things, to train electricians for the power plant and data centre boom that AI has sowed. This huge shortage means electrical engineers in data centre clusters in the US are earning significantly more than software engineers do. Simply put, say hello to the revolutionary idea that mechanical engineers do mechanical definition of literacy has changed. It was about reading, writing and arithmetic; now it is beyond that to working naturally with AI tools and agents. Young people, including those I teach at Ashoka and other universities, are fast adapting to be AI literate and use AI tools in everything they do, to get a leg up in their job search. At KPMG, recent graduates are reportedly leveraging AI tools and handling tax jobs that used to be done by employees with three-plus years' experience. Big legal firms are encouraging early-career lawyers to work on complex contracts that once senior people will have to rediscover humanities with subjects of logic, grammar, ethics, philosophy and literature to keep our competitive advantage. With AI agents increasingly handling the technical 'how-to' of tasks, the human edge will lie in the 'why' and the 'what next'. The 'humble' subjects of humanities like language, philosophy, grammar and the arts are the ones that provide us critical frameworks for understanding context, ethics, human motivation, creativity and critical judgment —skills that are inherently difficult for AI to replicate meaningfully. As answers become commoditised, questions or prompts become important, and increasingly employers will prefer graduates with a mix of humanities and technical and SMEs build economies, not large monolithic organisations. More and more first jobbers will choose to become entrepreneurs. The New York Times writes about how at Stanford University, fewer grads are considering tech and finance careers, and more of them are plunging into starting companies — 'on the theory that if humans are about to lose their labor advantages to powerful AI systems, they had better hurry and do something big'.There is no rule that people must do only one job at a time. 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