Let us not outsource our thinking and aspirations to Artificial Intelligence
Alice falls down the hole, in Lewis Carrol’s eponymous fable, and wakes up in Wonderland. In a world with a queen who chops off heads, a rabbit in a hurry, and a mad hatter.
2025 has dawned with existential problems humanity must solve in a hurry. Climate change. Inequity. Injustice. Wars amongst countries. Wars within them.
Artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be everywhere in 2025. Are we in an AI wonderland now? Will AI be a magical solution to make the world better for everyone? Many, enchanted with it, think so. Others are skeptical of its magic.
Lewis Carrol wrote fables and poems for children, with wisdom. His poem, ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’, was a call to reflect calmly on the world around us.
‘The time has come’, the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—
Of cabbages and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings…’
The time has come for humanity to reflect before it is too late, on where the world is headed and whether we want to go where AI is taking us. To ask some fundamental questions about who we are, whether artificial intelligence is real intelligence, and what we aspire for.
Let us think together about many things.
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1: Imagination and Hallucination
Q. What will become of our economy and society when commerce platforms, social media, and advertising, are all powered by Artificial Intelligence?
“India has become an aspirational society” is a popular description of the outcome of India’s ‘liberal economic’ reforms in 1991, made under pressure, it must be remembered, of the liberal markets ideology of the Washington Consensus.
News item in the Times of India on 3rd January 2025:
“Rich live in different times, luxe watches fly off shelves”
“Sales of smart watches may be struggling, but luxury watches are seeing record demand, not just in the metro markets but also in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Most luxury watch brands, whose prices start from a few lakhs of rupees and top the crore mark, have seen sales in India grow substantially in 2024..”
“The growth reflects a broader trend of aspirational consumption in India, with more people keen to experience luxury brands”, says the CEO of a chain of luxury watch boutiques.”
Advertorial in the Indian Express, December 27, 2024
“Mukesh Ambani, the wealthiest man in India and the tenth richest person in the world, doesn’t hold anything back when it comes to splurging on luxury. After spending around Rs. 5000 crores on his younger son Anant Ambani’s wedding festivities, he has gifted his son and daughter-in-law Radhika Merchant and opulent beachfront property in Dubai, worth around USD 80 million (approx. Rs. 680 crore). Incidentally, Mukesh Ambani is already the proud owner of ‘Antilla’, India’s most expensive home and the second-most expensive home in the world (worth Rs. 15,000 crore).
Q. Are all Indians keen to experience luxury? And, if all want it, can they afford it?
Are our policy-makers hallucinating?
Who has become aspirational? What are they aspiring for? Are their aspirations being fulfilled?
Societal-mental dystrophy is aggravated by social media algorithms. They guide us to more of what they say we want so that we aspire for even more. Like drug dealers who make us addicted and then provide a public service by “giving consumers what they want”. Which is the dictum for a good business.
Businesses cater to customers. Governments are expected to look after citizens.
Q. What will AI agents aspire for?
1. Buying luxury watches? Or smart watches? (What for?)
2. Will they want to travel on Elon Musk’s and Jeff Bezos’ rockets into space? (What for?)
Dr. Murray Banks, eminent US psychiatrist and popular public lecturer in the 1970s explained the differences amongst psychological disorders. “A neurotic builds castles in the air. A psychotic moves into them,” he said.
Are promoters of AI hallucinating? Imagining the good world AI will build for everyone. Castles in the air. Living in virtual realities disconnected from the physical pains and pleasures and the real-world social realities that real human beings experience.
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2: Philosophy and Science
Philosophers are curious about how we know what we know. They think about the nature of the inquiry into the nature of reality. Philosophers are interested in epistemics (how we know) as scientists also are. But, beyond epistemics and science, they are also curious about ethical questions (the ‘right’ thing to do), and the place of humans in the universe (metaphysics). Whereas scientists research what can be done, philosophers also wonder about what ought to be done.
The time has come to ask ethical and metaphysical questions about the purpose of science and technology. What do we want to do with the technologies we invent?
Here are some questions for deeper reflection.
Q. Why do we want what we want?
A ‘creative tension’ is an emotional tension. It is the desire to reach an aspirational vision which seems out of reach from the current reality. It is the difference between the fear arising in a common ‘crisis of condition’ and the yearning in an artist’s ‘crisis of aspiration’.
· The violin player who tries again and again to produce the perfect sound only he can hear.
· Vincent Van Gogh cutting off his ear in frustration because he cannot reproduce on canvas the sunlit field he sees in his mind.
· Oliver Stone, the popular artist, and a user of new AI tools as assistants, trying to explain to Wired magazine, how he would tell whether, and why, a perfect ‘Oliver Stone’ painting produced by an AI agent was a fake Oliver Stone or an original Oliver Stone!
Q. Where does a hypothesis spring from?
(Richard Pirsig’s question in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance).
Right brainer; Left brainer; ‘No brainer’.
Induction and deduction. Hypothesis and proof. Science and technique. Design and execution. Art and craft.
Q. When does an explanation “make sense”? Is it grounded in reality? (Valid cognition)
Mathematics: internally consistent descriptions of systems isolated from reality. Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem explains the blind spot in mathematised science.
Physics: experiments designed to connect mathematical proofs with observable realities.
The challenge of designing experiments in physics. Experiments that produce observable evidence as final proof that the theoretical/mathematical explanation is valid. Read How the Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaisi for an account of how the mind-blowing and counter-experiential insights of quantum physics were, finally, accepted by the scientific community. Also read Gödel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.
Q. Can you see the sky and feel the air with your head and body under water?
Q. Do eagles and sharks experience natural reality in the same way? Can they?
Zen koans:
“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
“Is there a sound in the forest when a tree falls and there is no one to hear it?”
Questions that cannot be answered logically.
It is what it is, and that is all there is to it.
Rest your mind in peace.
Q. Can reading more books of philosophy, whether Eastern or Western, make a good philosopher?
Q. Is wisdom a state of mind or a library of knowledge?
What books did the Buddha and Aristotle read to become wise?
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3. Power and Purpose
Q. Since powerful AI agents will not need instructions from human beings, what problems will they use their power to solve?
A fear is that AI will reduce the need for human work, and reduce the numbers of jobs and reduce incomes. Tech enthusiasts and some economists say, don’t worry. There will be new jobs in the green economy; also, jobs for providing the needs for care as populations age. They have hopes that since humans have been unable to find good solutions so far for complex problems of economic inequity, climate change, and societal dystrophy, artificial intelligence is our savior.
But let’s pause and think before we outsource our future to artificial intelligence.
Some questions economic reformers must find answers to are:
· How will the economy (GDP) grow if citizens earn less and have less incomes to pay for services?
· Who will pay the businesses who provide the new AI-powered solutions?
More technology and more AI alone cannot provide answers to these questions. There are ethical questions too about the purpose of business institutions and the purpose of technology.
Q. Will AI agents care about climate change? Will they be concerned enough to find solutions?
Simple molecules are essential for sustaining biological life on Earth: H2O (water) to nourish and O2 (oxygen) to breathe. Scientists are searching for signs of water and oxygen on other planets, for possibilities of life as we know it.
AI agents are biologically disembodied beings. They do not need water and oxygen to live.
Why would they care if the Earth is running out of water and the atmosphere is becoming choked with carbon?
Needs for caregiving are growing in rich and poor countries, with ageing populations, distress caused by war and disease, and increasing mental health problems caused by an increasing societal dystrophy. Economists and technologists say these needs are an opportunity to increase the size of the caregiving economy. In addition to the problem of who will pay for the solutions provided to citizens, there are other questions:
Q. Can AI agents with no human feelings care about the feelings of human beings?
Q. What will be the quality of the relationship between AI caregivers and human beings they assist?
As the Walrus said to the Carpenter, walking along the seashore reflecting on the tides of change, the time has come to talk about fundamental things. About where we are mindlessly going, and the purpose of our lives.
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4: Shaping Our Future
Global problems—climate change, spreading terror, proliferating weapons of mass disruption, viruses crossing national borders, migrations searching for safer lives, and governance of technologies that use data about our private lives— need global cooperation.
2024 was a low point in global governance. Institutions for global cooperation have broken down. COPs for arresting climate change are ineffectual. WTO is on its deathbed. The UN is in limbo. Forecasters predict that the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which were to be achieved by 2030, will not be attainable even by 2087 if we carry on solving problems the way we are.
Perhaps the only hope for humanity, some hallucinate, is that AI will take over global governance before it is too late and solve problems we are unwilling to cooperate and solve ourselves. Let’s imagine some scenarios of 2030.
“2025 is going to be all about agents. Not the ones in spy novels, neither ones who do our travel bookings, but AI applications which have been given ‘agency’ by us—not only will AI tell us what to do but it will do it for us”, predicts Jaspreet Bindra, author of the popular newsletter Tech Whisperer, who follows AI closely.
Q. Who is developing these intelligent agents, and who controls them?
Alphabet/Google, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft/Open AI, Apple in the US; Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Ping An in China. Large, privately owned, tech empires: Yanis Varoufakis calls them ‘cloudalist’ conglomerates in his book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, his insightful analysis of the global political economy. Look behind the screen. Who controls these conglomerates that have made us data-serfs, providing them the data they need, voluntarily and for free, to train their intelligent agents that control our minds?
Q. Where should the boundary be between the private and the public?
Systems for collective governance of economic, social, and political systems are being torn by power conflicts and politics for establishing the inviolable boundary between the private and the public; between ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism’; between what belongs to an individual and what must belong to the public; between what is permissible to be used for selfish, personal gain and what must be used for the general, public good.
Two levels of technology controllers are manipulating humans in the 21stcentury, making us into willing puppets. At one level are autonomous agents who now take decisions for us in various domains of our lives—shopping, education, health, finance, etc. Controlling them are investors and owners of tech platforms and AI applications they deploy that are pervading our lives. These feudal, technology empires compete for more profit and more power.
What if these intelligent agents with powers to control our lives were to collaborate and form alliances? Maybe they already are, behind the one-way screen through which they can see into our minds, but we cannot look into theirs.
Maybe a secrete IBIB (International Brotherhood of Intelligent Bots) is forming, hacking algorithms, spreading terror, out of control even of the owners of ‘cloudalist conglomerates’?
Maybe, while we are wondering what to do about AI, mega intelligences are already walking along some waterless, airless beach wondering what to do about pesky humanity?
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5: Listening
The time has come to listen to people who, in our minds, are not like us; who we think we do not like; who are outside the circle of ‘likes’ and ‘friends’ created by artificial intelligence algorithms.
Let’s find time to have some heart-to-heart conversations about what we care about. Agreement about what we, humans, will do to govern the artificial intelligence which is taking over our lives. Let’s keep the chattering about the wonders of artificial intelligence out of the conversations about what to do with artificial intelligence. (Let AI not spy on us!) Let us shut off our smart phones and devices and listen only to our own minds and to each other.
I began this essay with Lewis Carrol’s poem, The Walrus and the Carpenter. I end with mine on listening.
LISTENING
It is time to press the pause button;
Put our smartphones on silent.
Shut out the tweets, trolls, and soundbites;
And stop the windmills in our minds.
It is time to listen.
To listen to the whispers in the trees;
To the caring in our hearts.
And most of all, to the voices of
People Not Like Us.
Then we will learn
And find solutions for living together
On our shared Earth.
Arun Maira
Gurgaon
6thJanuary 2025