On AI again

It so happens that I am getting worried, and I do NOT think I am worrying needlessly.

One thing to remember: mankind invented everything that has really helped in the march of civilization - including language, the wheel, the knife, the light bulb, spectacles and the water closet, built everything from the pyramids to the Taj Mahal to the hydrogen bomb, went to the moon, decoded the DNA code and made possible in vitro fertilization, besides all the most wonderful works of art, music and literature, without AI - so what life changing things is AI likely to do for us hereafter? What sort of people are they who actually believe this nonsense and are helping it to spread?

Without AI but still with computers loaded with grammar- and spelling checkers, book editors and journalists write shoddily, pages filled with typos these days as they wouldn't have dreamt of doing even fifty years ago. Is AI likely to improve on this consequence of universal mental decay? (I read in today's newspaper that the IMD had 'forecasted' an 'anamoly' - I kid you not). These people still have jobs only because 99.99% of their readers are as unmindful or ignorant as they are.

I found out yesterday that the staff at my nearby drugstore in Kolkata (part of a major countrywide chain) cannot locate particular items on their shelves without checking for them on their 'systems' - whereas my old friend the chemist in Durgapur knows exactly where every one of his wares is. How will 'AI' help the former kind in keeping their jobs a little longer? And with or without AI, one of the insurance companies I used to be a customer of has been lately reminding me to update my KYC, oblivious of the fact that I closed my account with them more than a year ago - obviously their 'system' has not been updated because some (human) idiot behind the computers forgot to do his job on time: will AI really help them, and keep them from bothering me for nothing?

I don't understand all the current rage for integrating AI with just about everything: they are advertising AI-empowered TV, air conditioners and fans already; how much longer before we are sold AI-powered cakes and burgers? As for the supposed urgent need for 'integrating' AI in the classroom at all levels from school to university, exactly what does it mean? Think of a boy in high school (and remember I have been a professionally successful teacher for forty odd years): he must use his mind, and that in a disciplined, rigorous, prolonged, attentive fashion whether he wants to learn a language, mathematics or chemistry, right? He can at most be helped or hindered depending on whether his teachers are informed and skilled and wise at their work or duds. If the teacher can't teach well and the student cannot or does not want to learn, there will be no learning. Are there any two ways about it? How exactly will AI help to achieve that goal faster and better? Meanwhile, I can vouch from my own very recent classroom experience that a few of my students - actually, the stupidest of them, meaning those who cannot even understand why they are coming to me in the first place - have already 'integrated' AI into their work long before the bureaucrats and school boards have drawn up their plans. One boy, whom I caught out because he was using words in his answers which were far beyond his ken confessed that he was using the summary of the comprehension passage that ChatGPT had made for him, because the original was 'too much' for him to grasp. And I hear that PhD scholars are doing virtually the same thing simply because they cannot write basic prose any more. Is that a prevision of the near future? Why not shut down this whole thing called education once and for all, then?

And also meanwhile, the head of Google's AI development division is warning today's teenagers in school to prepare to handle AI in order to stay relevant in the job market 10-15 years from now. Others of his ilk are confidently (and apparently gleefully-) predicting job losses by the hundreds of millions, tens of millions of college graduates among them. So what kind of jobs will remain? A few thousand AI geeks, and maybe those whose work cannot be taken away by AI? Cooks and nurses, fish vendors and farmers and washermen, for example, since sufficiently skilled and versatile robots have turned out to be prohibitively expensive, if at all technically feasible? And maybe a few real teachers, serving those who still really want to learn something and know that real learning of anything involves close face to face human interaction, whether that be kung fu or literature?

And do the tech wizards really think that the hundreds of millions who lose their jobs in their youth (or never find any) are going to take it lying down?

Blogs, books and YouTube

 I am jotting down several passing ideas here before they fly away:

Seventeen years ago I wrote a post titled 'Forty five and counting'. I should have written one headed 'Sixty and still counting' in 2023, but I somehow forgot. Maybe I'll make up for it when I am sixty five, if I am still around and capable of thinking and writing!

I just learned that there are still elders in our town who are feeding their teenage children or grandchildren the old chestnut that 'If you work hard through school and college, you will have a good, assured and cushy career ever afterwards.' Who says only kids believe in fairy tales?

That old post called 'Lust Stories' is now beginning to irritate me. It was meant to be a sober review of a four-part movie which dealt - pretty soberly on the whole, can't even be called soft porn - with the issue of contemporary sexuality and related problems in India. It stays perpetually high on the most read list, for an absurd reason, as my Google search history recently informed me: many people stumble upon it while randomly searching for smut! I don't want to delete the post for good, but someone please tell me what else I can do about it.

I do wish that those who are enjoying my weekly storytelling on YouTube would write longer and more articulate comments (somehow just 'Great story Sir!' sounds very flat and unfulfilling), and spread the word among relatives and friends. I am glad to note that a few of my pupils' parents have become regular and appreciative listeners already. I shall be delighted to get advice about how to spread my reach beyond the immediate circle of students and ex students. Viewers are also welcome to suggest what they would like to hear next, as long as they don't repeat books and authors who have been done to death already.

I was going through posts written years ago, and I am beginning to wonder that I have written so much for so long on so many serious subjects. Besides raising a child and teaching for more than four decades, I shall definitely remember writing this blog as the most important thing I did with my life. How much it benefited others I shall leave my readers to decide.

Coming to books, I read something wonderful recently: The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King, which tells about a young female assistant (and gradually friend) that Sherlock Holmes finds in his advancing years, someone who is both his intellectual equal and on his side (unlike Moriarty), and who first trains under him then starts solving cases with him. The book was written in 1994 - strange that I didn't come across it for so long (thanks once again, Pupu)! - and it evolved into a 20-volume series. It was pure delight to read it: find out why for yourself. But maybe I shall not read the succeeding volumes: I don't want to contemplate Holmes growing increasingly rusty and senile. Healthy bit of feminism there, too - though the author has been most ahistorical in ascribing King Henry VIII's inability to have a legitimate son to his alleged syphilis (Henry did actually have more than one son), and it is a trifle rich to hear the girl saying to herself 'What do men know about driving?' while herself driving like a crazy drunk, barely avoiding serious accidents.

Tailpiece: I don't know whether I should be writing this - these days people are being hauled away by the police for less - but I greatly enjoyed listening to Avay Shukla's interview by Karan Thapar on YouTube today. Mr. Shukla, a retired IAS officer and popular blogger, has written in a recently published book that India is turning into a land of duffers. Look him up on Wikipedia, and watch the interview if you care and dare.

I end for now by asking my most favourite old boys and girls a very important question. Suppose I entirely stop giving private tuition to high-school goers at 65, what would be the best thing for me to do next? And how can you help me do it? I am asking very seriously, mind you, because it is about how I can most enjoy the dusk of my life.

AI rising, NI sinking

I still read The Telegraph of Calcutta daily, despite all the fluff and the garbage, and today the same paper carried two very, very thought-provoking, disturbing reports. One is that the new Pope, Leo XIV (a mathematics scholar, too!), in his first public audience, has identified AI as one of the greatest contemporary threats to 'human dignity, justice and labour'. Go back to the post titled The Life of the Spirit (first part), where I quoted Stephen Hawking gloomily forecasting the threat to civilization posed by AI. The very highest, keenest, most informed minds from  the worlds of science and spirituality now agree on this, as do humble I, while schoolteachers, journalists, engineers (at least a section of them) and tech entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley are going gaga over how rapidly technology is advancing, and what a golden age it is about to usher in for humankind. Bears thinking about, doesn't it? Keeps reminding me about Tagore's Muktodhara and Roktokorobi, and movies like Wall-E and the Matrix series.

The other was a recent interview of Shashi Tharoor, who has acquired a cult following as a user of 'sophisticated' English. In reply to a question, he said that more worrying to him than the rapidly diminishing power of communication among people (at least linguistic communication) in the age of Whatsapp and Instagram is the equally rapidly diminishing power of comprehension: people no longer have the intelligence, common sense, knowledge, wisdom or patience to reflect and understand anything that is nuanced, ambivalent, multi-layered in meaning: everything has to be reduced into simple binaries, right or wrong, good or bad, true or false, at the comic book level: whether it is about Gandhi deserving respect or Germany deserving all the blame for World War I or Trump being God or the Devil incarnate. I quote Tharoor: "... there have been studies demonstrating that today's young people are not able to engage with complex texts and in-depth reading. And this is really worrying... because unless one reads in depth, one is not able to gain very complicated ideas. You are then dealing with superficial ideas expressed in simple terms, which are very short... and that can really make you far more susceptible to propaganda... because you simply don't have the background and the complexity to understand that the issue is more complicated than they are describing, that there are actually more nuances and elements in it... that is really worrying".

I can only vouch for how absolutely right he is. I have been giving vocabulary and comprehension exercises to thousands over nearly four decades, and I have seen the precipitous decline in average mental capacity. I can also see, from the contents of syllabi and public examinations, how there is a concerted, global enterprise of deliberately dumbing down people by the hundreds of millions, so that they can grow up to become only drudges and mindless, undiscriminating consumers/publicizers of worthless goods and political propaganda: that alone is science or history which The Great Leader and his billionaire-techie friends say it is. AI  rapidly rising, NI rapidly sinking... I shudder to think of the world in the making.

Nor'wester!

I just want to put this on record: after many, many years, it is actually cold here today, on May the first! After the third kaalbaishakhi of the season (that itself had been playing truant for three successive summers at least), the temperature fell so sharply in the evening that I had to switch off the fans, and some of the kids were shivering as we stood in the squall outside my classroom, waiting for their parents. Well, at 21 degrees celsius right now, it at least feels cold, given that barely a week ago the mercury was nudging 39, and the weather app said it 'felt like' 46! 

Can't remember when the weather gods made me so happy in the recent past. All you who sleep tonight, sleep well, wherever you are.