Does AI end up making work and life easy, or do you just add more to the queue?
A couple of conversations at a birthday party that I took Keshav to, and the inevitable question on everyone’s lips was – what do you think about AI? Will it take our jobs?
I’m fortunate enough to be working on the right side(hopefully) of the fence, and I do have an informed view on such things. So, not one to hold back knowledge, I did engage in a discussion on the subject. My point was a thought experiment – think of yourself possibly 5-10 years in the future, and then look back from that vantage point. For instance, if we look back twenty years, you would possibly wonder how we lived and worked then, without the ubiquitous internet access across multiple devices. Voice chat, seamless integrations, one-tap electronic payments etc…
Now look back 40 years, the offices you see in the movies of those days, and wonder how they got any work done, without a computer!
And so in our little thought experiment, look back from the vantage point of the future and wonder what tools, techniques and processes we currently follow would have seemed as inefficient, given the advances in technology. You have your answer right there – those are the ones you need to change TODAY.
AI promises changes beyond one’s current comprehension. A book that I am currently re-reading – The Singularity is Nearer, by Ray Kurzweil, characterizes evolution throughout all time as progressing through six epochs, each one building on the one before.
He says the four epochs which have occurred so far are Physics and Chemistry, Biology and DNA, Brains, and Technology. Kurzweil predicts the singularity will coincide with the next epoch, The Merger of Human Technology with Human Intelligence. After the singularity he says the final epoch will occur, The Universe Wakes Up.
Read it when you get the chance.
One thing where AI would lag behind, for a considerable amount of time, is human emotion. And these are not the ones bubbling on the surface, but the ones that are ingrained in us, through our life experiences. Movies are a wonderful medium to explore such emotion – it’s not by coincidence that violent films do so well and have such a following. These movies bring to the fore suppressed emotions that we cannot engage in as a society, but need an outlet nevertheless. But today’s post isn’t about a violent movie. It’s about a simple movie, featuring simple people – the protagonist Nallandi for instance, was an actual farmer, and this was his first, and last movie (he died shortly before the movie’s release).
Our own assumptions of life and our troubles are shaped by the experiences that we have in the cities – complaints about traffic, late deliveries, rising costs of goods, lack of good places to visit on the weekends, and so on. Over time, we become blind to persons whose lives revolve around their smaller communities, where the scales are much lesser, but the emotions are much more pronounced. What is possibly left as a tip at an outing in the city, is a sizable part of a poor man’s monthly budget in a village. Life is slower, challenges are different, but community prevails. We are too small to understand their ways of living, and hence we dismiss them as ‘villagers’. Oddly enough, they are closer to nature than we can ever be.
Kadaisi Vivasayi (The Last Farmer) takes us on the journey of an old farmer and his simple way of living, which gets disrupted when he is accused of killing three peacocks. Although he is found innocent very early into the proceedings, the red tape of the judicial process prolongs his release, which results in him being away from what actually makes him happy – his farming. The premise of the story, when heard this way, would lead you to think that the movie would be an arty-type of exercise, but no. You life his life for those two hours, the subtle humor and sarcasm keeps you smiling at places, whereas at others, your eyes well up…and the climax reaches a crescendo before the film dissolves into black, drums beating furiously, and you find yourself on your feet, a tear in your eye, but a smile on your face, dancing to the beat. It just happens, and that is by far the best reaction I’ve had to a movie in a long, long time.
I wish the same to you too, so go watch it on Sony Liv if you haven’t already.
For now, I have a dinner to eat and some work to finish. See you tomorrow!