1.Tata Sons to Invest $1 billion More in Digital Arm

Tata Sons is poised to invest about $1 billion in Tata Digital, over the next few years, people familiar with the matter said, reported the Economic Times. 

This comes as the parent of the diversified Tata Group puts a pause on external fundraising for the e-commerce entity housing the superapp, Tata Neu, amid a likely review of its digital strategy with the appointment of a new chief executive officer this week, the people said. Tata Digital will only tap external investors after the new CEO sets down to focus on on execution and scale, one of the persons said.

Earlier this week, Tata Digital appointed Naveen Tahilyani, the former managing director of Tata AIA Life Insurance, as its CEO & MD. Tahilyani replaced Pratik Pal who had been holding the charge since the company’s inception in 2019. Tata Sons has invested more than $2 billion in Neu so far and has board approvals for further capital infusion over a five-year period, the people said. 

Read more at:
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/epaper/delhicapital/2024/feb/09/et-efm/tata-sons-to-invest-1-billion-more-in-digital-arm/articleshow/107538414.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

2.India’s plan for untouched Nicobar isles will be ‘death sentence’ for isolated tribe

Academics from around the world have urged India to cancel a huge construction project on Great Nicobar Island, warning it would be “a death sentence” for the Shompen hunter-gatherer people who live there.

The $9bn (£7bn) port project, planned to transform the Indian Ocean island of 8,000 inhabitants into what has been called the “Hong Kong of India”, includes the construction of an international shipping terminal, airport, power plant, military base and industrial park. It will also develop tourism.

In an open letter to the Indian president, Droupadi Murmu, published on Wednesday, 39 scholars from from 13 countries have warned: “If the project goes ahead, even in a limited form, we believe it will be a death sentence for the Shompen, tantamount to the international crime of genocide.”

3.Warner, Fox, Disney to Launch Streaming Sports Joint Venture in USA

Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery are giving up their individual live sports battles. Instead, they’re collectively launchinG a bundle of 14 channels to stream live sports in the US. Each will own one third of the joint venture.The service will go live later this year and comprise 55% of US sports rights.

The new joint venture, currently unnamed, is seen as a way for Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery to gain back some of the lucrative affiliate fees they have lost as their cable subscribers have cut the cord and moved to streaming outlets as their primary source of video entertainment. The new venture would pay its three corporate parents for licensing rights, essentially creating a new distribution partner.

Meanwhile, at the same time, ESPN has set a timetable for the launch of a stand-alone streaming platform.The Disney-owned sports giant is targeting fall 2025 for the debut of a much-discussed streaming service that will feature most of the programming currently seen on ESPN’s flagship cable.

 Crucially, though, the above mentioned joint venture doesn’t preclude any of the three companies from starting their own sports streaming platforms. Iger said on CNBC that the stand-alone ESPN platform will have “many more features” than the joint service: “[It will] provide a much more immersive experience for the sports fan than this bundle has. This bundle is really a channel bundle that I think will be very user-friendly because it’s more app based, but the ESPN flagship … will have features like integrated betting fantasy, much more personalization and customization, probably some shopping in some form.”

4.The hidden ways sleep deprivation warps your reality, reports the Big Think

If you’re on your third cocktail, you’ll start to notice alcohol’s effects on your perception. The key here is that you’re well aware that you’ve been consuming a mind-altering substance. But what happens when the cause-and-effect process isn’t so obvious? That’s one of the questions that Jonny Thomson explores with sleep psychologist Dr. Jade Wu in this fascinating look into the hidden consequences of sleep deprivation.

5.The London Underground is testing artificial-intelligence-based surveillance tools to detect crime, fare-dodging, and dangerous situations. 

The metro rail service tested 11 algorithms at one station in northwest London between October 2022 and September 2023, monitoring live feeds and alerting staff if something seemed amiss. That could be minor rule-breaking such as carrying a bike or more worrying things like weapons, or flagging people at risk of falling onto the tracks, WIRED reported. Privacy campaigners have concerns, but the 151-year-old London Underground is surprisingly forward-thinking: It adopted contactless payment years ago, and uses phone data to predict passenger movements and smooth out services, the tech reporter James O’Malley noted.

6.Boeing’s Tragedy: The Fall of an American Icon

Boeing, once an iconic company, has faced a string of accidents and incidents recently, undermining public confidence.

In Insead Knowledge Yves L. Doz and Keeley Wilson of the business school argue that the company undertook too much transformational change too fast — more global partners, outsourcing engineering, new materials, while overly focused on costs. This stretched its capabilities and led to quality control issues. 

The 1997 McDonnell Douglas merger brought in managers focused on cost-cutting and shareholder returns over engineering. This led Boeing to adopt a risky strategy of having more risk-sharing partners design and build plane sections to reduce Boeing's costs. But it lacked skills to manage this complex global network. Besides, the Boeing board lacked focus on safety and had no oversight mechanisms. 

“In retrospect, Boeing undertook several fundamental changes, seemingly unaware of how ambitious and difficult they were. It moved from having just a few select partners around the world — mostly in Japan, where manufacturing excellence is a norm — to building a much larger network of global partners that lacked enough experience of collaboration. This alone was a major transformation. 

With its growing reliance on partners, Boeing focused on system integration and final assembly, losing some of the depth in its industrial competencies. Shifting to composite materials made this transformation even more difficult, as did the cost-saving culture it imposed on itself amid growing competition from rival Airbus. Poor governance, full order books (thanks to strong growth in air travel) and an ill-composed, uninformed board prevented the various dangers Boeing courted withfrom being perceived and assessed realistically.

But perhaps the biggest challenge the company faces is trying to overcome the quality control issues that have arisen from the complex and dispersed nature of its supply system. Only time will tell if Boeing can rescue itself from the challenges it has created.”

7.Killer drones pioneered in Ukraine are the weapons of the future, opines the Economist in their Leader this week

Precision-guided weapons first appeared in their modern form on the battlefield in Vietnam a little over 50 years ago. As armed forces have strived ever since for accuracy and destructiveness, the cost of such weapons has soared. America’s gps-guided artillery shells cost $100,000 a time. Because smart weapons are expensive, they are scarce. That is why European countries ran out of them in Libya in 2011. Israel, more eager to conserve its stockpiles than avoid collateral damage, has rained dumb bombs on Gaza. What, though, if you could combine precision and abundance?

For the first time in the history of warfare that question is being answered on the battlefields of Ukraine. Our report shows how first-person view (FPV) drones are mushrooming along the front lines. They are small, cheap, explosives-laden aircraft adapted from consumer models, and they are making a soldier’s life even more dangerous. These drones slip into tank turrets or dugouts. They loiter and pursue their quarry before going for the kill. They are inflicting a heavy toll on infantry and armour.

The war is also making fpv drones and their maritime cousins ubiquitous. January saw 3,000 verified fpv drone strikes. This week Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, created the Unmanned Systems Force, dedicated to drone warfare. In 2024 Ukraine is on track to build 1m-2m drones. Astonishingly, that will match Ukraine’s reduced consumption of shells (which is down because Republicans in Congress are shamefully denying Ukraine the supplies it needs).

The drone is not a wonder weapon—no such thing exists. It matters because it embodies big trends in war: a shift towards small, cheap and disposable weapons; the increasing use of consumer technology; and the drift towards autonomy in battle. Because of these trends, drone technology will spread rapidly from armies to militias, terrorists and criminals. And it will improve not at the budget-cycle pace of the military-industrial complex, but with the break-things urgency of consumer electronics.

Basic FPV drones are revolutionarily simple. The descendants of racing quadcopters, built from off-the-shelf components, they can cost as little as several hundred dollars. fpv drones tend to have short ranges, carry small payloads and struggle in bad weather. For those reasons they will not (yet) replace artillery. But they can still do a lot of damage. In one week last autumn Ukrainian drones helped destroy 75 Russian tanks and 101 big guns, among much else. Russia has its own fpv drones, though they tend to target dugouts, trenches and soldiers. Drones help explain why both sides find it so hard to mount offensives.

The exponential growth in the number of Russian and Ukrainian drones points to a second trend. They are inspired by and adapted from widely available consumer technology. Not only in Ukraine but also in Myanmar, where rebels have routed government forces in recent days, volunteers can use 3d printers to make key components and assemble airframes in small workshops. Unfortunately, criminal groups and terrorists are unlikely to be far behind the militias.

This reflects a broad democratisation of precision weapons. In Yemen the Houthi rebel group has used cheap Iranian guidance kits to build anti-ship missiles that are posing a deadly threat to commercial vessels in the Red Sea. Iran itself has shown how an assortment of long-range strike drones and ballistic missiles can have a geopolitical effect that far outweighs their cost. Even if the kit needed to overcome anti-drone jamming greatly raises the cost of the weapons, as some predict, they will still count as transformationally cheap.

The reason goes back to consumer electronics, which propel innovation at a blistering pace as capabilities accumulate in every product cycle. That poses problems of ethics as well as obsolescence. There will not always be time to subject novel weapons to the testing that Western countries aim for in peacetime and that is required by the Geneva Conventions.

Innovation also leads to the last trend, autonomy. Today, FPV drone use is limited by the supply of skilled pilots and by the effects of jamming, which can sever the connection between a drone and its operator. To overcome these problems, Russia and Ukraine are experimenting with autonomous navigation and target recognition. Artificial intelligence has been available in consumer drones for years and is improving rapidly.

A degree of autonomy has existed on high-end munitions for years and on cruise missiles for decades. The novelty is that cheap microchips and software will let intelligence sit inside millions of low-end munitions that are saturating the battlefield. The side that masters autonomy at scale in Ukraine first could enjoy a temporary but decisive advantage in firepower—a necessary condition for any breakthrough.

Western countries have been slow to absorb these lessons. Simple and cheap weapons will not replace big, high-end platforms, but they will complement them. The Pentagon is belatedly embarking on Replicator, an initiative to build thousands of low-cost drones and munitions able to take on China’s enormous forces. Europe is even further behind. Its ministers and generals increasingly believe that they could face another major European war by the end of the decade. If so, investment in low-end drones needs to grow urgently. Moreover, ubiquitous drones will require ubiquitous defences—not just on battlefields but also in cities at peace.

Intelligent drones will also raise questions about how armies wage war and whether humans can control the battlefield. As drones multiply, self-co-ordinating swarms will become possible. Humans will struggle to monitor and understand their engagements, let alone authorise them.

America and its allies must prepare for a world in which rapidly improving military capabilities spread more quickly and more widely. As the skies over Ukraine fill with expendable weapons that marry precision and firepower, they serve as a warning. Mass-produced hunter-killer aircraft are already reshaping the balance between humans and technology in war.