Artificial Intelligence: An Opinion

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.... 

Malala and the Cultural Struggles Between Large and Peripheral Cities

I planned to wake up, early. I woke up at 3 a.m. I had still time to get up, so I checked my social news feed. There were fierce battles between the two opposing camps over the return of Malala. In fact, it was amusing like the WWE wrestling shows than serious debates. Rationalizations, sarcasm and faking of news to undermine the opponent point of views were at their best, something I could rarely find in the traditional news outlets (except in the comment sections 😜). Besides, worrying about Malala's safety (although, being an international celebrity she has better security, now), I couldn't resist thinking that despite all the shortcomings, the original confusions and emotions expressed with  broken language and poor illustrations in social media were more capable in capturing the interests of the visitors than what professional reporters try to achieve with the professional maskings of their reports (professional reporters still have the advantage of higher confidence levels 😑). Anyhow, what I understood from all the debates were that Malala as a person was not the concern. The concern was the shift of cultural leadership from big seats of power like Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad to the peripheral cities. This is now a continuous process. Persons who manage to go outside the circle of the big cities are seen as anomalies (In popular culture, for example, the break out of the artists to outside world (particularly Bollywood) were not welcomed as such, too).

To outside world, Malala was seen as a girl who had stood for the education of girls (an anti-Taliban voice, to sum up). But I surprised noticing that many of those who opposed Malala were not conservatives (there were highly educated women, too).

Before going further, I want to emphasize that the cultural war between big cities and peripheral cities are not just limited to Pakistan. It's a regional phenomenon. In neighboring Afghanistan, this battle is the fiercest. The like battles  (when become imbalanced by foreign interferences) have torn apart countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain. I'm expecting it in Saudi Arabia too if the country continues to open up in a zigzag manner (the way she is going these days). Once the peripheral cities/populations find themselves culturally compatible with traditional cultural leaders of the country, then the culture war will become visible and the desperate attempts of the traditional cultural leaders to maintain their status quo will turn into open cultural battles. (Please see the additional note at the end of the knol)

Back to the story:

While reading the arguments, I fell back to sleep, and dreamt:

Children were picking sellable items among garbage pile in the garbage-tub (The municipality used to build brick-walled-garbage-dumping-sites in the neighborhood that were called garbage-tubs). A garbage truck dumped its load on the garbage picking children. I didn't see what happened to other children but I saw a girl struggling to get out the pile of the garbage. The pile of garbage was heavy, stinking and suffocating. She was about to give up when she felt something hit her head. It was the bucket of an excavator. She cried in pain and grabbed firmly the bucket. The excavator pulled her out of garbage and lifted her in the air. She cried for help and the spectators cheered and applauded her. She collected herself and felt like a heroine.

I don't see any patterns in the dreams and do not believe in the interpretations. But nonetheless, it was an amusing dream that very likely had some connections with the current divide on a girl from a periphery area that has become a cultural symbol. And that symbolic representation has made her a target practice of the politico-cultural struggles between metropolitan and peripheral cities.

*********

Additional Note:

                         With the exception of East Asia (which somehow managed to transition to modern world in more organized manner, if not linearly), the rest of Asia has maintained its historical ethno-cultural identities. Historically, while the boundaries of the kingdoms shifted, the boundaries of ethno-cultural identities remained mostly unchanged. The game of power was played by changes of alliances between those identities. The imposition of nation states based on the culture of the majority population has pushed the smaller cultural identities into the peripheries. It's slowly changing (Enriched by global cultural influences, particularly Western cultures and empowered by the digital communications, the peripheral cultures are reinventing their identities. I may go in more details in a future knol on the issue) and that's creating lots of confusions and chaos. Controversial individuals and events are not all linked to this phenomenon. The Syrian experience has made people even more sensitive and the reactions to the controversial individuals and events were taken more seriously (as existential threats) now than any time before. 

Chop chop chop VS. Balancing: A tribute to Asma Jahangir

An elderly lady had advised my mom that for the children to become independent, it was very important to supplement their education with some trade apprenticeship. She had taken that advice by heart and encouraged us to master at least a trade: 

When I was a high school student, I started working in the evening shift as an apprentice at a woodwork factory. Part of the job was chopping the logs to prepare them for turning. I loved that part of the job. All I had to do was chop chop chop. I wished the trade just required one tool and that was an ax, then, all woodworkers were the happiest people among the population. Chopping released all the anxiety and made me feel good. I understood that chop chop chop was one of the best escapes, if not the only great escape. 

Another part of the job was balancing of the chairs. I hated that part. Wood, fresh out of the lathe machine was very sensitive to humidity and changed shapes and cracked during balancing. Balancing was mostly done by the chief technician. I understood that balancing was very stressful till one acquired the required skills and experiences. 

Back to today's main story:

Today, lots of people are offering their tributes to Asma Jahangir (the human right lawyer) for her lifelong stands for the rights of all ethnicities, religious minorities as well as women, laborers and other oppressed parts of the society. 

Photo Source: http://www.human-dignity-forum.org/2013/04/dr-asma-jahangir/ 

All along, I saw Asma Jahangir as a strong voice for the balance in the society. In every forum, she criticized sections of the governments and the society for their chop chop chop worldviews/strategies as the sole solution for the country's problems. Asma struggled all her life to convince the government and the people to adopt a balancing worldview (instead of temporary feel-good escapism for blaming and targetting a vulnerable part of society). Today, she died but the majority of the population and the government still love the feeling of the chop chop chop. On majority pages of everyday news outlets (both social and MSM) one encounters the suggestions for chopping this and chopping that. Chop chop chop has become a dominant culture and is rising. And we definitely are going to miss Asma a lot.  May her great soul rest in peace. 

Playing with Gephi

Other than during middle school time, when the primitive computer games were popular, I don't remember that I liked the computer games. But recently, I find myself liking a lot playing with computer programs (particularly python, specifically, its scikit-learn library and jupyter notebook)  and data analytics software. I have just started with Gephi and is already in love with it. Following is my first Gephi attempt. It's very crude (as data are all coded and without the reference to an original data table or a description of it, it's not much informative.). However, I like the endless possibilities that it offers in a time when we are submerged in relational datasets. I hope you enjoy my first attempt (even if you don't get anything out it. 😜)

End of History: A Class-One Student's Perspective

Each time we rethink a memory, we stretch it a bit. The following memories were some realizations that since have been stretched several times:

Realization 1:

At the new school, I rapidly excelled in drawings which were the combinations of basic geometric shapes. First I learned to draw a mountain (Isosceles triangles in a row), a sun (yellow circle), then, a house in the front of the mountain, a man next to house, a car on a line (road) and tree at the end of road and a pond in front of house (just rough blue coloring of the bottom half of the page). Once I mastered this drawing, I thought there was nothing to add to the drawing. For me, it the End of History (Francis Fukuyama's hypothesis that the current system is the best that humanity could achieve. Since I thought, I had mastered the art and there was no further room for improvement, it was my "the end of history").  I didn't miss any chance of expressing my view of "The End of History". I filled pages of my notebooks, blank spaces of my books (Although, it was tolerated but occasionally I get punished for them), drew on walls and streets with charcoal (a bakery was part of our house, so plenty of charcoal) and went to classes during recess in search of chalks and clean blackboards to draw. 

I was very content with my mastery. For first two years of my schooling, I struggled to learn alphabets and numbers (and that my impatient parents were very disappointed with my inability to learn and kept asking for pieces of advice from anyone who had to offer a solution) and in a new school (which was recommended by my father's friend), I learned reading, writing and drawing effortlessly. My father didn't mind it much but my mother didn't appreciate blackened dresses and hands. I kept drawing on everything. My view of the world had stopped with those limited number of objects and I couldn't see any possibility of improving upon it. But that didn't affect my enthusiasm for expressing myself.

THEN,

Realization 2: my youngest maternal uncle visited us after their Iran tour. He was a couple of years older than me and taught me to draw tulips (for the memory of the fallen soldiers), tanks, fighter jets, and helicopters. I had never seen tulips and helicopters before. The only tank and the fighter jet that I had seen were the ones that were parked in the parks of the cantonment area which appeared to me as oversized toys. It was the first time I heard about Iran-Iraq war and that people died in the wars. It dawned on me as I learn to draw new objects, I start seeing the same object anew. There was no "the end of history" moment. It was just a temporary satisfaction with the level of the mastery (So was the case with Fukuyama's hypothesis).

THEN,

Realization 3: I learned from the discussion of adults in the bakery that if Pakistan and India went to another war, India could drop an atomic bomb and we all could die in a blink of an eye (Pakistan was not a nuclear state at the time). I had no idea what an atomic bomb is but the idea everything could vanish in a blink of eyes, terrified me. I received pocket money in the morning and during the day, I kept looking my father and anytime I spotted my father or my grand-maternal-uncle, I taxed them. Each time,  received additional money, I was in heaven. The list of the objects that I could draw was growing and I started reading story booklets. In addition to group plays, these additional pleasures made the world too sweet and I definitely didn't want it to end in blank of eyes. But I couldn't unlearn that cursed knowledge that our world could end.

Probably, humanity survives a nuclear winter but there will be real THE END OF HISTORY for many cultures, societies, ethnicities and countless species of organisms.