Opening Note
The latest joke in Silicon Valley is that one only needs to survive until 2030. So what will happen after that? Researchers believe the advancement in genetic engineering will soon ensure that disease will cease to be the reason for human death.
A lot has changed since 2012 when Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier first proposed that CRISPR-Cas9 can serve as “DNA scissors” for programmable editing of genomes and fix disease-causing mutations, including cancer. Recent research at the Czech Academy of Sciences has revealed that chickens whose genes were altered using the tool became immune to high doses of avian leukosis virus, a common poultry problem around the world.
In another development, scientists in the USA have used stem cells of a frog to build first living robot or Xenobots that can move and pick up the load. This may help the doctors deliver medicine to a specific place inside a patient, scrape out plaque from arteries, or even implant bio-degradable bridge to repair large nerve defects or help in the editing of rouge genes.
Japan, on the other hand, has been working on the concept of Society 5.0 to overcome its social challenges like the decrease in the productive-age population, aging of local communities, energy, and environmental issues. This envisages convergence of cyber and the physical world to create a human-centered society, enabling the country to analyze interactions between billions of intelligent agents facilitating everyday work at an individual level, to solve intricate socio-economic challenges on the fly.
Going ahead, self-driving vehicles would be negotiating routes and flow of other vehicles, drones would be navigating complex terrain for search-and-rescue operations and Xenobots may be performing microsurgeries. This will require not just super-high-speed connectivity, but also near-zero latency as they will generate data, process and use it, all at the same time to predict and react to changes and events in “now time”.
To perform these and similar tasks, machines will require precision AI-level collaboration. Razvan-Andrei Stoica and Giuseppe Abreu, researchers from Jacobs University Bremen in Germany point out that such use cases will drive the 6G rollout by the end of this decade. According to Marcus Weldon of Nokia Bell Labs, “6G will provide the essential sixth sense for humans and machines, where biology will meet the AI.”
Why am I talking 6G when India is yet to deploy 5G? Because the country is not even thinking about it while China has already started research and development on 6G and Japan is planning to launch the service in 2030.
Also, because Voice&Data is celebrating its 25th Anniversary and as we bring to you this special edition with insight from who-is-who of the India telecom industry, we are also able to reflect upon the missed opportunities and lacunae, and point out that time is right for the sector and policymakers to get to the drawing board and draft the digital infrastructure roadmap essential to make India a developed nation by 2047.