The Irony Of Fools
Losing Our Humanity While Teaching Machines To Be Human
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Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts — Søren Kierkegaard
A significant part of the world is busy imbuing Artificial Intelligence (AI) in machines. Another part is busy putting its intellect behind identity politics and yet another is busy propogating identity politics to make a quick buck.The people on different sides of these identities don’t talk to each other. They have been progressively dehumanized to the point where there are no humans anymore. There are only symbols of a particular ideology. The people with a cosmic identity i.e. the people in the middle don’t know how to bridge the gap and restore sanity. They want to help but simply don’t know how. In software terms, there is no API (glue) that brings disparate world views together. This article explores the irony behind breathing humanity in machines while losing our own.
I don’t know whether to feel happy or sad when I hear the terms Application Programming Interface (API) or sandbox. Apparently, API’s are the glue that allows applications (such as the one on our cell phones) to talk to each other. Quite ironic considering humans don’t talk to each other but are busy making programs talk to each other. I am not saying API’s are not great. In fact, they can herald an era of inclusive finance if we chose to deploy them to do so. However, we are busy trying to bracket ourselves to limited identities while training computers to have a larger consciousness. There is no sandbox where differing world views can play together and co-create something new — a middle ground of sorts. We always talk about a sandbox where the government and private enterprise can collaborate to create new innovative technologies. How, then, are we missing the larger priority ie the future of humans as a species? This is not a set of words describing a doomsday scenario. These words are a requiem for us to not wait for an existential threat to unite us. Although, we are very close to such a scenario.
The Anthropocene
Our planet is approximately 4.57 billion years. Geologists typically measure the age of the planet depending on layers of rocks formed at every stage. There are four…
