Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Kids use AI for their schoolwork. Plenty of them use it, not as an assistant, but as the entity that does all the work. That is a problem obviously.   This blog is not on a solution for that problem (None exists. Not yet anyway). Instead, this blog is based on a post by college student Maximilian Milovidov on a course called Writing AI . What’s unique about it? “(It) might be the only one on campus where artificial intelligence was not prohibited but, rather,  required .” The spirit of this course is an interesting experiment: “What if we taught students to use AI critically, rather than insisting they ignore it or assume they're using it to cheat?” AI, after all, he says, is here to stay. You can’t wish it away any more than our ancestors could wish away the printing press.   Here’s how the course works. Students have to bring their own ideas and outlines to the class. “We fed drafts into a chatbot while documenting its suggestions and then explaining...

If you want info on questions like how to update your Aadhar card or increase views on your YouTube page, you do a search in all the usual sites like YouTube or Google. All free. So why would anyone pay for videos on such topics. Yet that is exactly what the Indian app named Seekho does. And millions pay for it. Dharmesh BA looks into Seekho . “Why would someone pay for what they could find free? What is it about the product, the design, the psychology of the user journey that turns free content into a subscription business?”   On YouTube, anyone can upload anything. On Seekho , only curated “showrunners” can post stuff. The company picks potential content creators, gives them topics, posts their videos and sees how viewers respond. If it draws clicks, the creator is enlisted (and paid). Else he is dropped. This solves the quality-drowned-in-quantity problem of much of the free Internet.   How much does it cost? ₹1 for the first week, ₹149 per month thereafter (on ...

The war on Iran has created oil shortage and oil price hikes. What I missed, in the middle of the war, was that the International Energy Agency (IEA) — the world’s top energy watchdog — asked India to share its oil with the world!   Wait a minute. Given that India imports 85% of its oil, how can we possibly have oil to share? What was the basis for the IEA ask anyway? Therein lies a tale, explains Nithin Sasikumar.   The story starts way back in 1973, when the Arab countries launched a surprise war on Israel. The US airlifted weapons and supplies to help Israel. The furious Arab states imposed a ban on all oil exports to the US and any Western country that supported Israel. Oil prices in the West quadrupled. Petrol pumps began to run out of oil. The West realized the importance of building an “oil cushion”, oil reserves that could last at least 90 days. They formed the IEA, an agency formed and led by (who else?) the West. “So if a supply disruption were to hit the...

“Social reality” is a concept that exists only in the human brain, writes Lisa Barrett in Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain . Social reality is anything we consider real though nothing in physics or chemistry would make it real – examples include national borders; or the idea that a specific portion of the earth’s orbit around the sun is January.   Scientists believe that the ability to construct social reality is because of a suite of capabilities of the (human) brain called the Five C’s. Creativity : Someone needs to decide to draw a line and call it the border of a “country”, then define what a country is. That needs creativity. Communication : The idea of a country can be explained to others. Via, say, language. Copying : This refers to the ability to teach and learn the practices of others. Only if newcomers and children can be taught or if one can learn the customs of a new place can social reality continue to exist for very long periods. Cooperation : We ...

“We behave better when we believe we’re being watched”, writes Brian Klass in Corruptible . Today, that line brings to mind CCTV cameras that are all over the place, and government systems that could get info on our online habits. But long, long ago, when policing systems were practically non-existent, how could one make people follow basic rules? This wasn’t just a law and order problem for kings. As we know all too well, if we can’t trust people and there are no systems in place to penalize and punish wrongdoers, then economic activities (and associated prosperity) never get going…   Until policing and judicial systems could be built, the way to build some basis for trust amongst people in most places was the concept of religion: “The world’s major religions are overflowing with reminders that God is watching.” Religion helped build some degree of trust, as long as everyone believed that one would pay, “either in this life or the next”.   Klass humourously calls...

My 14 yo daughter has noticed what I do in my office calls. Unlike my wife, I am usually on group calls, not one-on-one calls. This means that the parts relevant to me in the call can vary wildly. Between hardly needed to needed periodically to being the presenter. Accordingly, how much attention I pay during those calls varies wildly. As you might have guessed, my daughter picked only the data points that made me look inattentive or worse.   Let me elaborate on the “or worse” part. Sometimes, a question will be sprung at me in the middle of a call and I would not even have heard the question! Upon which, I follow the time-tested practice of blaming it on bad network connection, and ask them to repeat the question. Such instances became Exhibit A for the prosecution daughter.   At other times, I have been on my phone during calls, scrolling through various social media. Not only did these become Exhibit B, but they also got me branded (with exaggerated finger wagging ...