ICT INDUSTRY IS GROWING FAST WITH THE BOON OF EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
Bangladesh has been riding the growth waves in the last
three decades with spectacular results: our exports grew
six-folds, our GDP quadrupled and our extreme poverty
levels got slashed by more than half, not to mention our 30
percent increase in longevity and other human development
achievements. Many global institutions from Gartner and
McKinsey to Wall Street investment banks and the World Bank
have been projecting continued healthy growth of our economy
and our sure-shot place among the top economic powerhouses
of this century despite the setbacks of the Coronavirus pandemic
stalling growth on a global scale.
Sustaining such a growth trajectory for a country with little
natural resources, a small geographical footprint, and the
sixth-highest population in the world has only been possible
through prudent and pragmatic policies of the government,
visionary entrepreneurs, and resilient workforce. The ‘Digital
Bangladesh’ thrust of the current government since 2009 has
seen the ICT adoptions in government, and industry soar,
software and IT services exports rise by eight folds, and internet
penetration jump 20 times in less than 12 years. This is especially
significant because sustaining the nation’s growth can only be
possible through the adoption of a diverse array of the latest
technologies that will help us eke out an ever-greater output per
capita and per square meter. Technology has always been a driver of change and development in all layers of society.
As we celebrate more than three decades of Bangladesh
Computer Samity (BCS) – the information technology industry
association of Bangladesh – we are delighted to see
manufacturing and assembly of digital devices; design and
development of enterprise and utility software applications; and
proliferation of IT services in all emerging tech, from artificial
intelligence and blockchain to data science and virtual reality; and
these are happening in ever greater crescendo all around us.
Below is a sample of the emerging technologies that lie at the
front and center of our innovation-driven future. These are the
tech that can carve out a future for us where we are the pioneers
and not followers, where we lead by example and are not forced
to make knee-jerk reactions. The range of technologies and
knowledge paradigms will touch everything from our green
pastures in the villages to the tall glass edifices in the cities –
everyone from the bottom of the social pyramid to those at the
top of the heap.
In agriculture, agro-processing, and food industries,
biotechnology and bioinformatics can unleash the bounty of
nature like never before. Whether through genomics, genetic
engineering, DNA sequencing, or high-throughput image
analysis, biotechnology and its interdisciplinary cohort – bio-informatics, are bringing about a revolutionary change in the
way we hybridize seeds for resilience to drought, increasing sea
levels leading to salty crop-fields and extreme weather
symptoms. Bio-informatics has a special significance as it helps
unravel the mysteries of cellular biology and gives us the tools to
get a leg up on the cutting-edge developments in biotechnology. In manufacturing industries increasing levels of process
automation and use of robotics is enhancing productivity on the
one hand and lowering the use of physical labor. While
double-digit growth of goods exports and accompanying
manufacturing jobs growth have been one of the pillars of the
economic success of the nation but going forward the success of
this sector will no longer depend on our large labor pool but how
we turn that labor force into a cyborg-like greater-than-human
force by leveraging robotic technologies and machine learning
algorithms. The challenge is to retool our workforce into skilled
machine-assisted industrial super-human workers or skilled
robotic operators.
This may sound like science fiction but it's
already happening in our largest industrial segment, i.e., in
ready-made-garments manufacturing as reported in the Wall
Street Journal nearly two years ago. This transformation is less than obvious in a country where labor is perceived to be plentiful
and cheap. However, an uptick in labor costs is already felt by the
middle class as costs of domestic help have crept up beyond their
purchasing power. With the increasing use of machine-assisted
process automation and robotic tools, there is a huge potential
for IT services around machine learning, artificial intelligence,
internet-of-things (IOT), and robotics programming. Machine and deep learning tools are the new frontiers where we
must create our own footprint if we are to remain relevant in the
new industrial paradigm. It is truly heartening that some of our IT
industry colleagues are taking bold steps to gain a foothold at the
forefront of these developments. However, the entrepreneurial
efforts alone will not be enough – there needs to be a concerted
effort from the trio of government-academia and industry for this
emerging technology to become mainstream here. There are
several such collaborations already underway for digital device
manufacturing, blockchain technology adoption, and IOT
development. The biggest disruptor and enabler in the field of artificial
intelligence and machine learning is the new paradigm of
quantum computing. The classical computing model is based on
binary computing where there are only two states – on or off – 1
or 0 – but in quantum computing, there is a third ‘quantum’ state
or ‘Qubit’ that makes a whole slew of new algorithms and
computing models that can solve compute-intensive problems in
cryptography, big data, 3-D simulations, etc. much faster than
conventional computer systems. Microsoft has already launched a
programming language for quantum computing and many others
are coming. Our universities need to focus on these emerging
trends and equip our students with the tools and inquisitiveness
to take deep dives into this new computing paradigm and
collaborate with the industry to make quantum computing
applications to solve our climate adaptation, extreme weather,
and public health quandaries. The government needs to support
such initiatives with appropriate funding, international research
linkages, and national recognitions.
The biggest enabler of these emerging technologies and trends is
the internet and cloud-based infrastructure sitting on the internet.
While the government is fast deploying its own data centers and
disaster recovery sites that constitute its cloud strategy, the
government also needs to encourage private clouds whether they
are locally set up or provided by global majors such as Amazon or
Microsoft. We simply do not have the resources or the time to
wait for computing infrastructures to be built over many years
and then leverage such systems for our use. The abundance of
cloud infrastructure globally makes it quite easy for us to take on
any large problems and try it out on the cloud without having to
get weighed down with big capital expenditures before we have
figured out what works and what does not. In this area, the
availability of cloud infrastructures is a great boon for IT
entrepreneurs and start-ups as well as tinkerers. Who can tell:
today’s tinkerer can be tomorrow’s Steve Jobs or Elon Musk.
0 Comments