Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In his book on the future of AI (Artificial Intelligence), Life 3.0 , Max Tegmark talks of the importance of ensuring its goals are aligned with ours. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, warns Tegmark. Just think of King Midas: he got literally what he asked for, except that wasn’t what he wanted. Or all those stories where the genie grants three wishes, which almost inevitably end with the third wish being: “Please undo the first two wishes, because that’s not what I really wanted.” Be careful what you wish for: it might come true.   Put differently, this is the danger with an AI that takes our instructions literally:   “The real risk with AGI isn’t malice but competence.” So where does that leave us? “All these examples show that to figure out what people really want, you can’t merely go by what they say. You also need a detailed model of the world, including the many shared preferences that we tend to leave unstated because we consider them obvious, such as that ...

My brief year and a half stint in the US was way back in 2000, long, long before Trump. Back then, I used to hear the words “liberal” and “conservative” used in American politics and it confused me greatly. Because “liberal” wasn’t always a positive term as used in their political debates. Nor was “conservative” always a negative term! So what was going on? Much later, I finally got it. “Liberal” in American politics is the equivalent of “secular” in Indian politics. In other words, the dictionary meaning of those terms is totally different from what those terms mean in domestic politics. The former is the literal meaning of the term whereas the latter is based on how people who claim to follow that value actually act. Fareed Zakaria, the CNN host, recently pointed out how accentuated this trend has become ever since Trump was elected: “At the heart of liberty in the Western world has been freedom of speech. From the beginning, people understood that this meant protecting...

There’s that famous line from Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong’s song, War , that goes: “ War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothin'! ”. A lot of such opposition to all wars comes right in the middle of a war (The lines above were written during the Vietnam War) or right after a major one ends. But does anybody subscribe to that view entirely? Does India’s war that created Bangaladesh qualify as a useless war? Or the first Gulf War that freed Kuwait? Or how about the dharma yudh of the Mahabharata? So what’s common to those 3 wars? They all had a purpose that was defined before the war started, not some noble cause associated after the event by the victors. Which is why I totally disagree with Ambrose Bierce’s stance (as described below by Benjamin Schwarz): “Emerging from the charnel house, (Ambrose) Bierce shunned any effort to invest the butchery with meaning. . . . For him the war was nothing more—could be nothing more—than a meaningless and murderous slaug...