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A nomad interested in twisting the kaleidoscope of science and looking for new patterns
With age creeping in, morning spent on the tennis court is slowly shifting from playing to observing humans at play, and as human play many a game simultaneously, it is very often more rewarding to do human-watching.
The top contender for the day today was a young boy (who if I am not scared of annoying the gender-fluidity brigade, is a future Casanova as he knows a truth that most grownup men do not, i.e., you need to talk to a woman) who was interesting in everything else but coaching and was lucky to have a sixish girl playing alongside, who was frustrated because her shots were not timing well. Not that our ladies’ man was doing any better, but he decided to offer her a piece of his own private “truth”, i.e., “Eat a banana in the morning. Power ayega.”
This causal statement made me notice a strange quality of truth and how it will impact the future of artificial intelligence that is now overwhelming us.
If we trace back the history of banana “truth”; it is clear that the boy has learnt it from someone. He has not done any double-blind study and concluded it, but he has acquired it as a legacy of being human. But what he does with it next is amazing. He links this “truth” with an incredibly complex phenomenon of a specific girl not timing a tennis ball.
While there could be a zillion reasons for our heroine not timing a tennis ball (starting from peer pressure of a tennis-mom watching her every move all the way up to a flap of a butterfly wing in a garden on a planet in a distant galaxy in our chaotic universe), the human intelligence residing in the boy had the audacity to make a leap of faith and establish a cause-and-effect relationship between banana-eating and a-specific-girl-not-timing-a-
No amount of data-crunching or algorithm making can give the output that the information processor residing in the young (probably hormone-filled) cranium.
If we return to Artificial Intelligence armed with this wisdom, it is easy to see that AI has a long journey to travel and there is a great possibility that just like our journey, it will also not be going anywhere.
The AI that is around us is a bit like the young boy inheriting “truths” and building relationships on them. Most of AI is “trained” on data that we give it (or it acquires through instruments similar to our senses) and it makes effort to connect the dots there-in using different mathematical models. Just as the boy’s leap of faith in not entirely baseless (as banana does give energy and even vitamins that can provide strength and neurological control to time a tennis ball better), the connections that AI draws are also not baseless, but the problem is, be it the information processor of the boy or the machine, the reality out there is highly unfriendly on two counts.
To start with, we seem to have a wicked universe far too deeply interwoven for building certain cause-and-effect relationships making more powerful computing power of AI just a better boy-on-the-tennis-court, but worse is the next wickeder quality, i.e., if you keep “deploying” cause-and-effect relationship, the universe is not going to “like” it and the way it typically responds to it is by altering these relationships.
In simple terms, if everyone starts eating bananas, everyone will be powerful and then there will be “better” timing of ball for the previous frame of reality, but the same timing will be “bad” timing in the new relative frame.
So, an AI armed with humongous amount of memory, reality-data and computing power will get nowhere other than where we are, and that is developing a realization that we may be running faster, but all that it leads to is the reality-treadmill getting faster keeping us in the same place.
Though it is a bleak picture for an intelligent man or machine, there is a silver lining that the boy has already offered.
The boy cared two hoots about being right. He made a conversation. He improved his chances of knowing the girl. And that clearly made him happy.
The boy’s brain offers a lesson to all of us worried sick about AI.
We are biology. Unlike AI, our intelligence has a “higher” or transcending purpose than being “right” or “more right”. We are here to live and replicate (apologies, but Freud was right) and nature has ensured that we get the reward called “happiness” if we follow Her scheme of things.
Intelligence is a gift and an amplifier if used correctly. Use it to be happy and deploy it to be happier. AI is just a poor copy of our intelligence sans the happiness-reward chemistry. Even if it grows, if it is really smart, it too will head towards being happy or fall in the chasm of existential angst that our reality offers at every moment.
We are the boys and girls, and we are already far ahead than AI in being what counts, i.e., being happy.
Let us cherish our advantage. AI has no choice but to try and be where we are.
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Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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