Latest news with #ManuJoseph
Mint
25-05-2025
- Business
- Mint
Manu Joseph: This is why the flight attendant shouldn't be a genius
I get a spam call from a girl who asks which bank has issued my credit card, and I say, 'Sperm Bank." She asks if it is a foreign bank, then for the spelling. Listening to her, I am delighted at the progress the nation has made. I am not being sarcastic, partly because sarcasm is the second lowest form of humour, but chiefly because her response is a good omen. Another day, I am as delighted when I hear a flight attendant struggle to make an announcement in both Hindi and English. Once, flight attendants were disturbingly articulate, some were even brilliant, and many of them had the grace and elegance of professional models. Also Read: Manu Joseph: India has a tariff on America's huge cultural surplus In a cinema hall, I rejoice when the person behind a counter can't tell the difference between 325 and 32.5, as though the dot is some design element. Also, baristas at coffee shops no longer have the urban swag that they used to when expensive cappuccinos first came to India. And in five-star hotels, waiters display the meek wonder of those who come from places that have no five-stars. There is an ideal mediocrity all around in some tedious professions with no prospects. It is a sign that India has progressed so much that the smartest, or simply the luckiest, do not have to do jobs for which they may be overqualified. It is a sign that a segment of Indians who were once so inexpensive to hire that companies could afford them to do dreary work have priced themselves out of such work and moved to more complex or rewarding jobs, or at least different sorts of dreary jobs, or maybe have even opted to do nothing, which is not a bad way to be. Also Read: Employers of the world unite: Time to safeguard brains Until about 25 years ago, Indians went to a restaurant and just asked for 'coffee." Then the café-chain Barista opened. What a naive time it was for a cafe to be called 'Barista.' It's like a bar called 'Bar-Tender.' But it was all so new and swanky that most of us had to rehearse a bit before we said 'cappuccino" so that we were not shamed in front of the suave baristas who worked there. I felt it then—that there was something wrong if the staff at a café seemed more refined and cool than a nation's general population. You may argue that this is exactly the case in a rich-world café today—they are manned by the hip. But that is because many baristas in, say, Europe or America are students making side-money; or they only look well-off as most people appear in a rich society. In any case, their skills are probably not rare. In 2000, in India, Barista should not have been able to afford the sort of youngsters who agreed to work there. They did not last long. The call-centre revolution came, and many of them moved to that, and those who started serving coffee had quite a different social profile. The call-centre mania, too, pointed to a nation that was so poor that some of its smartest, or at least most articulate, could be absorbed by that industry. Around then, I had a friend who could have chosen any field but became a flight attendant because it paid her the most among the paths she could have taken in the country. Also Read: Work-life balance: Do employees dream of Excel sheets? You can see this phenomenon at work in the Miss Universe or Miss World pageants. Generally, with some exceptions, beauty queens from rich countries are from modest backgrounds, while the women from poor countries are from socially advanced backgrounds, usually from the upper middle class or affluent strata of society. This was one of the reasons behind the difference between Indian beauty queens like Sushmita Sen or Aishwarya Rai and many of their competitors. All that has changed now. It is not a surprise that Indian beauty pageant contestants today come from different socio-economic backgrounds. As India grows richer, lower rungs of society get more opportunities, especially as the top strata move on to better things or do not wish to participate in some areas of work. Today, even personal wealth managers are not all that urbane anymore. Also Read: Generating jobs in India's highly segmented labour market will be a long haul You may argue that this is still a nation where thousands of graduates apply for menial government jobs. In September, about 40,000 graduates and 6,000 post-graduates applied for a sweeper's job in the Haryana government. But this only points to the farce of college degrees. These were people who probably felt the job befitted them irrespective of the laminated pieces of paper they somehow collected in the name of higher education. The argument I am making is not that India has progressed enough to employ its whole workforce, but that it has progressed enough to ensure that some segments of smart people are too expensive to recruit for basic jobs. Just as rich nations hire Indians to do jobs their citizens do not wish to, urban India is beginning to dip into emerging social segments for affordable hiring. Also Read: Revive India's unorganized sector to raise incomes and tackle unemployment Meanwhile, some professions that were considered semi-skilled have become more gentrified. Once, when I had hair, I used to go to a place called Head Master, where a man who was called a 'barber' cut my hair for a pittance. Then 'salons' opened, where young people who appeared affluent and were called 'hair stylists' did the job. But it is not clear to me what the chic of India's middle-class are doing today. What professions have absorbed them? Those suave guys who used to make cappuccinos and those articulate flight attendants—if they were young today, where would they be and what would they be doing? I don't see them around anymore. Maybe there was a wave of young people who appeared briefly in the late 90s and aughts, playing surprising roles, but do not exist anymore. The author is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, 'Decoupled'.
Mint
23-05-2025
- Business
- Mint
Google Search: Its evolution is being led by GenAI and Gen Z
For over two decades, Google has been shaping how the world searches for information with its artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. But as Generative AI (GenAI) chatbots grow more conversational and capable, the Big Tech company has been pushed into a 'total re-imagining of Search," as its CEO Sundar Pichai said this week in his Google I/O 2025 keynote address. The catalyst is Generation Z: netizens born between 1997 and 2012 who prefer context, relevance and answers in natural language over blue links. Instead of 'googling,' Gen Z youth tend to treat chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) as their first point of inquiry. Also Read: Manu Joseph: Who'd have thought Google could be replaced This explains the growing popularity of AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot, Google's own Gemini, Meta's Llama, Anthropic's Claude and Perplexity's search engine. These tools combine LLMs with live web data to deliver ready responses with sources, summaries and follow-up cues. Does Google need a defensive flank for its core money spinner? It dominates the global search market, of which it still has a share of almost 90%. Its revenues from search and related services—its ad mop-up, mostly—stood at $198.1 billion in 2024, 56.6% of its parent Alphabet's total. Also Read: Friend or phone: AI chatbots could exploit us emotionally Further, while OpenAI gets a billion messages daily (each 'prompt' can have many), 70% of its prompts ask for tasks that do not overlap with search usage, like writing code or summarizing text, according to a note by SparkToro and SEMrush. It adds that even if all 125 million daily ChatGPT prompts mimicked Google searches, AI tools combined would have less than 2% of the world's search market. So chatbots have created a ripple rather than a wave. That said, while LLM-based search platforms aren't eating Google's lunch yet, they are certainly revising the menu. In February 2024, Gartner projected traditional search engine volume to drop 25% by 2026, with gains for AI chatbots and other virtual agents. Google's global share of search-engine use fell below 90% for the first time since 2015 during each of the last three months of 2024, according to Statcounter. Last month, it was below 89.7%. The dip is tiny, but Google does not want to take any chances. This week, it updated its search service to include AI Overviews, which uses GenAI to offer a summary on top (if deemed helpful), with the classic links of its results to follow. This feature is widely available and has already touched over 1.5 billion users. And then there's its new AI Mode, which uses Gemini to address complex queries and sustain chats, like other chatbots. Thanks to this, Google's interface can handle tasks like itinerary planning and document drafting. Along with the company's other apps Chrome and Gemini, Search could soon be given agentic capabilities too—so that it can take actions on our behalf. Also Read: Dave Lee: Apple must make peace with developers for AI success Another reason Google does not face a near-term threat is that LLM-native platforms also face challenges. They need to make money, for example. As of now, they're using subscription models, charging for premium features. Perplexity is also exploring 'sponsored' content generated by AI independently of sponsors. But it's unclear if these tools can count on much ad revenue. What is notable, though, is how they have forced Google to evolve faster. If chatbots minimize hallucinations to offer us reliable answers, prove competent in agentic roles and achieve business viability, they may give Google a run for its ad money. So far, GenAI has only chatted up Gen Z well enough to reshape it.
Mint
18-05-2025
- General
- Mint
Manu Joseph: It isn't true that every language holds secret feelings
Usually, when a person speaks a language poorly, it is a sign that they speak some other language very well. But many Indians who eat avocados cannot speak any language well. This includes English, their current dominant language that made them forget their own. I, too, have lost the ability to speak well, especially an Indian tongue, even though I used to think in both Tamil and Malayalam once. It is hard to kill an Indian mainstream language because there are so many of us, but our mother tongues have died inside us and our children do not know them at all. Yet, I am unable to mourn a dying language. This is because beyond the nostalgia of heritage, the broad reasons why people mourn the demise of a language are based on false assumptions. Also Read: Manu Joseph: How language may have conspired to keep people unfit There is a view that every language encodes a unique human emotion or a way of thinking, which cannot be decoded by another language. I want to believe this because I want there to be magic in this world, but from what I have seen, there is nothing emotionally unique about any language, and the lament about dying languages is overstated because we are afraid of death in general. Laura Spinney, whose latest book is Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, told the Indian Express recently that, 'A quarter of living languages will die." This would have brought a familiar ache to many of us. The same ache we feel when we are made to hear the sounds of the last person to have spoken a language, inevitably a poor tribal person in some remote place, or the last songs of an extinct bird, sounds that filled the forests for millions of years that vanished, never to return. The death of a language is not a trifling matter. Millions of people, for thousands of years, once loved, fought and figured stuff out in it. Then, a generation began to abandon it, or simply became another sort of people. So modern people try to 'preserve' it. Our age is defined by preservation; every dying thing must be preserved. But the true heritage of a place is made up of the things that intellectuals do not try to save, but which survive anyway—paradisiacal food, mainstream music, the clothes of a bride, even daily-wear. What goes is usually the insignia of the old elite, also known as culture, or what the masses can afford to let go. Also Read: Verbal e-volution: Language technologies are still shaping global culture A language always dies of natural causes, because it has been forsaken by its people for a more useful language. (People who want South India to adopt Hindi don't seem to get this—for many in this region, Hindi is useless.) A powerful reason why people want to preserve a language is the assumption that every language contains a way of thinking, or human feelings that are unique to it. This has spawned some esoteric overreach. Thus, we are told of an African tribe (it's always an African tribe) that refers to the future as behind it and the past as ahead of it. And we are supposed to marvel at some secret the tribe knew. But there is nothing more to it. Just as there is nothing to the fact that Hindi has the same word for tomorrow and yesterday. Some naive Anglicized writers try to see too much philosophy in what is just an etymological accident. Maybe some incompetent pundit made an error and it stuck. There is this famous view that the Inuit people of the Arctic region have hundreds of words for snow because they can see many aspects of it. That's not true. It is just that the Inuit languages are poly-synthetic, so they can make up long strings of words, like 'lightly falling snow.' Also Read: Three-language formula: Chhattisgarh offers an education case study In her book Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions, the Dutch psychologist Batja Mesquita cites words in several languages to build the argument that emotions are not entirely innate, that they are cultural artefacts, recorded in and even arising from local languages. Inevitably, Japanese comes up often in Mesquita's book. She says that the Japanese word amae, which means 'a complete dependence on the nurturant indulgence of their caregiver,' has no English equivalent. And that the Samoan word alofa, which encompasses love, sympathy and pity among other emotions, does not have an English parallel. Mesquita makes too much of such words. That we fully grasp the meaning of the foreign words she lists indicates that we know the feeling, just that we need many words to express the same feeling. For instance, 'a complete dependence on the nurturant indulgence of their caregiver.' In fact, the most useless aspect of English is that it has many words that represent elaborate feelings, but these are not widely known. Etymologist Susie Dent frequently posts such words on the social media platform X—the kind that would be marked red in your Word file. Like 'beek,' which means to bask in the pleasurable warmth of the sun, and 'apricate,' which means to sunbathe. Surely, these words don't mean anything unique to the British, especially as they never saw much of the sun even in ancient times. Also Read: Let the market pick the language on signboards What about 'jihad,' a word that seems to contain an idea of war. The word simply means 'struggle' in Arabic. Everything else about it is a metaphorical application and nothing about the word or its emotion is unique to Arabs. If there is a word that denotes an emotion or a way of thinking that only speakers of that language can achieve, please let this writer know. Like I said, I want there to be magic. The author is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, 'Decoupled'.
The Hindu
10-05-2025
- Business
- The Hindu
The Hindu Huddle 2025: 'AI will amplify, not replace, human capacity'
Paranoia around rapid advancements in AI is misplaced and technology would only amplify, and not replace human capacity, experts at a panel discussion said. The discussion titled AI for All: Dream of Democratised and Ethical AI was moderated by author Manu Joseph and had Astha Kapoor, Co-founder, Aapti Institute, Kalika Bali, Senior Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research, India and Tanvi Lall, Strategy, People + AI as experts. To think of AI as an instrument of absolute and malicious power was wrong, said Ms. Bali. 'Technology can amplify human efforts both good and bad. There are questions that we need to manage right now - such as whether the data that is used to train AI is representative of the global majority, how do we ensure that models are aware of the context, how to reduce the risk of biases etc.' Also Read | The Hindu Huddle 2025 Day 2 live updates The nature of jobs will change and new jobs will be created, but the new ones also will be redundant soon as technology advances, pointed out Ms. Kapoor. 'The most vulnerable jobs right now are those in the BPO industry. There will new jobs in managing the data is being generated. There will be chaos and is need for regulation, social security, skill development and preparedness,' she said. Ms. Lall said AI has opened up the opportunity for learning for the curious people. AI and technology can take care of a range of routine work, and humans can turn their attention to creative and critical areas. The experts were of the opinion that in this phase of rapid changes, the human capacity to think critically and make sense of the cognitive overload will be of value. The Hindu Huddle 2025 is presented by Sami-Sabinsa Group Co-powered by: Government of Karnataka, Government of Telangana; Associate Partners: ONGC, Presidency University, TAFE, Akshayakalpa Organic; Energy Partner : Indian Oil Corporation Limited; Realty partner: Casagrand; Knowledge partner: Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham; State partner: Meghalaya tourism and Haryana government; Luxury car partner: Toyota; Radio partner: Radio City; Gift partner: Anand Prakash; Broadcast partner: Times Now; Outdoor media partner: Signpost India.
