Transformation of Lives and Artificial Intelligence:
A Conversation with Amar Gupta
Nibir K. Ghosh
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An
Engineering graduate from IIT Kanpur with a Ph.D. from IIT Delhi, Dr. Amar Gupta
joined the MIT
Sloan School of Management in 1979 where he distinguished
himself in several capacities through his consistent engagements in innovative
projects that led to widespread adoption of new techniques and technologies
worldwide. As
Founding Co-Director of the Productivity from Information Technology (PROFIT) initiative
and in allied roles at MIT Sloan School of Management, Dr. Gupta initiated and
managed major multimillion dollar projects related to information technology
and automation of business processes. As Director of the Research Program on
Communications Policy at MIT School of Engineering, he coordinated the
establishment of the Internet Telephony Consortium, subsequently renamed as the
Internet and Telephony Convergence Consortium, and played a pivotal role in the
commercialization of the Voice-over-IP technology. He has spent the bulk of his
career at MIT. In
addition to his MIT career, he has served as Phyllis and Ivan Seidenberg Endowed
Professor and Dean of the Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information
Systems at Pace University, US, and as the Thomas R. Brown Professor of
Management and Technology at the University of Arizona, US. In 2015, he
rejoined MIT to work at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Sciences
(IMES), Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, and the
Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) on innovation and
entrepreneurship related to Digital Health and Globally Distributed Teams. He
serves as Principal/Co-Principal Investigator and Coordinator for
"Telemedicine" and "Enhancing Productivity of Geographically
Distributed Teams" areas. Prior to joining MIT, Dr. Gupta contributed significantly
while engaged with the Department of Electronics, Government of India, New
Delhi and High Commission of India, London. His publications include 12
internationally acclaimed books besides over 100 pathbreaking research papers
in international journals. He has served as advisor to a broad range of
multinational corporations and international organizations on technology,
innovation, and strategy issues.
He has
also served as Advisor to United Nations Industrial Development Organization on
innovation and entrepreneurship. He is credited with leading a UNDP team to
plan and implement a national financial information infrastructure in Brazil, a
Latin American country where 40 per cent of the banks had gone bankrupt. He was
a part of the expert group established by the World Health Organization to
formulate policy guidelines for Health Informatics. It is nothing
short of phenomenal that Dr. Gupta has recently been elevated to the
prestigious position of Life Fellow by the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers (IEEE), MIT. In this conversation, conducted on Zoom, Dr.
Amar Gupta shares his unique experiences as a computer scientist, ceaseless
innovator and experimenter. His farsightedness in anticipating shape of things
to come and his zeal for battling against odds and adversities in paving new
pathways of human progress through a judicious use of Artificial Intelligence
makes one recall the concluding lines from Lord Tennyson’s poem on Ulysses, the
Greek hero: “To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.”
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Nibir
Ghosh:
Greetings from Re-Markings. At the very outset, I congratulate you on your
elevation as Life Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (IEEE) MIT in recognition of your innovations in research fields
including engineering, computer science, and education. How does it feel to
earn such recognition at one of the world’s most prestigious institution?
Amar Gupta: Thank you for the
congratulations. I feel honoured and humbled by this award. Lesser than 0.1% of
the elected members of it get this recognition and I feel it's all the work
done with my colleagues and my students and others who have helped me reach
this stage. What do I attribute this kind of an achievement to? Well, the
things which we have done are developing new technologies and applying them on
a very broad basis, e.g., the technology for automated reading of bank checks
and the technology for Nationwide processing of bank checks, the work we did on
Presentation Graphics, and the work we've done in financial industry as well as
healthcare industry in tele-medicine. The fact that the number of things which
we suggested came in very handy because of COVID which we had said in advance. So all these things
I think are recognition but, again, I want to emphasize that it is a team
effort, not a single person's effort. So I want to say that those are the
people who really helped me, a lot my colleagues and my students in attaining
this level.
Nibir Ghosh: That’s true humility, I must
say, to share your glory with your team members. But it cannot be denied that
there has to be a driving force and the leadership you have provided accounts
for all the people contributing their best to take forward your initiative.
Amar Gupta: I tell people my job is
primarily twofold, one is to get money for them so that they can do the
research and second to keep them out of trouble. Those are the two things that
I take sole responsibility for and then I give them a lot of freedom to do what
they feel like. I guide them a lot, but they are the ones who put in a lot more
time and effort on one subject. At a private university in the US, we have to
raise our own money from diverse sources to do all this research and also to
pay the overhead expenses. So, that itself is a substantial job in terms of
interacting with lot of potential sponsors and donors and raising significant
money from external corporate and other sources.
Nibir Ghosh: After the successful
completion of your Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from
I.I.T. Kanpur, India, in 1974, you were engaged for a few years with the
Department of Electronics, Government of India. Please share your experiences
of working in the said Department.
Amar Gupta: Yes, I worked in the
Department of Electronics, Government of India. It is absolutely the best job
I've had in my entire career in terms of the impact it made and the people that
I got to work with. It is indeed very rare for a person almost fresh out of
college to handle such broad responsibility. I feel really honoured and
privileged to have had that job. Just to give you an idea, when I joined the
Department of Electronics in 1974, the emphasis was on how to get computers,
how to use them. In contrast, I was saying that computers will make India be a
force in the world and that we can be the leader in this area. People looked at
me with scepticism. I went to a ministry in New Delhi and was told, “you must
be really crazy. We can't even take care of our own thing and you want to
export in a new field like computers; who's going to maintain these computers
and all the other tasks.” I was the person who was assigned the job to take all
the required steps for getting the Computer Maintenance Corporation
established. My very first job in the Government of India was to be part of a
small team to set up a National Data Center that subsequently was renamed as
the National Informatics Center which, at this point, has become vital to
everything. And then I played a major role in IIT Kanpur and IIT Delhi
receiving large computers. In that sense, the thing which I did enabled a whole
generation of people to get trained on state-of-the-art computers at Kanpur and
Delhi and also at other places. So that's where I think the impact that I made
has really panned out over the years. One can see its impact right today across
the country.
Nibir Ghosh: Did you encounter any
difficulties or opposition in the process?
Amar Gupta: When you are working in
unknown territory, obviously there will be difficulties. I mean I was a young
guy in my early 20s. When I got this job, I remember going to the security
guard and he couldn't believe I carried a pass that entitled me as a Class One
officer to go in. Even later, most of the security guards would closely look at
my pass to see if it was a real pass or not. I remember I was given the job to
convince the UP government to do some things together in the computer sector
with IIT Kanpur. Senior officers of the state government were there and here
this young guy comes in as the sole representative of the union government. I
also got posted in the High Com-mission of India in London at a very young age.
When I attended diplomatic meetings, I was one generation younger than all the
people representing other countries there. These things made it difficult to be
heard. In such an environ-ment, making such a major impact was really
encouraging and an honour indeed.
Nibir Ghosh: What motivated your deep
interest in the domain of computer science? Who would you count among the
formative influences in your life and work?
Amar Gupta: I think this interest was
motivated by my studies at IIT Kanpur. I was there for five years and I started
learning programming languages in the second year. I was actively involved in
the work of the computer centre and did more things than were normally
required. That's where my interest grew in. But what I saw was different from
what others saw. I saw this was a way not just for computer science, not just
for me. Instead, I thought of it being for India. It was a very major
opportunity. Fantastic. That was the recognition which arose there. I think I
was largely alone especially when I was at IIT Kanpur, people didn't think of
it that way. A lot of people were just interested in going abroad and working
there. I was the one who was thinking that what should be done in India, and
why does it have to be done abroad?
Nibir Ghosh: What attracted you to seek
a career in the US? Was it a pull of what is known as the American dream?
Amar Gupta: My career in US has been
defined primarily by destiny. What happened is that when I was in Ghaziabad to
see people building our house, I happened to run into a person who asked me
that “Rotary Foundation has to award a scholarship for advanced studies. Do you
have somebody who could be considered for this scholarship.” I said, “hey, how
about considering me?” and he looked at me and asked if I was interested. And
one thing led to another. I was selected for the Rotary Fellowship for
International Understanding for one year. In that one year, I completed my MBA,
actually19 courses for this MBA, wrote my MBA thesis with one professor. In
parallel, I wrote my doctoral thesis from beginning to end on a different
subject under another supervisor and, even after doing all this, the work I had
to do during that year was less than what I had to do in IIT Kanpur every
year. One thing led to another. People
thought if I have done so much, why not publish papers in journals based on
these dissertations. And then I got married and I wanted to let my wife see MIT
and the whole country. My former classmates make fun of me even today when they
say, “you did so much studies in one year saying that you'll go back to India,
how come you're here?” I said, I'm a slow guy. I'm still here, So, being in US
was and is total destiny.
Nibir Ghosh: If you were to compare
the resources, infrastructure, faculty and work environment of the Indian
Institutes of Technology with that of the universities and institutions you
have worked in the US, what similarities or differences come uppermost in your mind?
Amar Gupta: In terms of the computers and
facilities which are at IITs, I would say they are phenomenal. These are the
best institutions that really produce people of world class quality. The slight
difference—which might be there—is in in terms of other skills. I was lucky
that my parents did not know how to drive so they actually encouraged me to
learn driving at a young age. I got the family car at that age. Now when people
come from abroad to study at MIT, some of them don't know driving. So they
don't know some of the skills which are taken for granted in the US.
I think the difference between the institutions in
India and in America is in terms of the ranking systems. The ranking is done by
people from eminent universities and it has more alumni involved in this
evaluation from MIT, for example, who provide peer rankings to universities as
compared to alums from IITs. Therefore, the IITs are at a disadvantage and they
get ranked much lower in these global scores. But in terms of the study, I have
absolutely no reservation whatsoever in saying that they are among the best in
the world.
Nibir Ghosh: You have developed and
taught a course on “International Management with Focus on India” at MIT. What
were the thrust areas of the course? To what extent did the course motivate the
learners to address pressing issues confronting India?
Amar Gupta: When I came to US, people in
the US were sceptical about India. I
talked to one of my MIT professors at that time and he responded, “India? What
is India? India is not in the global business anywhere, why would we waste time
teaching a course about business there?” Twenty years later when I suggested
that we start a course on India at MIT, I was asked to teach it. The number of
persons who wanted to take the course was so high that we asked all the
applicants for the course to write a five-page long paper. Based on that paper,
we decided who should be admitted in the course. And the first time when it was
taught, the students got to meet the Honourable President of India at the
Rashtrapati Bhavan, have food there, making them feel like royalty.
Significantly, that course was replicated at other universities. Then I started
a course on Outsourcing which again had a lot of following. Subsequently, I
started a course on International Management of Services during my tenure as
Endowed Professor in Arizona. People again were very sceptical about why I was
teaching this and what did I mean by ‘globally distributed’ teams? All that
work of mine, whatever I had been preaching for so long, became immediately
relevant when COVID came in.
Nibir Ghosh: As a computer scientist,
would you agree that the COVID-19 Pandemic came as a sort of catalyst for the
AI revolution?
Amar Gupta: Yes, there have been Global
disasters which became the main catalyst for incorporating the work which we
had done. The AI-based check processing method which we developed no longer
required the check to physically flow from the place where it was presented to
the place back to the owner of the check. There was lot of scepticism. The cost
of processing one check in the US at that time was $1.25 per check and 44
billion checks were processed annually in that manner in the US alone. And then
9/11 took place, the planes were grounded, the conventional check processing
system became inactive, and within few days $35 billion worth of checks got
stuck in the system. The US federal government passed emergency laws to
instruct that the image of the check should be used instead of the physical
check and our work was cited in some of these directives.
Nibir Ghosh: Well, I think that's
something not many in India would know how Amar Gupta was instrumental in
starting this revolution to assist the banking system worldwide.
Amar Gupta: Yeah, we hold a broad US
patent in that area. Several major improvements actually happened because of
catastrophes. For example, Y2K problem legitimized Outsourcing. Prior to that,
many organizations would not allow Information Technology services to be
performed in a foreign country. To do the Y2K conversion, these organizations
had to take people based in foreign countries and that really opened up the
global market. In the area of tele-medicine, we have been doing work since the
nineties but there was a lot of resistance to use it in practical situations. I
said, just wait and it will happen. In this case, the COVID pandemic served as
the key catalyst. I should tell you that two people whom I never knew before,
on two different flights, heard me out when I said this thing and they asked me
point blank, “have you heard of Goddess Cassandra”? and I said, I'm sorry I
don't know who Goddess Cassandra is. Goddess Cassandra is a priestess in the
Greek mythology who predicted things years in advance. Nobody thought they'll
take place and every one of them takes place. I don't want to be compared to
her because her life was a difficult one.
Nibir Ghosh: Could you cite some
instances of what you experienced in such cases?
Amar Gupta: To give you an example, when
internet telephony came in, many countries of the world were banning internet telephony
because it was com-peting with the Telecom Giants which happened to be owned by
the governments themselves. So I played a pivotal role in the creation of an
international Internet Telephony Consortium anchored at MIT. We would tell the
governments that it's going to come whether you like it or not. You have two
choices, either to have a legal industry which you can manage or an illegal
industry like drugs, so which one do you want? In the same way I did work on
check processing through funding from another International Consortium anchored
at MIT. When I had said that the checks have to be standardized, everybody was
sceptical about it. Then I'm reading a journal and I find Britain has
standardized it; in 3 months’ time they had taken my draft for that standard
and applied it in Britain!
Nibir Ghosh: Getting standardization in
Industries like this is not easy. Were you not anxious about offending the
so-called crooks who were opposing the idea of the good that you were doing?
Amar Gupta: Well, I've had resistance of
several kinds. There was resistance from the people who do it. I might digress
a bit but let me give you a different answer which may seem totally new to you.
Based on my lifetime of work at different places and in different environments,
and having been a United Nations expert, a World Bank expert, a World Health
Organization expert, all these things that I've done and have been very
fortunate to do, I've come to the conclusion that all startups, all companies,
all countries, all Empires go through four stages of evolution.
Nibir Ghosh: Kindly elaborate what these
stages are.
Amar Gupta: The first stage of evolution
is get the work done, it doesn't matter how many people get killed, just get it
done. That's how Empires start, and that's what happens in the first stage.
The second stage is get the work done but also try
to minimize the casualties. Try to follow some rules. That's the second step to
do it, so that some level of control is there.
The third level of thing is get the work done and
follow the internal rules, external rules, follow those, be moral, be all those
kind of things. So if you take the Roman Empire for example during its third
stage, killing people was considered bad, so Romans would not join the Army.
The whole army was composed of foreigners; that's how they ran the Roman
Empire.
The fourth stage is follow all the rules, internal
and external. It does not matter if the work gets done or not. I've seen it
happen in the case of number of Empires and organizations.
Let me explain further. What happens when a crisis
takes place is that an organization which is in the fourth stage – doing absolutely nothing
except creating work for each other – actually goes back into the third stage (or even
second stage) in order to survive the external crisis and that is what really
allows this change to take place. These crises serve as important catalysts for
change and improvement.
Nibir Ghosh: As Diversity Committee
Member for three terms wherein your focus was on increasing the number of
underrepresented minorities at Sloan School, what challenges did you encounter
in raising awareness related to American ideals of liberty and equality?
Amar Gupta: I was the first person of
Indian origin to hold a senior academic position at the Sloan School of
Management. My colleagues were the ones who voted me to be their representative
on the Diversity Committee. Being a member of the Diversity Committee enabled
me to be part of an effort to make more change in terms of diversity of the
students coming in, and also some change as far as the faculty and staff
recruitment is concerned.
Nibir Ghosh: How would you respond to
Elon Musk’s description of Artificial Intelligence as the “most disruptive
force in history”?
Amar Gupta: Yes, your question is
interesting. One of my friends says artificial intelligence is like fire. It
can either be used for good purposes or bad purposes. To me, I think the best
comparison of artificial intelligence is the nuclear bomb. I think there are a
lot of similarities. I know of one well known place where significant work on
artificial intelligence is being done at the same location where during the
Second World War significant work on radiation was done. There were some people
who said it should be done, some people who said it should not be done, and
some people said, “oh we can correct it later.” And it was the first bomb which
Oppenheimer is shown doing. The scientists on the field went ahead and signed a
memorandum that everything should be banned from now on but by that time it was
too late to do that.
Nibir Ghosh: Do you see the same kind of
a dichotomy between what is done and what shouldn’t have been done in terms of
AI?
Amar Gupta: I think we have the same
crisis in artificial intelligence. People are trying to tackle quality issues
and safety issues but more at an organizational level than at continental or
intercountry level. This has to be done at the global level. And that is what
is not happening at this point. Making rules which are just good for one
country or one region of the world is not the way to proceed. I'll give you one
example. The European GDPR is mentioned a lot in terms of Privacy regulations.
A fine is imposed if there's a breach of privacy but the fine is much higher if
it is a non-European company as opposed to a European company. This disparity
is not conducive to the adoption of the regulations by other countries.
Nibir Ghosh: That means discrimination is
apparent?
Amar Gupta: I'm sorry to say that
discrimination is there. We should be allowed this but other countries should
not be allowed this. Based on my past ex-perience, it may take a disaster to
get the situation rectified. Until then people are not going to listen to it
and that's essentially how things will be corrected just as happened in the
case of Y2K, and just as it happened in case of check processing. That's
unfortunately my view at this point in time because there are so many interest
groups conflicting with each other.
Nibir Ghosh: It seems conflicting
interests of power groups are bound to lead to disasters?
Amar Gupta: Yes, of course. If you take
the Opium War for example, Britain fought it on the basis that China had no
right to be regulating opium but Britain itself was regulating opium at that
very time. The same thing is true of nuclear bombs today. We have to think in
global terms, not just country by country. In the case of artificial
intelligence too, the same is true. Without global policies disasters involving
artificial intelligence are likely to occur but it is hard to predict when and
where.
Nibir Ghosh: There is a common
perception that AI, especially generative AI, will augment the human workers
and not replace them. What is your view regarding issues of unemployment and
lay-offs?
Amar Gupta: When we did check processing
through automated technology, our technology eliminated a lot of jobs in terms
of reading of checks. Earlier, checks were read manually during the night shift
primarily by ladies. Periodi-cally, somebody would get mugged and lot of
resignations would take place the next day. Banks had to deal with it all.
Those people gradually got laid off which is unfortunate. Today, I again
believe that evolving tools and technologies will have a similar disruptive
effect. At the same time, people will be needed in order to develop and
maintain them.
Nibir Ghosh: What do you have in mind
regarding non-constructive use of AI tools?
Amar Gupta: Yes, these unfortunate
things will happen and that again is a very disturbing part of it. The new jobs
created in check processing were a fraction of the ones which were lost because
of the automated processing coming in; that is the reality of the game and
that's how the whole Industrial Revolution worked. And that's how the whole
Information Technology Revolution is work-ing.
Nibir Ghosh: In what other areas did
COVID-19 Pandemic serve as a catalyst for the AI revolution?
Amar Gupta: COVID-19 has been a catalyst for AI
but it has been for several other things. It has been a major catalyst for
telemedicine. It has been a major catalyst for Digital Health, it has been a
major catalyst for telemedicine not just between States but also between
countries and continents. It has been a catalyst in terms of working at
different times of the day through globally distributed teams. It has led to
personnel trying to work from different countries and opting for the best
inputs from different countries. In order to do all these things, I think COVID-19 has acted as a catalyst.
As far as AI is concerned, you can give it some benefit but I don't think it's
a direct benefit to the same extent. I should tell you when COVID took place, a number of
organizations approached MIT to say that fewer customers are coming to our
bank, we have fewer employees in the bank, and customers are sending us lot of
letters and lot of faxes. We want new technologies and methods by which you can
do all these things. Such work, by the way, within MIT, got directed to me
because of our earlier work on auto-mated check processing. Okay. So we are
working with a number of organi-zations which are there in terms of it but as I
talk to these organizations they are interested in some of it being automated
but they're more interested in address-ing the growing information glut
problem. So much information is there. How can we use these new technologies to
be able to get to the information piece that we wanted. So, on one side we are
creating the information glut and then we are trying to find means about how to
deal with information glut. Those are the kind of problems that we are
addressing more at this point in time.
Nibir Ghosh: Could you please shed
some light on the transformative use of telemedicine to achieve better,
quicker, and less expensive health care for all?
Amar Gupta: With regard to telemedicine,
yes, I use the words better, quicker and less expensive. There are different
kinds of diseases which lend themselves to use of telemedicine; some do not
lend themselves to use of telemedicine. For example, if somebody has an
accident and needs bandage, then one really has to go to a hospital or clinic.
People have to do it. Yes, robots will come in to do the bandage for you but
that's not the level of strategy at which we are currently. On the other hand,
there are clear areas of medical specialities where tele-medicine actually
outstrips conventional medicine. For example, with mental patients telemedicine
is much better than dealing with traditional medicine because you're actually
seeing the patient in his or her environment. You can correlate it more. If
that person needs to see a specialist, you can arrange it instead of the person
having to wait for months. In the prison system in Arizona, they used
telemedicine first for mental diseases and it was absolutely amazing to see what
they were to achieve with it.
Nibir Ghosh: In the case of telemedicine,
did you receive any encouragement from any quarters during COVID?
Amar Gupta: At the time, we were
approached by a number of organizations who were willing to give us millions of
dollars to develop international tele-medicine aids so that if a person is
suspected of COVID anywhere in the world, the
person can go to a computer, go through it and get connected to a doctor in
another part of the world. So the patient gets instant satisfaction, instant
gratification, instant treatment which is just not possible in terms of face-to-face
conversation. Another example is in the case of a stroke. You have to do things
in the first one hour and if you are in Alaska, it may take you 3 hours to
reach a hospital. So there again is a case that if you can do it through
telemedicine there's much more chances that the person will survive. There's a
whole spec-trum in areas where telemedicine outstrips the abilities of
conventional medicine. In some ways it's complementary and in some ways you
still have to go through the conventional form. I was the first one to write in
a paper published in 2010 that since doctors and nurses make more mistakes at
night when they've not gotten proper sleep, medical assistance could be
provided by doctors and nurses working during day time on the other side of the
globe.
Nibir Ghosh: What was the reaction to
your paper?
Amar Gupta: I got mixed reactions
including a lot of hate mail. The latter sentiments were along the lines:
“first there was outsourcing of other jobs, now you want even the doctor's job
to be outsourced. You are a traitor.” Eight years later, Emory University Hospital
in Atlanta adopted that model. It transferred several of its doctors and nurses
to Australia. So at night in Atlanta, the ICU patient is actually managed by
doctors and nurses working from Australia. It’s much better for them physically
and mentally and also much better for their patients. So anytime you make a
change, the people who are entrenched in the system resist the change and the
people who gain from the change are not there to support it. This is the
Machiavellian Paradox. I should give lot of praise to what has been done in
India and some of the developing countries. The way they responded to
telemedicine by picking it up much faster than developed countries and the
infrastructure that they've developed in India is worth noting. For example, if
somebody has cancer they're allowed to consult the best cancer specialists in
the whole country by telemedicine and they don't have to pay a dime for it.
Those kinds of things that they’ve brought are really novel. We've done studies
of how it's being done in different countries of the world and what the unique
things are in terms of doing it. I happen to be also editor-in-chief of a
journal on a strategy for telemedicine. It is one of the channels through which
I get to know some of these things.
Nibir Ghosh: According to a post in MIT News, an
unfortunate accident at California resulting in injury to your wife led you to
realise the “dysfunction and inefficiency in the US healthcare system” and
inspired you to transform personal trauma into a serious quest for finding
corrective measures that would benefit one and all. Would you mind sharing the
episode?
Amar Gupta: I was at MIT for a
long time. Then I went to Arizona as an Endowed Professor, then I went as Dean
to New York. In New York I started the Tele-Health Intervention Program for
Seniors (TIPS). In one local county in New York state, within 3 months of
implementation of TIPS, the number of calls for ambulance was reduced by 70%.
While it is good progress, it was not getting the kind of visibility which is
required to expand the concept on a global basis. I came to MIT for one year
and then wanted to move to warmer climate. So I applied and got an endowed
professorship in Los Angeles. My wife and I went there. We stayed at a hotel
and my wife had a fall in that hotel. The city ambulance took us to a hospital
which basically said they only take care of their own patients even in an
emergency. They categorically stated that they do not treat people who are not
patients of that hospital chain. This is a violation of Federal law, State law
and local law which says, in emergencies, every hospital with an emergency room
has to take care of anyone who has an emergency. It was partly because of that
hospital chain that laws at federal level, state level and local level were
enacted especially because it had been doing it for a long time. So they
couldn't transfer us to anywhere else because no other hospital would accept it
based on these laws. Finally, they said you go back to Boston and get it fixed
there. So, with wrists bleeding and badly bruised, she was asked to go to
Boston and the emergency surgery was done 10 days later and because of that
she'll have lifetime of health problems.
Nibir Ghosh: When I read about it in the
News item I mentioned, I was surprised that such a situation was possible in a
country like the US.
Amar Gupta: The situation is reverse.
While it happens in the United States, it does not happen in any other country.
I've talked to people from many countries of the world. They said, “if a person
didn't have insurance or could not afford the treatment, yes we may send people
back. But in a case like yours, we would never send a patient back.” It's
absolutely never done. A friend of mine who was a professor at Stanford had a
similar unexpected fall in Switzerland. Within 15 minutes, he was in the
operation theater and they told him if it's not done immediately, he would have
lifetime problems. Everything was immediately taken care of. What happened with
us can happen in the United States only. This is very unfortunate.
Nibir Ghosh: Did you raise this issue of
gross neglect with any agency in authority? If so, what was the outcome?
Amar Gupta: I complained to the Federal government,
the State government and the local government and it's a total mockery the way
these complaints were examined. This is the reason why some hospital systems
think that they are above the law and can do whatever they feel like. One of
the agencies basically wrote back that they have closed the case.
Nibir Ghosh: Did they mention any reason?
Amar Gupta: When I had complained to the
hospital about the unprofessional treatment, they said that if I was not
satisfied I can file a lawsuit in a small court. Their reply was satisfactory
in the eyes of the concerned government agency. (Small courts in the US can
make awards of very small amounts only and will accept cases for only a very
limited period after the concerned incident.)
Nibir Ghosh:
In the enviable list of your
stellar contributions, the term “24-Hour
Knowledge Factory” appears quite frequently. Also, you have been recipient of
awards from IBM for your initiative in this field. Kindly elaborate the concept
highlighting your work and the impact you have been able to make in this
direction.
Amar Gupta:
Yes, 24 Hour Knowledge Factory is a term that I coined. The idea being people
in America work from 9 am to 5 pm. At the end of the world they transfer the
work to somebody in Australia or China. A person works there from 9 am to 5 pm
(local time) and then the work is transferred to somebody in Romania or Poland.
So everybody's working from 9 am to 5 pm in their respective countries but you
feel as if a magic fairy is working behind the scene. When you come in for work
the next day, substantial work has been done. So this is what I coined as a
term in 2003. This notion of distributed work over 24 hour period has become
more popular over time, especially during the COVID pandemic. It has been used
for blue collar jobs as well as white collar jobs and it's growing. Some people
are using two shifts, some are using three shifts, some are using more than
three shifts. This is what is becoming the new norm. This is the innovation for
which IBM awarded me the distinguished Faculty award, two years in a row.
Nibir Ghosh: Congratulations. It is
something to be proud of.
Amar Gupta: Yes. You can test the effect
of it yourself. If you call an airline today you get connected to the
reservation staff in a country where it is daytime at the time of your call. If
you call at night, it is handled by a person on the other side of the globe.
Nibir Ghosh:
What generated your interest in “Teach the Trainer (TTT)” approach towards
dissemination of knowledge and experience?
Amar Gupta: I've served as an adviser to
the United Nations, the World Bank and the World Health Organization. Each of
them has been a learning experience for me. Brazil appointed me to be an
adviser on their national education program. I served as the adviser for
computers to be acquired for every school in the vast country including primary
schools. It was a very ambitious program and was on the top 10 list of the
President of the country. One of the constraints was the shortage of people who
were trained to teach these skills to students.
I helped in writing the strategy how to get
Internet for the country and to leverage the internet to do educational
activities at different times of the day using the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory
concept. I proposed that we will train the first set of people who in turn will
train the next set of people, who in turn will do the third set of people and
so on. If we teach 100 people in the first iteration and each of them teaches
100 people over the next 2 months, then we'll have more than 10,000 trained persons.
They accepted my idea and that is what was used to train the vast majority of
people needed for this work. I coined the term “Teach The Trainer” and people
asked me if this approach could be used for teaching telemedicine concepts.
Nibir Ghosh:
AI is vested with both utopian and dystopian features. It has been reported
that a South Korean man was crushed to death by an indus-trial robot after it failed to differentiate between him and a
box of vegetables. Likewise, a 22-year-old worker at a German
Volkswagen factory was killed by
a robot in 2015. What is your take on such dystopian events that reminds one of
Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein?
Amar Gupta: I think we need to have a
nodal global agency, or agencies, who would come up with standards for safety
and quality with AI. It cannot be done on a piecemeal basis. Ideally, it should
have been some international organi-zation like the United Nations or one of
its agencies. I actually thought of this problem way back and was co-organizer
of a major conference to think and brainstorm about emerging information
technology and the formulation of regulations. MIT was one of the three
organizers of this event 30 years ago and we had many attendees. It was at that
time that the agreement for the World Wide Web was signed. After that, I went
ahead and talked to concerned persons in the United Nations, the World Bank and
other agencies of the United Nations. I visited the concerned organizations in
New York, in Washington D.C., in Geneva and in Vienna, all at my own cost in
order to get this done. It was the first and only time that an individual was
championing for starting a new agency to do this work. One UN agency agreed to
lead the effort but, unfortunately, I couldn't get enough support from a
national government and I couldn't get support from an educational institution.
It was supposed to involve one national government and one educational institution
as being the lead on it but it didn't take place. But now, this void is being
recognized and things like this are getting some attention.
Nibir Ghosh: Where exactly and in what
way?
Amar Gupta: India is interacting with
International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to do something like that. It is a
great challenge and it needs to be done by somebody. Ideally it should be an
international organization. Instead, different countries and different
companies are attempting to find solutions by formu-lating new regulations and
policies for artificial intelligence on a piecemeal basis. I've talked to
people at WWW that was then actually located in the building in which I am
now. I've talked to other people but
there is no willingness, there's no motivation, there's all this thing that we
don't want to share any information. Strangely enough, we want to see the other
people's information but we don't want to share ours. I have stated in a paper
written for Sloan Management Review that the more powerful the company,
the more powerful the country and you're more likely to indulge in this
one-sided affair where you want the other person to share information with you
and not vice-versa and that's essentially what we are seeing at this point. So
unless somebody comes up and changes it, it's just going to get solved by
crisis and in no other way. That's the direction in which we are going at this
point.
Nibir Ghosh: Do your
pressing academic and research engagements leave you with any leisure time
activities or hobbies that you would like to mention?
Amar Gupta: I have no typical hobby. My
hobbies are helping other people getting their venture off the ground and
helping them develop it further as part of the overall effort to make
improvements in healthcare, finance, and other key sectors across the globe. In
this context, I had coined the phrase: Healthcare for All: Better, Quicker, and
Cheaper.
Nibir Ghosh: If you're devoting your time
working for the betterment of others, there cannot be any greater hobby.
Amar Gupta: That's nice to hear.
Nibir Ghosh: In what ways can geographically distributed
teams outperform, as you say, collocated teams with proper technology and
business processes?
Amar Gupta: Geographically distributed
teams can outperform collocated teams in several ways. One is the example of
Boeing Dreamliner. Boeing, with key operations in Seattle, adopted a
distributed model for designing and developing the Dreamliner at different locations,
in different countries, around the world. In this way, you can get good
technology, good people, and you can get the work done at cheaper prices. But
you have to be really careful because people with different tasks and at
different locations don't speak to each other as much and, therefore, they can
make assumptions which the other persons are not aware of. So the communication
becomes very important in distributed teams. I insist that the people meet
face-to-face at least once or twice a year; that's very important and if you
follow these guidelines then they can actually outperform collocated teams
because the work in the distributed scenario is being performed around the
clock. So, if there's any bug which is there then this team can solve it in
much shorter time from the time it was detected as compared to conventional
teams. That's one advantage of it and there is fair amount of information that
I've published on it and on 24 Hour Knowledge Factory. If you do a search on
the web you will come across many examples of the work which I've done in
different areas, including papers in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine
and the Journal of Strategic Information Systems.
Nibir Ghosh: These days it is quite
common to see young Engineering graduates from India making a beeline for US
universities for their MS. Equipped with a US degree, most of them do not wish
to return to India. What is your message to such aspirants?
Amar Gupta: Well, I would say several
things are there. One is that in the ‘60s and '70s, there was really nothing
that you could easily do in India in this area: the infrastructure was weak
with few computers. That was one reason why people had to come abroad but the
situation has changed entirely. Today, you have all the equipment available,
you have lot of manpower available and it's much cheaper to do the work there.
Whereas in US, today it's gone the other way around. In Silicon Valley, when
you take an idea to the venture capitalist and you say you're going to do that
work in the Valley, they veto it immediately. They say, “no, the work should
have been done in India. You don't even realize that cost should be contained
with all startups and the better thing would be to develop it further there.”
So they are all relying entirely or heavily on India for these kinds of
activities. The issue is how to capitalize the situation on the Indian
side.
When you see a new thing is coming up, instead of
it carrying a Western brand name, you need to ask: when it is being developed
in India, can it have a different name? Can it be marketed in a different way?
That will make a lot of difference. Second, an increasing number of people,
including me, who feel that there were some things better when we came to the
US but as we grow older, health system for example is far superior in India.
The ‘Patient dumping episode’ that we went through in the US was unlikely to
have happened in India. When my mother-in-law and my father-in-law were sick in
India and were bedridden, they had two people around the clock to help them and
they were connected to the hospital through electronic means. Here, in the US,
the concept of hospital-at-home is considered to be a new innovation; people
are getting millions of dollars of research grants to move this concept
further. For the same healthcare situation, the costs are much lower in India.
This is a reason why people will be motivated to go back to India, whether they
go back just for retirement or earlier. I'm seeing both kinds of things happen
at this point in time. Third, there are things that can be done in India which
would be more difficult to do it abroad, such as in the case of digital health
and telemedicine. Those are some of the opportunities which I see for India at
this point.
What people should tell these youngsters is what I
tell all my students: If you want to go back, just go back immediately after
your studies. Don't stay over for one or two years for some job. If you take
the one or two years to gain experience, you are increasingly likely to get
stuck on. There are a lot of oppor-tunities there in India. Make use of it. It
will be good for you in the long term.
Nibir Ghosh: I am sure your inspiring
initiatives in transforming adverse situations into opportunities for millions
of people worldwide will motivate quite a few Indian youngsters to discover
pathways and avenues not only for their betterment but for the progress of
humanity in general. Thank you so much for sparing your valuable time to share
your experiences spread over nearly half-a-century.
Amar Gupta: Thanks, Nibir. It was a
pleasure talking to you.
·
Dr. Nibir K. Ghosh is UGC Emeritus Professor,
Agra College, Agra & Senior Fulbright Fellow 2003-04, University of
Washington, Seattle, USA. Author/Editor of 16 books and 180 articles, essays
and reviews, he has interviewed over 40 celebrity writers, academics,
journalists, from various parts of the globe. These interviews constitute two
collections titled Multicultural America: Conversations with Contemporary
Authors (2005) and Republic of Words: Conversations with Creative Minds
from Around the Globe (2021).
v
Published in Re-Markings Vol.23 No.1 March 2024. pp.15-30
Copyright Nibir K. Ghosh 2024
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