, tech entrepreneur, writer and a distinguished fellow at Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering, has come out with a new book, The Driver in the Driverless Car, co-written with Alex Salkever. It looks at how technology is going to change our world in under a decade, impacting healthcare, education and transportation. Away from his passive home in San Francisco, which doesn’t draw electricity from the grid, and his Tesla Model S electric vehicle, he comes to the interview in New Delhi in an Ola cab, weathering 11 am traffic and a thick blanket of dark smog. He believes technology is the silver bullet, provided we know how to use it. In an interview with, Wadhwa says whether we are hurtling towards a Star Trek future or a Mad Max dystopia will depend on how prepared are our institutions and policymakers to deal with the massive convulsions tech will create in society, especially unemployment, which will call for large-scale retraining of workforce. Edited excerpts from an interview and a follow-up email interaction:Look at Delhi: the smog shows the city’s descent into darkness. But the good news is that with technology advancing the way it is, we have reached an inflection point where it will save the day. Within five years, solar power will be 50% or even 60% cheaper than the grid. It will make economic sense for people to upgrade. And this is when the magic begins to happen. Electric cars will be a godsend for Delhi when the cost of battery storage drops to $100 per kWh and if the cost of a car that can go up to 200 km/h falls to $10,000. These will be eminently affordable in five years so much so that it will be more expensive maintaining the petroleum cars. If you have cheap energy, then you can think of vertical farming (where you grow crops in buildings, warehouses and containers without soil or natural light). You can have entire buildings where you can grow crops. You don’t have to transport foods. You can grow and consume locally. In five or ten years, this will be economical. The big concern is employment because this will result in millions of unemployed farmers. But they have to be retrained.The minister is misguided. Yes, there are millions of jobs at stake. But there are half a million deaths due to road accidents every year. Millions of people will die early because of pollution. Do you want to sacrifice half a million people? Life has become unbearable for everyone. We need a vision to re-employ people. We should not stop progress. We should channel it in a more meaningful way.Within three or four years, the economics will change. And the Indian government will have to take tough decisions. What is needed is good leadership and good governance. Go for electric cars and self-driving cars. Clean up the environment using technology. Retrain the workforce. Put them in the department of new infrastructure to rebuild our cities and clean up our rivers. It all starts with learning technology.What’s exciting is that finally solutions are at hand for problems of energy, traffic, pollution, education. One of the fears is that India is going to run out of water. However, what does it take to have 100% clean water? Boil it and capture condensation and you have distilled water. The problem with that has been the cost of energy. If it drops by half, suddenly it becomes economical too. Boil the oceans — this will happen within five-six years. In India, there are 200 million children who will not get any form of acceptable education because teachers don’t even show up in school. In three years, the entire Indian population will have smartphones. We will have headsets that will take us into holographic worlds. Virtual reality headsets will be as affordable as smartphones are today. Which means we can build new education systems that educate people differently. Imagine learning mathematics by building the Great Pyramids of Egypt. These are all possible within the next five, not 50, years because the cost of all core technology is going to drop.That will be iPhone 18 or 20. That will be the technology for high-end phones. But in another two-or three years, others will also have the same technology.Technology creates equalities and inequalities at the same time. What worries me is that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening and our policymakers are going dumber. The message of The Driver in the Driverless Car is that we must make sure everyone benefits from technology. The second is we have to assess whether the rewards are greater than the risks. Here’s where it gets very difficult. Gene editing, for instance. That technology will come to India before it comes to other countries because people here would want to have fair children or pink boys over girls. The risks of this technology are greater than the rewards in the short term. Then there’s the question of autonomy versus dependence. It is not much of an issue in India because it is better to be dependent on driverless cars than on these horrible roads. The trade-offs will be different for every case — and with every technology we will have to be vigilant and make those choices.Because technology can be used for both good and evil. There is a dark lining to every cloud. We need to be careful to use technology to uplift humanity rather than hold it back.I heard Finance Minister Arun Jaitley at a conference and I was blown away by his vision of technology. Here was an Indian minister articulating his vision about technology more intelligently than any government official in Washington, DC. The government has good advisors but can it do something? People will have to make it happen. This country’s entrepreneurs are a cut above the rest of the world. A company I am associated with is HealthCube (which provides a host of diagnostic solutions in a box and is particularly useful for last-mile delivery); its units are going to Mexico, to Bangladesh where it is used for Rohingya refugees, to Angola and Peru. Within a couple of years, the goal is to have 100 million people outside India using this technology. This is a made-in-India technology. In India, despite all of the problems, there are countervailing forces and entrepreneurs are solving problems that no one else can.In the next 20 years or so, if we do it right, we can build Star Trek. These 20 years will be amazing and scary at the same time.I have been following Aadhaar since its inception. Aadhaar is badly needed. But you also need checks and balances. The security risks are high. Those need to be and can be fixed. Aadhaar is the most successful IT project in world history. Indians are very negative about everything Indian, so it is easy to attack Aadhaar. Indians need to understand that what they have is monumental. Now a billion people have identity. And with it became possible UPI (Unified Payments Interface) and India-Stack (a set of APIs that allows governments, businesses, startups and developers to utilise Aadhaar-based digital infrastructure for paperless and cashless service delivery), which are equally monumental. In Silicon Valley, where I live, there is an obsession with bitcoin and blockchain. Bitcoin is fraud: it might double or triple in price but it is going to implode, it is going to be worth zero. But they are obsessed with blockchain: they are trying to build a digital currency that requires a massive infrastructure. Meanwhile, India, which is famous for jugaad, says, look, to get digital currency, all you have to do is transfer money from your bank account to my bank account. Why do you need to have this blockchain infrastructure and mining? If everyone has a bank account, an identification number and a mobile number, all you have to do is send a message from one mobile to another to transfer the money. It happens instantaneously.That needs to be worried about. As with every technology, it can be used for evil. I worry about the risks of hacking and have concerns over privacy. India must develop strong regulations to control the use of data and to ensure the safety and privacy of its citizens. All of the applications that are built on top of Aadhaar and the data that is gathered must be secure and citizens must be able to control how their data is used. There are technology solutions to all this.This device (pointing to an iPhone) is the most powerful spying device ever made. It follows you everywhere you go. Apple, Facebook, Google — these tech companies have gained so much information and so much power that they can rig elections. Who are you more worried about: companies that are selling you and lying to you at the same time, or governments that are trying to operate for its population? This is why I am less worried about Aadhaar than I am about Facebook. Facebook is a bigger threat to privacy than is Aadhaar. Both need to have very tight security. Mark Zuckerberg tried to pull a fast one in India with his Free Basics. Thank god, the government stopped it. People who are using smartphones for the first time would have believed that Facebook and everything Facebook teaches is internet. Look at what happened in America: Facebook facilitated Russians hacking the US elections and it made a lot money out of it. Imagine if they are taking control of Indian elections.Exactly, which is why India needs to control the Facebooks and the Amazons and even the Ubers. India was stupid enough to let the British in. The East India Company was able to trick Indians. The same thing is happening all over again. We are welcoming these companies with open arms. East India Company is now Silicon Valley. You have seen the damage Silicon Valley can do. It lacks ethics, morals and is obsessed with making money.India should put restrictions as regulations on Facebook, Google and others. Put up barriers. Regulate the heck out of Amazon. Have a policy to support local startups. India has to build its own ecosystem. It has the technology and the skill to do that. It doesn’t need Western companies. It has to learn from China, which walled off the Western companies and built their own. It will be good for the ecosystem. Earlier these companies had intellectual property. Now Indians are building innovations in Silicon Valley. Let them come home and bring the best ideas with them. It may sound anti-competitive. But that is what China has done and look at how far they have come.Facebook is not democracy. It is restricting democracy. It is rigging elections. It is limiting choices. It is spouting fake news. My next book, by the way, is titled How Happiness Got Hacked. The theme of the book is how the technology industry is taking our choices away. That it is so obsessed with selling to us that it is making us addicted to it.Forget about disclosures, there are no rules or regulations in the tech industry. They want to get away with whatever they can get away with. This is the group think in Silicon Valley: they think they are gods over there, and everything they do is perfect. They don’t even understand the damage they are causing. Zuckerberg is genuinely deluded about what he is doing: he did not believe that he is impacting the elections. These are a bunch of kids who don’t have the experience and are building these nuclear weapons-like technologies without understanding their implications. This is why India needs to do it on its own and not depend on Silicon Valley.Tech world is as bad as the entertainment industry. Tech industry should be ashamed of itself for its sexist ways. And it is equally bad in India. The tech industry here is chauvinist, male and leaves women out.I have been critical about the industry because they were trying to catch up to yesterday — like cloud computing and SAP. There has been a lot of speculation over who should take over Infosys. I think Nandan Nilekani should take over. Out of Infosys, he built Aadhaar and guided IndiaStack. He should now do to Infosys what Steve Jobs did to Apple. He should come back and take the company to the next level. Jobs came in, knowing that he had to disrupt the old company. He was always obsoleting his own products: iPhone put iPod out of business. What Nandan needs to do is obsolete his own company and rethink it. He has the experience, skills, vision and power. He can then save not only Infosys but also Indian IT.The situation is dire. We should be teaching AI, robotics, sensors, nano-technology, gene editing. Engineering colleges were able to quickly react to the requirements for IT. What stops them now from responding to newer technologies and the magic that can be done with them?