What did the man tell his dead Alexa? Don’t wreck your brains; the answer is: “Rust In Peace.” Jokes apart, it is a fact that this gag would not have been born till November 2014, the year Amazon’s popular virtual assistant technology was born. The joke is also a pointer to how emerging technologies shape our attitude, philosophy, lifestyle and even the way we crack jokes. Technology is humanity’s new oxygen. Take it away, we cease to exist. Kiran Karnik, who spent most of his career tracking the rapid changes in technology in India and abroad, understands the importance and impact of science and technology of people’s life — reason why he decided to look at how the phenomenon is influencing and “affecting key elements of daily life: money and finance, health, education, attitudes and behaviour, and accessing government services”.

In ‘e’volution: Decoding India’s Disruptive Tech Story (Rupa, ₹495), Karnik offers a bird’s eye view of most of the important trends in technology from a layman’s perspective. To be fair, he covers almost all the emerging technologies and tech-driven social issues in this small volume: artificial intelligence, blockchain, virtual assistants, digital money, healthcare tech, privacy, big data, surveillance and more. His perspectives are lucid and insightful and are in synch with opinions expressed by the high-and-mighties of technology — from Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk.

Karnik’s philosophy is rather simple. He tries to present a holistic approach to understanding technology’s role in society and culture — as an enabler, a catalyst and a disruptor of myriad hues. The technology-culture interaction, writes Karnik, is substantially asymmetrical, with technology affecting culture more than the other way around. He cites, among others, the example of how cellphone calls got cheaper in this market, thanks to the Indian cultural ethos of seeking ‘value for money’. That’s a nice way of looking at the interplay between technology and society but it runs the risk of discounting the role political economy plays in shaping and spreading technology.

Which is why parts of Karnik’s analysis reads like glorified consultancy reports in spite of their uniqueness. He just states the obvious and moves on. Sample this: While probing the role of technology in democracy (‘Whither Democracy’), Karnik says that “in a climate of ultra-nationalism and heightened cultural and religious schisms, technology seems to aid alienation and a sense of ‘otherness’”. That’s a bold statement to begin with. But like elsewhere, the author declines to give us the larger picture and vanishes by offering a few global examples and anecdotes.

Again, writing on Technology of the Future, and the Future of Technology, Karnik sets out to map the changes — good and bad — technology has brought to our society and how some of these changes are driving us into danger. But he is not resorting to technological determinism, like many philosophers (like a Neil Postman) who studied technology in the past decades and tries to look at the brighter side of it all. All that’s cool, but here too, Karnik is in a rush to move to the next topic of discussion leaving his arguments midway, and leaving the reader disappointed.

That’s why Karnik’s book ceases to become the great book it should have been, given his level of experience and expertise. To sum up, this a book that has a great blurb, superb chapter heads and meaningful central thesis but it fails to explore the subjects in the depths required to bring out a meaningful discussion on the evolution of technology in India and beyond. Maybe Karnik can try an updated and more detailed sequel soon because, as they say, anytime is the best time to write about tech.

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