02/02/2016
Will the dawn of artificial intelligence also mark the beginning of the end of humanity? Stephen Hawking is afraid it may. He thinks it is going to be like the story of the fisherman and the genie. Once released the genie will devour all!
However, we better get the question answered at the earliest, as AI is certain to come on stage in a big way soon. But how do we go about it? Suppose we try the tactic my school teacher employed to help us solve problems: for every question anyone of us asked, his response was a counter-question!
For instance, what is artificial intelligence and which way does it differ from its counterpart, natural intelligence? The former is a fabricated imitation of the latter, one may say. In short, it is lifeless.
Procreation in some manner is the only way life can re-create itself. Sure, natural life forms can be ferocious and cruel; but no predator terminates its prey-species and no parasite wipes out its host. Any life form, however destructive to others, eventually strikes a balance.
Individuality is another trait of NI. In any genre, each individual is different from every other at least by a miniscule margin. In fact, this justifies the very existence of it. And every life form undergoes the birth-growth-decay-death cycle.
Modern science, despite its prowess and precision, even now suffers from two fallacies. One, it assumes that the material world is the only reality, there is nothing more. Two, it divides the universe into the living and the non-living. If these are done away with, all doomsday-phobia as well as every roadblock in the path of science vanish.
The universe, in fact, consists of three levels of reality: According to the Bhagawat Gita, for instance, there is the material universe that goes on changing every second (kshara), the substrate from which it emanates and goes back to (akshara), and finally, the ultimate level of unified forces (aksharaateeta). Any naturally occurring material object, living or non-living, exists at all the three levels at the same time. Anything naturally occurring in the material world has, in fact, three bodies at the same time – the material one (sthoola sareera), one parallel to it in the dialectical substrate (sookkshma sareera) and the fundamental one (kaarana sareera).
A mechanical construct has only the first, though the components taken from nature and going into its making have all the three pieces. What is lacking at the other levels is the blueprint of organization of these parts and the motivation for their build up. So it’s like a tree without roots, not included in the larger scheme of things.
Translated into consideration of intelligence, AI is valid only at the first level. It cannot transform itself and survive in tune with changes at the second level and not at all at the ultimate level – the level of universal natural intelligence.
No wonder hybrids revert to the nature of one of their parents in course of time and even genetic variations either perish or shed the mutation in the long run. Very heavy atomic nuclei laboriously assembled with the help of gigantic particle accelerators do not survive for long. The same is the case with macromolecules synthetically assembled. In all these cases the pattern of association and the motivation for the assembly are not supported by records at the other two levels of reality.
It is therefore certain that, the devastating scenarios presented by AI horror movies notwithstanding, NI alone can survive the tidal waves of change brought about by natural evolution of the universe.
The Puranaas have stories about Viswamitra, a haughty scholar attempting to create an artificial heaven besides artificial life forms. The heaven had to be given up for practical reasons and the Viswamitra srishtis, even though they continued to exists, did not bring about the end of any other species. This was despite the great man creating these with parallels at all three levels of reality!
One cannot blame Stephan Hawking for extrapolating current trends in the existing perception of reality. It can be surmised that confusion of this sort on many fronts are likely to persist till modern science closely examines the ancient scriptures, so as to clean them of contaminating superstitions, and also those scriptures are brought to bear upon modern science to help it get rid of its limitations. Gita portrays universal natural intelligence as the mind of the universe, the end of all knowledge, and as the awareness that governs the universe – Iswara. One may conclude ‘Iswaro rakshatu’ (God save us!) continues to be a valid prayer!
(Photos: Greg Rakozy via Unsplash and Maitreya)