I remember asking Ustad, "Why religion is so powerful?" an obscure question (that could be interpreted in many ways, both positive and negative).
Instead of a direct answer (as was his signature way of explaining things), he began with an example, "If we give students the choice between researching the topics and preparing their personalized set of a knowledge-base and prepared notes, which method you think, the majority of the students will choose?"
"No doubt, there are students who genuinely do go their own way out of their personal drive for knowledge but I think the majority of students prefer ready notes...."
"And it's not just the education, the same rule is equally applicable in all spheres of life. Take the example of the food. The health hazards of fast food are in the news and advertisements, almost everyday in one or other form and yet, it is the cooking at home that's in decline instead of fast food [An interesting statistics about the number of the eating places in the new york city. There are 24000 eating establishments in NYC and if you want to eat at a different place, you would need about 65 years (24000/365 = 65.75) from the day you are born to be able to eat at all the stores]."
"Don't you think that it's just a practical need of the modern lifestyle?" I asked him.
"Of course, all the ready-made products are very practical for time-crunched city dwellers but also have become a modern style as you mentioned and that's part of human nature. That's strong inclination towards easiest of the choices. And there lies the strength of both religion and culture. Religion free its followers from the burden of thinking hard in distinguishing rights and wrongs and making right choices. As a follower, one has just to believe that the religion he/she follows ae true and he/she can have the piece of the mind that the algorithms he/she are following are the best of the choices that he/she could make. Even better than that it gives you the assurances that your religion is true and others are false...."
I mentioned our conversation to bring in another phenomenon that's functioning the same way (as religion and culture) and have become part of our daily lives (most of the time, we don't even realize it) and that's the artificial intelligence. Based on the digital footprints (the data we feed by our online activities), specific products, services, news, opinions and organizations (even friends and social groups are recommended) appear in search engines and millions of the other potential products, services, and opinions do not reach us. Therefore, we can say that services empowered by artificial intelligence are not only thinking for us but on the long-run influence our personalities. We do not need to have machines embedded in our bodies to be defined as bionics. We can claim that we are already bionics and artificial intelligence are replacing traditional roles of culture and religions in many ways. Once a cultured person or a religious person easily easy identify himself or herself as belonging to the particular group and see the group as an extension of himself/herself. That simple categorization is disintegrating. Artificial intelligence is designed by companies and in addition to the personalizations of the education, culture, and lifestyles, they also promote the cultures and worldviews beneficial to those companies and therefore, except the small number of individuals who do take the burden of thinking for themselves, the majority of people let AI think for them.
Continued....
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