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Support R100 ed b y VOLUME XLIII NUMBER 12 DECEMBER 2019 The Book Review / December 2019 1 Order now and get 20% off* Must reads from SAGE Bestseller! Bestseller! Bestseller! `295 ` 595 ` 595 ` 450 Brings together some of An account of a personal Argues forcefully for A book on one of the Bhagat Singh's seminal journey to liberate the mind social justice for the world's biggest film writings on his pluralist from colonial legacy. Dalit-Bahujans. industry - Bollywood and egalitarian vision Samya SAGE Select Samya SAGE Select Yoda SAGE Select YODA SAGE Select PB: 978-93-532-8256-1 PB: 978-93-5328-262-2 PB: 978-93-5328-655-2 PB: 978-93-528-0837-3 ` 450 ` 895 ` 850 ` 795 A moving documentation Examining the impact of social A vivid documentation of the Analyzing socio-economic of the plight of victims of problems on mental health and initiative by women to achieve conditions and the mental mob violence. the interventions possible. parity in school leadership. health of low-income women living in big cities. SAGE Select SAGE YODA Press HB: 978-93-532-8378-0 PB: 978-93-532-8219-6 HB: 978-93-532-8314-8 SAGE YODA Press HB: 978-93-532-8191-5 *Write to [email protected] with code TBR19 to get the discount www.sagepub.in 2 The Book Review / December 2019 C o n t e n t s Sam Pitroda Osama Manzar In Conversation 7 Kazim Rizvi Make, Think, Imagine: Engineering the Future of Civilization by John Browne 9 Arun Maira Where Will Man Take Us? : The Bold Story of the Man Technology is Creating by Atul Jalan 11 Editors Karishma Mehrotra The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans & Their Thinking Machines Chandra Chari Uma Iyengar Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb 12 Consultant Editor Adnan Farooqui Marc Prensky Forward Without Fear: Towards Humanity’s ‘Symbiotic Guest Editor Osama Manzar Human- Machine Hybrid’ Future 14 Deepak Maheshwari The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics and the Editorial Advisory Board Future of Work by Richard Baldwin 16 Romila Thapar Ritu Menon Mala Bhargava The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Chitra Narayanan Future of Humanity by Byron Reese 17 T.C.A. Srinivasa Raghavan Mini Krishnan Manoj Kumar Jena A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence: How Algorithms are Shaping Our Lives and How We Can Stay in Control by Kartik Hosanagar 18 SUBSCRIPTION RATES Pankaj Pachauri The Politics of Digital India: Between Local Compulsions and Transnational Single Issue: R100 Pressures by Pradip Ninan Thomas 21 Annual Subscription (12 Issues) Ajit Phadnis Dissent on Aadhaar: Big Data Meets Big Brother by Reetika Individual: R1500 / $75 / £50 Khera 22 Institutional: R2500 / $100 / £60 (inclusive of bank charges and postage) Ravi Venkatesan The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey 23 Life Donors: R10,000 and above Aasim Khan Permanent Record by Edward Snowden 24 ADVERTISEmENT mANAgER Amir Ullah Khan Satya Prakash and Atif Ahmed Privacy 3.0: Unlocking Our Data-Driven Future by Rahul Matthan 26 [email protected] Sonia Jorge The Direction of Digital Equality 27 WEBSITE MANAGEMENT Seema Chishti A World Without “Whom”: The Essential Guide to Language in the Digital Empowerment Foundation Buzzfeed Age by Emmy J. Favilla 30 [email protected] Sania Farooqui The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You by Scott. E. Page 31 COMPUTER INPUTS, DESIGN AND LAYOUT Sevanti Ninan Automating the News: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Media Ravi Kumar Yadav by Nicholas Diakopoulos 33 Digital Empowerment Foundation Ravi Guria India Misinformed: The True Story by Pratik Sinha, Dr Sumaiya Shaikh and Arjun Sidharth 34 Please Address All Mail To: The Book Review Literary Trust Dushyant Arora Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger Mcnamee 35 239, Vasant Enclave Mahtab Alam The Real Face of Facebook in India: How Social Media have Become a New Delhi 110 057 Propaganda Weapon and Disseminator of Misinformation and Falsehood Telephone: by Cyril Sam and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta 36 91-11-41034635 9278089024 / 9811702695 Nitish Verghese Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind 37 Website: Udita Chaturvedi How to Win an Indian Election: What Political Parties don’t Want www.thebookreviewindia.org You to Know by Shivam Shankar Singh 39 Ali Ahmad Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War email: by Paul Scharre 40 [email protected] [email protected] Ravi Guria The Great Hack: Directed by Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim 41 Madanmohan Rao Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern Advisory Board Founder Members India by Lilly Irani 44 K.R. Narayanan S. Gopal Amitabh Singhal Digital Transformation: Build your Organization’s Future for the Nikhil Chakravartty Innovation Age by Lindsay Herbert 46 Raja Ramanna Meenakshi Mukherjee Christie Maria James Mentoring 2.0: A Practitioner’s Guide to Changing Lives K.N. Raj by Sunil Unny Guptan 48 Sakshi Abrol Information Systems: Debates, Applications and Impacts edited by Priya Seetharaman and Jocelyn Cranefield 49 Cover Illustration: Designed by Sharada Kerkar, Digital Empowerment Foundation The Book Review is a non-political, ideologically non-partisan journal which tries to reflect all shades of intellectual opinions and ideas. The views of the reviewers and authors writing for the journal are their own. All reviews and articles published in The Book Review are exclusive to the journal and may not be reprinted without the prior permission of the editors. Published by Chandra Chari for The Book Review Literary Trust, 239 Vasant Enclave, New Delhi 110057. Printed at National Printers, B-56, Naraina Industrial Area Phase-II, New Delhi 110028 Story of Digital Shift from Village India hakti Singh is a young man in his later half of mid-twenties who lives in a small village of Chohtan block in the district of Barmer in Rajasthan State of India. Barmer, which Sis arid, a desert, is also one of the largest districts of India besides being highly under developed. People in this district eke out their lives with enormous amount of difficulties. Six years ago, Shakti joined Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) as his first job. He had no idea what he wanted to do and had no clue what his job responsibilities will be. Sometime in early 2014, we were trying to establish hundreds of centres across the country in remote areas and at village level, where almost nothing existed, certainly not any kind of digital infrastructure. Our objective was to establish public spaces with digital infrastructure and Internet connectivity where people from the villages could walk in to access information, get digital literacy and skills, talk to someone who could help in accessing online forms and get them filled to get entitlements under government welfare schemes for thousands of people who had no clue how to get them. Osama Manzar is the founder and director of Digital Empowerment It became clear that millions of people who may not be part of the connected world and Foundation (DEF) may not have any means to be connected to this digital world started depending on the digital ecosystem. This was so, because, even to get hold of their ration for the month, a poor person had to go through a biometric machine based identification check which very much depends on connectivity and would allow permission to the entitlement only when the digital database would confirm their identity. Unfortunately, many a times the database would not match, connectivity may not work, machine may malfunction or the agent behind the machine may also play foul­­­—all of them or any of them could result in the poor man returning without his ration and his family may starve to death. Shakti’s job was to be trained to master the know-how of digital tools, how he could use them, how he could mobilize the villagers and help them understand that he is the man who could be instrumental in enabling people with access to the world of information, entitlements, opportunities, knowledge and rights through the digital doorways. Shakti learnt fast and developed empathy and in the last six years has earned such a reputation in and around his village council that people started pressurizing him to contest for village council election because ‘it is he who has genuinely served the people, so much so, that not a single household left in the village council that is unserved.’ One classic example that Shakti Singh narrates is that there was this old lady in her 90s who had not received her old age pension for a couple of decades. She approached Shakti Singh and narrated her story. After a lot of enquiries and following the trails of the old lady’s application, he found that her pension was disbursed by the local government all these years and was also received—but someone at the local post office who was supposed to deliver her cheques continued to avail himself by forging papers and signing for the old lady. Once the investigation was completed and was proven, the guilty begged for forgiveness and returned all the money to the old lady which was almost in six digits. While the situation in the villages of Barmer has not changed much and people are still largely poor, the situation of connectivity and mobile penetration has increased. most of the young population have started owning smartphones. While the purpose of owning a smartphone may not be compulsive enough to buy, it is seen and observed that the ownership of mobile is a social phenomenon and not having one would be seen oddly.

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