Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Where are we wrt Artificial Intelligence? Facebook uses it for targeted ads and tagging your photos. Microsoft and Apple use AI to run their digital assistants on your phone. Google’s search engine uses AI. To some extent, we are already a weak form of cyborgs: don’t our phones feel like an extension of us? But this level of AI isn’t what scares its detractors: after all, none of the above seems to run the risk of running amok and taking over the world. Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Telsa, is one of the guys in the tech field who is scared about AI: “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he’s like, yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon? Doesn’t work out.” Here’s a graphic on different people’s takes on AI: Given how tied AI is to Google’s areas of operation (search, driverless cars etc), they have been buying up almost every interesting company in t...

As algorithms make more and more decisions, any accusation of bias or an outright error in the decision gets redirected at the algorithm. Seth Godin cites a few such examples : -          That important mail that landed in the spam folder; -          Who gets stopped at airports for extensive checks; -          Google’s search results; -          Facebook’s news feed. As Godin says, this begins to sound more and more like “hiding behind the algorithm”. But why blame the algorithm “as if it wrote itself”? Isn’t it obvious, asks Godin, that “someone wrote that code”? What happens next when AI (an algorithm) begins to write new algorithms?! “As AI gets ever better at machine learning, we'll hear over and over that the output isn't anyone's responsibility, because, hey, the algorithm wrote the code.” While there...

Claude Lévi-Strauss once said: “The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions.” Of course, that’s true for many areas outside science as well. In his wonderful book, The Gene , Siddhartha Mukherjee gives an awesome example of the danger of mis-defining something: “If we define “intelligence” as the performance on only one kind of problem in only one kind of test, then we will, indeed, find a “gene for intelligence”. In A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , the inhabitants of Magrathea didn’t know Lévi-Stauss’ point. They asked their super computer the answer to the “Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything”. After millions of years of computing, the super computer states the answer (drum rolls, please): “Forty-two.” The characters in the story were as dismayed, perplexed and disappointed as you probably were by the answer. And so the computer explained: “Once you understand what the question actua...

In his wonderful book on the topic of predictions, The Signal and the Noise , Nate Silver has one chapter on the match between then world champion Garry Kasparov and the computer program Deep Blue. Since it is not practical to analyze every conceivable move to endless depths (even for computers), both humans and computers break down the ultimate objective into shorter term tactics, like winning a pawn here or a piece there. Kasparov tried to exploit that tendency by “baiting it into mindlessly pursuing plans that did not improve its strategic position”: “A classic example of the computer’s biases is its willingness to accept sacrifices (trade a better piece for a weaker one).” In the first game, Deep Blue took the bait via just such a sacrifice. While neither Kasparov nor the computer could calculate all the moves from there onwards, Kasparov knew from experience that, in such positions, “with such pressure the odds are heavily in his favor”. Kasparov was right: he went on t...

I was tickled by these two excerpts on the whole concept of pantheon of gods. So get on board for a tongue in cheek ride. In his novel, Cryptonomicon , Neal Stephenson made this very amusing point about the pantheon of Greek gods: “And yet there is something about the motley asymmetry of this pantheon that makes it more credible. Like the Periodic Table of the Elements or the family tree of the elementary particles, or just about any anatomical structure that you might pull up out of a cadaver, it has enough of a pattern to give our minds something to work on and yet an irregularity that indicates some kind of organic provenance—you have a sun god and a moon goddess, for example, which is all clean and symmetrical, and yet over here is Hera, who has no role whatsoever except to be a literal bitch goddess, and then there is Dionysus who isn’t even fully a god—he’s half human—but gets to be in the Pantheon anyway and sit on Olympus with the Gods, as if you went to the Supreme Cou...

I remember the hardest part about learning to read the time was not the minute hand part. The minute part was easy: depending on the age you were learning to do this, you used one of two techniques: -          The multiplication table of 5 (me); -          Or skip counting by 5 (my daughter). For me, the hard part back then was reading the hour. Why? Say it’s 4:50. The hour hand is almost at 5; so you had to decide the hour not only by where the hour hand was. But when it was 5:10, you had to use the decide the hour by where the hour hand was. The minute value had to be used to decide which hour value to pick… which was confusing, and insane! Now that whole confusion of the hour hand was rooted in the fact that clocks were mechanical devices and the hands moved bit by bit. In the present day, you could just read the digital display (phone, tablet, PC, laptop, or if anyone still has it, a digita...

When the topic of judicial activism comes up, many argue that it is necessary given how unwilling our legislature is to do its job, namely to evaluate issues and frame the right laws. Jallikattu is quoted as a recent example from this perspective. Others worry whether a not-elected-by-the-people judiciary would end up subverting the whole idea of democracy. They argue that the job of the judiciary is to enforce the laws in place, not make laws. Santosh Desai raises another aspect for this debate, namely that a legislature is designed to consider all angles to an issue, to negotiate the best way forward in the “larger ecosystem of competing interests”, and to ensure that the “consequences of the proposed action are understood in a systemic sense”: “Laws cannot be so blinded by a single desirable outcome so as to ignore all the consequences that ripple outwards nor can they overlook the differential impact they can have on different constituencies.” Take the recent example o...

“A storm is blowing in from Paradise… This storm is what we call progress.” -          Walter Benjamin’s essay, “On the Concept of History” As the liberal left and its ideology finds itself under assault in all the major democracies, Tim Carmody points out the problem of believing in a direction to history: “It’s not a sudden eruption of chaos, but a manifestation of an ongoing vortex of chaos that stretches back indefinitely, without any unique origin. When we’re thrust into danger, in a flash we get a more truthful glimpse of history than the simple narratives that suffice in moments of safety.” Carmody doesn’t mince words in pointing out who believes in a direction to history: it’s the defeated or oppressed ones. Heaven is (only) for the poor. Labour will overthrow its chains. You get the idea: “The perfect theory that links events into beautiful chains of causality is elusive enough to be a dream for a fallen people.” But th...

After Trump won, there were murmurs in the West that Angela Merkel was the new “leader of the free world”, a title associated with the US. This was such a stupid though that most non-Western people smirked at it, “How many divisions does Merkel command? If she is the leader, Vladimir Putin must be laughing”. But (lack of) military might aside, does Germany in any way make for a good leader of the West? She certainly has one of the key things needed for the job, namely hypocrisy. After the recent terrorist attack on the St. Petersburg metro, Berlin refused to light up the Brandenburg Gate in the colors of the Russian flag, a gesture they have shown for previous terrorist attacks in France and Britain. Ah yes, it was “gunmen” in Mumbai, but terrorists in Europe. And Russia? Serves them right for interfering in Syria. And Chechnya. But is just hypocrisy enough for the job? The Americans don’t show any great remorse for their worst acts. Like what they did to the native Indians o...

Here’s something that every one of us knows from childhood: -          It is the easiest thing to multiply two numbers, no matter how large they are (It may take time, but the “how” part is child’s play. Literally.); -          But there is no easy way to find the factors of a number, other than hit and trial, which can take forever. Such operations (easy in one direction, but impossibly difficult in the other) are called “Humpty Dumpty functions”, after the most famous egg in history. This belief in the Humpty Dumpty nature of the problem of factorization is at the heart of most encryption algorithms, including the ones used for your financial transactions on the Internet. No mathematician has found a way to factorize a number easily; so the belief is well placed indeed. Or is it? In his book, The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks noticed something very surprising about a...

History is taught in schools as if there is a clear cause-and-effect relation between events and a certain inevitability to what happened. And yet, none of the events that happen during our own lifetime ever seem to indicate any such clarity! Nassim Taleb in his book, The Black Swan , describes this tendency to spin clear stories of all past events as the “narrative fallacy”: “The fallacy is associated with our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths…(our inability) to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship , upon them.” I believe that history just a story where every writer (and reader) thinks that he is wise, without realizing anyone can call himself a genius after the event! Even worse are the people who talk as if history has a direction. Personally, I think this blogger Yago describes things far more accurately: “Act...

In general, acts of oppression are done by the majority against the minority. In general, tolerance (if not respect) for other religions is a good idea. In general, the rich exploit the poor. In general, rule by the majority creates the risk of marginalizing the minority. The key point, however, is that these are just rules of thumb, they are not immutable laws of physics. So it makes sense to periodically check if they still hold true. Or, as with anything in the social world, check if something that started off with the best of intentions is now getting exploited by politicians and common man alike. The left leaners must have started with many such rules of thumb which were perfectly valid when they were formulated. Unfortunately, they stopped doing the periodic checks for continuing validity, and instead started treating the rules of thumb as if they were written in stone. At least that’s what I believe has happened. How else can one explain the stance of the left le...