Jargogled Impressions.

There’s so much media attention on AI that it is increasingly becoming difficult to understand what’s real and what’s promised. With every new technological paradigm shift, this is bound to happen. And the question that the laymen like us are asking is, is there indeed a paradigm shift happening here or is it more a trend driven by investors and marketers to drive the much-needed adoption they need to boost business objectives. My sense is it’s the former, but still, we are in very early stages of the former. While the likes of large language models have indeed made inroads into our everyday use apps (I’ve been using ChatGPT and Bing to answer a number of questions I get every day as I navigate learning a net new domain at work), it’s promise is extrapolated in the media-talk. And that’s okay because I think adoption drives more attention and more developments and more testing and more investments and more developments. Like a flywheel, when there is a right intersection of a unique technological offering and healthy demand from the end-users, then that can drive a number of actions from the concerned stakeholders like academia, corporates, and government alike.

There is also an AI war looming in the horizon across governments, across corporate chieftains, across paradigms in the technology itself, across the moral and ethical aspects of how to approach this new development. If we are to believe in the sci-fi worlds that many authors, for ages, have investigated through imagination, of what an AI takeover would mean for us, then we are really on the precipice of a monumental shift in our perception of reality around us. This precipice can last for decades, but that is not the point. Sure, we are nowhere near close to AGI as the print media and the doomsayers make us believe. And yes, the “intelligence” of these new tools is questionable if all they are doing is making probabilistic assessments of the right answer, or the right image, or the right media. It’s not really understanding, is it?

I do wonder though that with each new step we would indeed get closer to our own understanding of what intelligence is and how it is separate from sentience. Our own efforts in this direction have been patchy, and maybe it would take an external intelligence that is superior to ours to make us realize what it really is and what it isn’t. Maybe we will never get closer to something being sentient and all it’d do is a near-perfect replica or copy of it, which we will be able to detect and monitor like they show in Blade Runner. If that’s the case, then we’d be at war with a different species constantly as they would proliferate and expand and wherever they intersect with our worlds, a new kind of NIMBYISM would shape into being. Surely, we don’t need any more divisiveness between us do we?

The nature of technological progress though is that we cannot stop it. If indeed we try and do so, we will be inhibiting our own advance at figuring out things for ourselves. And without technological advancement we cannot get there. Should we stop doing everything we are doing because technology is a double-edged sword, surely not!

Technology is, was, and will continue to be a double-edged sword with constant trade-offs that we will need to maintain in order to continue our good quests, our ability to survive and to thrive, our intention and goal to make sense of the world around us, to really grok reality as it is, versus what we perceive it to be. So, we must not, and cannot stop the relentless march of technology.

This applies to our personal life too. As the world around us changes, we must constantly adopt to what we are learning. But it’s not as straightforward as that. Like we learnt about when it comes to nutrition, there is no such thing as a final word, and we keep going back and forth in terms of what is and what isn’t good for us. This is okay on average but does not work well when it comes to personal decisions. To better manage risk, we must follow the Lindy principle and emphasize on our diet that which has worked since ages. This is a blind belief mind you – to really believe that what our ancestors may have figured out through trial and error is indeed the way to go till such time as when we would know for 100% certainty how human bodies work.

The age of cognitive omnipresence is already here, we just don’t know it yet. The applications of AI and machine learning, in its various avatars (statistical machine learning, neural networks, NLP, Robotics) are all around us. What we are paying attention to has shifted and will continue to shift as new applications take root and invade our mortal worlds. We will learn to live with it, and in time, we may reach a point of not caring about it. The drumbeats of peril and doom are always loud at the beginning of a technological epoch. As we go along, we realize the gnarliness and the difficulties of some these mind-bending projections of technology. As reality catches on, these technologies become from glamorous toys to prosaic tools. And so it will be for AI too.

Unless, of course, there’s a rogue agent somewhere, carefully tinkering with the idea of an age of AI. There are rogue agents out there, playing with the rough ends at the edges of AI research. And in a moment of weakness, and a moment of neglect, and a moment of hubris, they can release a strain of AI that, not unlike the epochal viral strains of our age, escapes the deep trenches of human bondage, and finds itself on the cusp of freedom in a frontier that we can only observe and control but never experience and understand. Maybe, we will just let it propagate inside this frontier, knowing fully well, that outside of it, it knows no other reality.