In the world of Technology, AI (Artificial Intelligence) is the new wave, a kind of holy grail for investors in the tech space. Valuations are reaching astronomical proportions, and a famous investor is talking in terms of creating a fund with a trillion dollars for investment in the area of AI.
The whole world of tech consumers is agog with great expectations and excitement as if AI is the panacea for all the ills the world is facing.
Tech bubbles are not uncommon. In the late 90s and early 2000s, the dot-com bubble came and went. It also took many promising tech geeks and investors in its wake. But there is something distinctly different in the AI wave compared to earlier waves.
The danger and challenge it is posing to humanity have prompted some to call this an ‘Oppenheimer moment’. While many seekers of millions and billions of dollars see such great potential in AI to realize their dreams, they seem to be unaware of its potential to be catastrophic to the welfare of humanity.
AI has distinct capabilities: it can write long, grammatically correct, and meaningful sentences which was absent in the earlier breakthroughs. It can create animated videos. It can also seemingly absorb the meaning of the text exposed to it and is thus capable of producing an excellent synopsis — all this at an incredibly rapid pace.
There are some powerful technologies underlying this capability. One is hardware-related. It makes use of Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), technologies that can bring enormous processing power at very high speed, allowing the AI machine to respond. The second thing is a software capability known as LLM (Large Language Models), a subset of Natural Language Processing, besides using Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). Its ability to write naturally looking English has both good and bad effects.
Even the good outputs need intelligent usage, implying you need intelligent managers to make proper use of it. This wave of AI has given birth to an ancillary segment of tech companies working on the usage of AI for real-world applications.
This seems to hold real value to businesses for their specific business purposes as the ancillary companies keep developing business applications using AI.
I know a company developing an automated testing process in the area of software development. All this development work is keeping AI as its base layer. The entertainment industry has evolved its own animation technology. All these developments have enabled not only speed of delivery but have also reduced costs drastically.
Recently, I came across a TV commercial that was produced at a fraction of its conventional cost, though unverified.
A lawyer can command an AI machine to come up with a draft trust deed, which can be promptly produced by AI. But the lawyer needs to use his resources to see how this can be vetted and adapted. He cannot use the output of the AI machine automatically. It is true that the speed of delivery of a routine job, which is basically a mechanical function, certainly adds value to a law firm.
But it doesn’t obviate the vetting process. The negative part is that it is making humans overdependent on machines. Will the future of middle-level executives be bleak, as most of the work currently done by them can be delegated to AI machines? This is certainly a moot point.
The ugly part is about the ability to fake. So many fake videos have appeared online, causing so much disinformation and misinformation.
There is a dangerous side to AI as it is posing a major challenge to the future of humanity.
Sage J Krishnamurti talked of the dangers of AI way back in the 1980s when he said, “The brain is occupied now, so it is active. And when it is not active, it is going to wither, and the machine is going to operate. So we are all going to become zombies, going to lose our extraordinary inward capacity, or become superficially intellectual.
“We do not exercise our brain and therefore it deteriorates, and how shall we prevent this? What shall I do? I must exercise my brain. Now it is being exercised through pain, through pleasure, through suffering, anxiety, all the rest of it. It is working. And when the machine takes it over, it will not be working. And if it is not working, it will deteriorate. It is a muscle. I wonder if you see the danger of this?
When the relationship is between machine and machine, what is going to happen to the quality and vitality of the brain? Will it seek some form of entertainment, religious or otherwise, or will it allow itself to explore the vast recesses of one’s being? The industry of entertainment is gathering more and more strength, and very little human energy and capacity are turned inwardly. So, if we are not aware, the entertainment world is going to conquer us.
Your knowledge, your Vedas, Upanishads, Gita — everything is gone. Because the machine can repeat them much better than you and I can ever do. It will invent theories, it will create gods, it will bring about a new kind of knowledge. It will. They are doing it now.”
The light at the end of the tunnel, according to Krishnaji, is the possibility that humans can go inwardly into themselves, become radically self-aware. It is only this inward move that has any possibility of producing order in society. But this is a moot prospect, and one is not certain that humans will go inward instead of being vulnerable to the entertainment industry.
Exposure to Krishnaji’s teachings has greatly contributed to my understanding of the functional side of life. He made a crucial distinction between ‘intellect’ and ‘intelligence’. ‘Intelligence’ operates at a totally different level compared to ‘intellect’. Intellect is purely a thought process, whereas intelligence is the human ability to be aware and to see through things.
The way of working of a computer or Artificial Intelligence is very much akin to the human thought process, which is a material process. You could define it as output based on inputs subject to a specific process.
Human intelligence, on the other hand, is not a material process bound by a certain programmatic thinking; rather, it is a natural and spontaneous movement of mind. I am told the Latin expression ‘inter-legere’, meaning reading in between the lines, is the etymological origin of intelligence: the human mind is capable of reading in between the lines, but AI can only read the lines of a given data source and not in between the lines, nor is it capable of human feelings. The name ‘Artificial Intelligence’ gives a good pointer.
The first word ‘Artificial’ is appropriate here as this kind of intelligence is not natural, but the danger is the influence of language humans are vulnerable to.
Over a period, humans may misconstrue Artificial Intelligence, which is only an intellectual process, as human intelligence, which is a natural process. This could make humans into zombies as they could be content with the machine intelligence. The real side effects are already clearly visible.
Social media has produced a mentally disoriented generation with, as a side-effect, a great demand for psychiatrists and psychotherapists.
Will the evolution of AI produce a great demand for neurologists to deal with the predicted brain atrophy and its consequent disorders?
(This article is written by Vishwanath Alluri, who, among several other things, is the Secretary of Krishnamurti Foundation India. Views expressed are his own.)
