Viswanathan K's Thoughts

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...

Remember those award ceremonies where the person on stage reads out the winner after opening an envelope? In 2016, at the Oscars, the winner of the best movie was called out wrongly on stage… and to millions on TV.   Tim Harford’s podcast explores how that happened. Far more importantly (and scarily), it cites the same pattern to be behind other far more disastrous events. And to top it off, that pattern had been pointed out by good old Galileo!   So what led to the Oscars gaffe? The Best Movie envelope had the name of a movie and an actress . Why the actress name? Because it was the wrong envelope! But wait, there’s more. The previous award had been for the Best Actress: this envelope was for that category. Wait a minute, wouldn’t the previous award not have been called out wrongly in that case? Aha, they kept duplicates of each envelope. It was the wrong duplicate that had been handed on stage. But why did they keep duplicates? As a safety measure, as a backup syst...

Google’s famous 20% rule encourages its employees to spend 20% of their time working on ideas that interest them without worrying how the company would make money out of them. Of the huge number of mini-projects that Google launches, more than 60% fail. Yes, that’s a failure rate of more than 60%. So one guy told Eric Schmidt, Google’s ex-CEO, that the company’s attitude towards experimentation, trials and risk of failure didn’t make any sense: “You tell employees to waste their time, 20% of the week, you have this strange management approach where people are treated like peers and you don’t mind failure. This makes no sense what so ever.” If a company like Google has such a high failure rate, I felt that it explained why our education system never encourages us to take a chance, to try out something new (or something never tried before). If you’re that likely to fail, surely, it must be safer to play safe: do things by rote, repeat what’s already been done and proven, right? Or wer...