Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Next day, the driver took us to the Khardung La pass that connects the Indus valley to the Shyok valley. It’s at a height of over 17,982 feet. The roads are curvy and narrow, like the ones to Ooty. Except these go to a much, much higher altitude and you can see snow on the mountains. Even on these roads (and everywhere else we went), we saw large groups of bikers –it was impressive how long these guys could ride.   Along the way, we walked up a snowy slope, had some fun in the snow, and took photos. Like all tourist spots, the top of the pass has a shop that sells the T-shirts and other memorabilia. Except these are sold by the Army! My wife and I bought them for ourselves, but my 11 yo daughter wasn’t interested. I mocked her saying that she felt this was too cheesy, but the I Love NYC shirts aren’t. It had no effect. Oh well, her loss.   On the way down, we stopped at the 108 feet Maitreya Buddha . Buddhist structures are so tall, colorful and spacious.   ...

For our Himalayan vacation, we went to Ladakh . The view from the plane was great – on most flights, you see nothing below when there is a gap in the clouds. Here, the Himalayas were visible in almost every gap.   We landed in the afternoon at Leh , which is at a height of 11,500 feet (For comparison, both Srinagar and Vaishno Devi are at 5,200 feet, half the height). Our itinerary for that day? Do nothing, just rest and acclimatize to the lesser air and oxygen, our travel agency had told us (Here, you need permits for everything, so it’s best to go through a local agent). (In case you wondered, it’s the same concentration of oxygen – 21% - just that there’s less air at that altitude, and 21% of “lesser” translates to less oxygen)   The hotel we stayed in was very luxurious (the Zen Ladakh ) – it was one of the venues for the G20 summit. It was centrally heated, and to my 11 yo daughter’s immense relief, had free Wi-fi. That evening, we walked to and from the nea...

When I turn a globe such that the Pacific Ocean is facing me, it’s possible to adjust it such that no land is visible. The opposite isn’t possible though: there is no orientation of the globe where I can see only land. That’s a perfect visualization for Philip Ball’s line from his biography of water, H2O : “We call our home Earth – but Water would be more apt.”   Why does Earth have (so much) water, whereas Mars doesn’t? After all, our theories say that when the planets were being formed, ice-laden comets were bombarding planets all the time, so why shouldn’t Mars still have water? The answer has two parts. And both parts are based on the same root cause: “The key is size.”   The first consequence of the smaller size? “ Being smaller than Earth, Mars cooled off sooner from its fiery youth.” As it cooled, its volcanic activity seized up. And: “Without the churning of a hot mantle, Mars developed no plate tectonics.” The (initial) water on Mars eroded its roc...

Digital public infrastructure. Or DPI. Examples include UPI, subsidy transfer, Digi Locker, Digi Yatra and many other such services. Which is why, as Rahul Matthan writes : “Small wonder that so many of us have come to assume that for all things DPI, India is the global epicentre of innovation.”   But, as Matthan points out, many other countries have built some DPI too. During COVID, usage of digital wallets in Sierra Leone boomed. mPESA in Kenya for money transfer. A few Caribbean countries have issued a joint digital currency, the DCash. The BPNT program in Indonesia is used for the delivery of subsidized rice to its intended beneficiaries. In Ghana, they have the Safe Water Network that allows payment via SMS codes to improve water delivery.   The biggest use of such digital systems across countries seems to be wrt payments. But, in addition, as you saw above: “This DPI approach had significantly accelerated the achievement of their societal objectives.” These...

Water is the liquid we see everywhere, and thus the one we take to be representative of liquids in general. Which is why we don’t realize how “profoundly odd” water is, how un-representative of liquids it is, writes Philip Ball in H2O . He compares it to using the lives of the residents of Buckingham Palace as representative for British life in general! “They’re probably the most written-about family in the country – but you could scarcely have chosen a less representative household.”   Let’s see the ways in which water is atypical. Most liquids become denser when they freeze. Not water. Ice is famously less dense than water. Which is why ice floats on water, whereas the solid forms of other liquids sink to the bottom of their respective liquids. (This, by the way, has enormous implications for life. Ice is formed at the top of oceans, not bottom. And so when summer comes, the ice at the top melts. If instead, ice had sunk to the bottom, it would never un-freeze and progress...

Did you know the tale behind why the “normal” body temperature is considered to be 98.6˚F? Tim Harford tells it in his book, How to Make the World Add Up .   More than a century back, a German doctor named Carl Wunderlich assembled over a million readings from 25,000 patients. Over a period of 18 years. The average of those million readings became the de facto answer. However: “Wunderlich’s numbers were off; we’re normally a little cooler (by about a Fahrenheit degree).” How could he have gotten it wrong despite that many readings? Well, for one, his thermometers were never calibrated. Another reason was that he took readings via the arm pit.   But the biggest reason why the number 98.6˚F has stuck is what I found the most interesting.   Wunderlich’s readings were in centigrade, and his average value was 37˚C. The implicit margin of error was 1 degree (the accuracy of his thermometer), i.e., the band between 36.5 to 37.5˚C. He wrote his articles describin...

The control problem. Can one control a superintelligence? Alternately, can one design it with some basic guiding principles as input to prevent bad outcomes?   The answer to both options is almost certainly No, writes Nick Bostrom in Superintelligence . Controlling a more intelligent entity? How likely is that? “(An) AI would realize it is under surveillance and adjust its thinking accordingly.” How about boxing an AI to a very limited and controlled environment? Won’t work – as I wrote in an earlier blog , ChatGPT has already shown that it can outsmart, trick or manipulate humans to get access to what it wants. In future, that might mean an Internet connection, more resources, whatever.   Feed it some core “good guy” principles? Anyone who has raised a kid can tell you it is impossible to frame such rules – every rule has an exception; every rule is open to misinterpretation, both innocently and maliciously; every rule has loopholes.   In any case, says B...

Why does the Center have so much power in India? Why doesn’t the country have a more federal (more power to the states) structure? Nilakantan RS goes into that question in South vs North . If you expect all blame to fall on the two most powerful PM’s of India – Indira Gandhi and Narendra Modi – you will be disappointed. But if you want to understand a complex topic, read on.   The idea of more power to the Center comes from our colonial masters, the British. After all, they wanted to extract maximum benefit from the unit called India – they weren’t trying to administer each region best. Back then, when Bengal was given maximum powers as the Center, the states like Madras Presidency and Bombay Presidency protested. To little avail.   Ok, but why didn’t we change that at the time of independence? As independence approached, states did ask for greater power. Jinnah was one of its supporters – he was hedging his bets. If a separate country would not be created for the Musl...

How would an AI/superintelligence go rogue/take over the world? Nick Bostrom predicts several ways this would happen in Superintelligence . Think of these possible scenarios, to get a hang of what could happen, not as a necessarily accurate description.   If the AI concludes we humans would get in the way, it may bide its time to develop a killer strike capability before it acts on its ultimate goal. If that weapon uses self-replicating tech, then only a few units would suffice – it won’t need to wait to create a massive stockpile, he warns.   Or the superintelligence may attain power by: “… hijacking political processes, subtly manipulating financial markets, biasing information flows, or hacking into human made weapons systems.” When I read those lines in 2013, it sounded very far-fetched. Today, it doesn’t.   It’s not necessary the AI would target us humans. If it doesn’t feel we are a threat, it may let us be. Or we may become collateral damage – unint...

Like most democracies, India has a constitutional provision for periodically updating the number of parliamentary seats, based on the population count. The idea behind that, as Nilakantan RS explains in South vs North : “We want the will of the people to be reflected in a democracy. And the way to ensure that is to make sure all voters are equally represented in Parliament.” Equally represented – that’s the key phrase. Say, each MP is supposed to represent 10 people, then if a state has 100 people, it should have 100 ÷ 10 = 10 MP’s. It follows that if the population of a state increases to 110, then it should have 110 ÷ 10 = 11 MP’s.   During the Emergency, Indira Gandhi put this delimitation (reassignment of MP counts) on hold for 25 years . Why? One of the things she wanted, however crudely and badly it may have been implemented, was to reduce population growth. Why should states that increased their population be rewarded with more MP’s, she reasoned. (In 2001, the free...

With the spurt in what AI can do, I re-read Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence . In the intro, he had written: “The control problem – the problem of how to control what the superintelligence (aka AI) would do – is quite difficult.” Even more ominously: “It also looks like we will only get one chance. Once unfriendly superintelligence exists, it will prevent us from replacing it or changing its preferences.”   Some feel this is an excessively pessimistic view. Won’t an AI rise be gradual, allowing us time to formulate and tweak our response? Not necessarily, argues Bostrom. Why not? “The (AI) train might not pause or even decelerate at Humanville Station. It is likely to swoosh right by.” In other words, AI might just explode, growing exponentially. It would hit human level abruptly and then continue on its upward trajectory at that same exponential pace, leaving us no time to react.   Now keep in mind Bostrom wrote his book back (it feels a lifetime ago) in 201...

In South vs North , Nilakantan RS starts off by pointing out that: “At the time of independence, the southern states were indistinguishable from the rest of India in terms of their development metrices.” That is surprising. How come the two have diverged so sharply in a such a short period of around 70-75 years? (The book goes into that at length, and I’ll write about that later, but that’s not the topic of this blog).   Vaclav Slim makes an interesting point about how to compare numbers and statistics in Numbers Don’t Lie . One way is what we did above – look at the time frame (70 odd years) over which the divergence has happened. But that’s not the only way. This example from Slim’s book will help understand the point.   Slim points out that the per capita energy consumption of Nigeria is five times less than that of Japan or France. The obvious fact leaps out – the factor of 5 difference. Slim asks us to next look at how long back Japan and France consumed the ...

I started writing this series of blogs based on the surge in what AI’s can do, the most famous example of which is ChatGPT. I was basing the blogs on Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence , a book I read back in 2013. Several things that felt far-fetched then seem increasingly a possibility to be considered seriously. (Btw,  Geoffrey Hinton, one of the AI “godfathers”, quit Google recently saying some of the chatbots are “quite scary”).   Let me start with what Bostrom meant by the term “superintelligence”. He starts with a warning on that term “intelligence”. He points out that our (human) tendency to think of intelligence in human-centric terms is dangerous when it comes to AI. He quotes another AI specialist on the topic: “The human tendency to think of “village idiot” and “Einstein” as the extreme ends of the intelligence scale, instead of indistinguishable points on the scale of minds-in-general.” We say dolphins or chimpanzees are smart, but don’t distinguish individ...

Tim Harford describes a very interesting incident in How to Make the World Add Up . It’s about an art expert named Abraham Bredius. The man’s speciality was Vermeer. He was a proven expert who had spotted many frauds of Rembrandt and Vermeer paintings over a career spanning decades. And yet he got fooled by a fraud Vermeer painting titled Christ at Emmaus .   Harford’s digs into how an expert could have been fooled by a painting like Emmaus . Sure, anyone can be fooled, make an odd mistake. But this painting didn’t even look anything great, not remotely comparable to any of Vermeer’s masterpieces. So how could someone Bredius fall for it?   The short answer: it fed into Bredius’ history; what he wanted to believe.   Now for the longer version. Bredius had a fascination for Vermeer’s religious works. Only two existed. The first one had been identified by Bredius himself. The second one he’d declared to not be a Vermeer. Other experts had disagreed, and the con...

I was amused to find yet another thing ChatGPT can do. One guy asked the tool to identify the author of an article based on its first 4 paragraphs. ChatGPT correctly identified the author! (The author in question, Ben Thompson, publishes on the Net, so the dataset to compare against was large enough).   ChatGPT then explained how it had arrived at the answer. Read the entire explanation here (it’s quite short)– it sounds exactly the way a human would reason. Scary? Impressive? Both?   ChatGPT, like all AI’s, builds its own models, writes Ben Thompson . And like humans, its model can be wrong. But it can’t realize that. There’s even a technical term for it – hallucination : “In artificial intelligence (AI), a hallucination or artificial hallucination (also occasionally called delusion) is a confident response by an AI that does not seem to be justified by its training data. For example, a hallucinating chatbot with no knowledge of Tesla’s revenue might internally p...

W hen we visited Maldives a couple of years ago, we realized the US dollar is accepted as legal tender everywhere. Even though the country has its own currency, the Maldivian Rufiyaa. In her book, The Almighty Dollar , Dharshini David says there’s a name for this: “parallel currency”.   One can see why tiny, tourist’y nations like Maldives would accept the dollar (it saves tourists the hassle and costs of conversions). Or why a country like Panama (think of all the fees in the Panama Canal) would do the same. But the dollar is also the parallel currency in countries where the local folks have no faith in their economy and/or government. Like Russia when the USSR collapsed. The same reason applies in several Latin American countries and Cambodia even today . Of course, a parallel currency also makes corruption and black money even more easy: transactions in the parallel currency never show up in the country’s financial systems.   And then there are countries that have ...