News India Times

www.newsindiatimes.com – that’s all you need to know Dr. Sudhir M. Parikh Founder, Chairman & Publisher Ilayas Quraishi Chief Operating Officer Ela Dutt Editor Archana Adalja Contributing Editor T. Vishnudatta Jayaraman Advisor Arun Shah Ahmedabad Bureau Chief Peter Ferreira, Deval Parikh, Freelance Photographers Bhailal M. Patel Executive Vice President Jim Gallentine Business Development Manager - U.S. Shahnaz Sheikh Senior Manager Advertising & Marketing Sonia Lalwani Advertising Manager Shailu Desai Advertising New York Muslima Shethwala Syed Sheeraz Mahmood Advertising Chicago Digant Sompura Consultant for Business Development Ahmedabad, India Hervender Singh Circulation Manager Main Office Editorial & Corporate Headquarters 1655 Oak Tree Toad, Suite 155 Edison, NJ 08820-2843 Tel. (212) 675-7515 Fax. (212) 675-7624 New York Office Tel: (718) 784-8555 E-mails editor@newsindiatimes.com advertising@newsindia-times.com subscription@newsindia-times.com Website www.newsindiatimes.com Chicago Office 8846 Lavergne Ave, Skokie, IL 60077 Tel. (773) 856-3345 California Office 650 Vermont Ave, Suite #46 Anaheim, CA 92805 Mumbai Office Nikita Ajay Pai Goregaon, West Mumbai Ahmedabad Office 303 Kashiparekh Complex C.G. Road, 29 Adarsh Society Ahmedabad 380009 Tel. 26446947 F ax. 26565596 Published weekly, Founded in 1975. The views expressed on the opinion pages are those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect those of News India Times. Copyright © 2026, News India Times News India Times (ISSN 0199-901X) is published every Friday by Parikh Worldwide Media LLC., 1655 Oak Tree Toad, Suite 155 Edison, NJ 08820-2843 Periodicals postage paid at Newark, N.J. , and at additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address change to News India Times, 1655 Oak Tree Toad, Suite 155 Edison, NJ 08820-2843 Annual Subscription: United States: $28 Disclaimer: Parikh Worldwide Media assumes no liability for claims/ assumptions made in advertisements and advertorials. Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed on this page are those of the authors and Parikh Worldwide Media does not officially endorse, and is not responsible or liable for them. Opinion News India Times (January 3, 2025 - January 9, 2025) January 9, 2025 3 What The Future Could Look Like, Driven By Technology When systems are built for hundreds of millions of people, efficiency becomes mandatory, inclusion critical, and cost discipline the engine of innovation. S tep back and look at the past five years and it becomes clear that humanity has advanced faster than it did over 50 years in earlier eras. Technologies that once belonged to science fiction slipped quietly into everyday life. Behaviours that once seemed radical became routine. ystems that used to take decades to change were rewritten almost overnight. Technology has crossed a fundamental Rubicon. It is no longer something we consciously “use”. It is embedded in nearly everything we do, at work, at play, even while we exercise. Like electricity a century ago, it now powers daily life and quietly reshapes how we live. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the clearest example. A decade ago, AI was something venture capitalists dismissed. Five years ago, it was still treated as futuristic. Today, it is everywhere. You no longer turn AI “on”, it simply exists in the background, ampli- fying human capability and human error at the same time. That is the nature of exponential change: We are like frogs in the water while the temperature is rising. While AI captured most of the attention, biology crossed its own threshold. For most of human history, medicine was descriptive and slow. We observed symptoms, tried treatments, and waited. That era is ending. Protein folding, once a genera- tional bottleneck, became computational. Gene editing moved from theory to lifesaving reality, with CRISPR therapies curing diseases once thought incurable. Living systems are beginning to resemble programmable code — editable, testable, improvable. At the same time, humanity lifted its gaze back to the stars. Reusable rockets now land themselves, and spacecraft are being designed to carry humans to Mars. Launches that once stopped the world now pass almost unnoticed. Above us, thousands of satellites are stitching the planet together with Internet access, reaching even the most remote villages, and will soon blanket Mars. Covid-19 was an accelerator. The pandemic compressed a decade of adoption of remote work, telemedicine, and online education into a single year. Video calls became as common as phone calls. “Working from anywhere” became the norm world- wide, and talent became global. Beneath these visible shifts, a quieter hardware revolution unfolded. Sensors, many of them already in our smartphones, became cheap, small, and extraor- dinarily capable. Advances in optics, spectroscopy, and imag- ing made it possible to continuously measure our bodies, our environment, and our infrastructure. With cameras everywhere, human existence became data. India’s recent achievements — a lunar landing, a digital pay- ments revolution, and a startup boom— are often treated as iso- lated successes. Taken together, they tell a more powerful story. India has shown that disruptive technologies do not require western labs or western cost structures, and that population scale, combined with data, can be a decisive advantage. When systems are built for hundreds of millions of people, efficiency becomes mandatory, inclusion critical, and cost discipline the engine of innovation. This matters to humanity because the next five years will strain every society’s ability to adapt. As AI embeds itself into every system that gathers and interprets data, it will fade into the background, much like electricity. The world will depend on it quietly and notice it only when it fails. Health care will change first. Medicine today is episodic: You feel sick, see a doctor, get tests, and wait. That model made sense when diagnostics were expensive and expertise scarce. Soon, AI systems will handle first-line triage and treatment recommenda- tions, supporting clinicians and directly helping people where doctors are unavailable. This is the only scalable way to deliver health care to billions. India already manufactures much of the world’s medicines and runs large parts of the global digital backbone. It is uniquely positioned to export a new model of health care, one that blends modern diagnostics with traditional systems like Ayurveda and shifts care from reactive treatment to prevention, accessibility, and balance. Because I understand exponential change and the country’s unique advantages, I am helping build this future through my work at Vionix Biosciences in India. We are developing diagnostic technologies designed for scale, leveraging India’s talent, data, and cost discipline. Our goal is to provide the poorest person in a village more comprehensive medical diagnostics than a wealthy patient in theWest receives today, at less than the cost of a meal, supported by AI systems that deliver high-quality guidance at scale. Much more is coming over the rest of this decade. Robots are learning to do the work of humans, first in factories, warehouses, construction sites, and roadwork, and eventually in homes. They will take on routine domestic tasks and assist the elderly, people with disabilities, and patients in hospitals. What begins as auto- mation will become everyday support. Brain–computer interfaces and bionic limbs are still in their infancy, but will mature into practical tools that restore function and redefine disability. Even energy, civilisation’s oldest con- straint, is advancing exponentially. The costs of clean power and storage are dropping rapidly while capabilities continue to im- prove, pushing us toward an era of abundant, affordable energy with consequences as incredible as electrification itself. We are heading into a future that is both amazing and scary because these technologies can be used for good or for evil. We face a real choice between building the utopian future of Star Trek or the darkness of Mad Max. The choice before us is to shape these technologies not just to create wealth for a few, but to solve the problems of the many. Vivek Wadhwa is CEO, Vionix Biosciences. ByVivekWadhwa Photo:ACommons.Wikimedia.org Image generated by DALL-E 3, symbolizing advanced artificial intelligence. Public Domain. Author: Alenoach. @Commons.Wikimedia.org PHOTO:CourtesyVivekWadhwa