Artificial Intelligence: Will remain Artificial till?

 

"Nature is not a place to visit, it is home." –Gary Snyder

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bob Marley

 

 

Yet if you closely examine what AI can do (short list above) is still very much synthetic! Closely examining the word ‘synthetic’, it denotes something manufactured, fabricated, fake or even counterfeit. Looking at the origin of the word ‘synthetic’ it comes from Greek word ‘synthetikos’- which means ‘put together’. It can at most give ‘augmented reality’ but not reality.

 

But the problem is that everything synthetic has created more and more synthetic. Yet to create something worthwhile you go back to nature.

 

For instance the movie Jurassic park too creates a dinosaur by extracting blood from the gut of a long dead mosquito trapped in amber and used its DNA. The seed was still ‘from nature’- you could play with nature but you cannot create nature- could be a fair logical deduction.

 

Scientists are working on creating a sperm! But that too from a human cell. In-vitro gametogenesis, or IVG, which involves custom-making human eggs and sperm in the laboratory from any cell in a person's body. You are almost there but not quite. You still need a cell. We have not been successful- fully successful yet in destroying rogue diseased cells!

 

You can create seed money but not a seed.

 

Even the law of conservation of mass states that the mass in an isolated system can neither be ‘created’ nor be ‘destroyed’ but can be transformed from one form to the other.

 

Let us look at it from another perspective. In the mass energy equivalence equation E= MC2

 

E is the energy equivalence generated when mass denoted by M is destroyed and converted into E in terms of heat and blast. In this equation C is the speed of light. Which is 299,792,458 meters per Second. For one gram of mass the equivalent of energy will be 90 Tera Joules (TJ) which is 21.5 billion kilocalories this is energy released by combustion of 21.5 kilo tons of TNT(trinitrotoluene). In the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, the fission caused by approximately one kilogram of the 6.15 Kg plutonium resulted in becoming exactly 1 gram less after the fission process was complete. You converted 1 gram of Plutonium into massive energy. It therefore had the intensity of 21 kilotons of TNT. You can convert but not create.

 

Therefore you cannot create a cauliflower from nothing- the seed has to go back to nature- a natural seed.

 

But we need food- AI cannot create it, but it can help optimize production. It can help reduce losses, better growth per acre (Suck more out of mother earth), optimize water requirement, better fertilizer management, better logistics etc. etc. It can further squeeze the nature- ounce by ounce- till it’s very last drop.

 

But it cannot produce food, grains, grass, trees, water in rivers and even fresh air on its own.

 

 

We want a clean environment. Better human beings, children with better values, less greedy business houses, humane business leaders, caring doctors, cleaner cities, breathable air quality. I don’t want to know how bad is the Air Quality Index (AQI) in real time which AI could give me on my wrist watch or even on my reading glasses. I could blink my eyes and get to know what shit I am breathing! What do I do with that? Duck for cover, grab an oxygen cylinder or what. For God’s sake I want clean air, clean water (first water). I want trees to look at and feel good. I want thick grass beneath my feet- real grass not plastic or PVC. I want millions of acres of thick jungles. I want clay and not parched surfaces or sand dunes. I don’t want a smart city, I want a green city with nature around me. I want to feel the real wood, touch wood and not a plastic based synthetic wood that looks ‘like wood’. This is what a person with flesh, blood and bones needs.

 

Do you know that to create 5 mm of soil it takes more than hundred years for Mother Nature?

 

In 1 gram of soil there are 50 types of microbes and one teaspoon of soil holds 8 billion organisms!

 

So let us not play god- he is too big even to imagine.

 

I want flowers on my bedside and not artificial flowers that look ‘as good as flowers’.

 

 

Abdul Kalam

 

We are still dragging our feet in the direction of number crunching, collating, compiling, stacking, all skewed in the direction of IQ. Emotional Intelligence is what we need. We need committed people, saner leaders, bridled egos, at political levels and not computer generated star wars which pushes up or adrenaline levels.

 

I want actual smiles and not plastic coated smiles. I want things from the heart and not the head.

 

 

We don't need no education

 

We don't need no thought control.