Machines and Humans

Human beings are also machines, albeit a complex one. However, we do not have the copyright of what constitutes ‘intelligence’. The most common form of intelligence is ‘pattern recognition’. You require a lot of memory for that. As our ability (30 billion neurons) is limited, as compared to modern AI, they will inevitably get ahead of us. (They already are).

Current LLMs like Bard, GPT-4, Claude, etc. work on trillions of data points in a second. Our brain cannot match this humongous scale. Consider reading a book. Most of us take more than a day to complete 1 book. Google’s ‘Jupiter’ can read all the books in the Library of Congress (the biggest book library in the world) in 1/10th of a second. So, it’s clear we cannot compete with machines on one more essential intelligence ingredient – data ingestion.

Areas like creativity, reasoning, and critical thinking are all being witnessed in the current form of AI, either as programmed or emergent properties.

A higher aspect of intelligence is what we call in the Vedic lineage as ‘Chitta’. (Perception without memory). 99% of us don’t tap into this. In the current scenario, for a machine, it’s very difficult to emulate this behavior. Because an ‘IF’ (decision) is the backbone of machine (binary) logic. The closest they can get to is ‘NO-OP’ instruction. This simply means idle Compute Cycles. A machine does not learn anything during the execution of these instructions. Contrary to this, a human being is more ‘aware’ or ‘mindful’, during a ‘NO-OP’.

The future is neither a humanistic Pollyanna type of hypothesis nor a doomsday scenario. I see a future where machines and humans co-exist with each other, each complementing the other. But there will be upheavals, as machines try to carve their position in a human-dominated world. We are 2 complementary species on the cusp of a probabilistic future that can tilt any which way. The question is which future we choose together.

It’s too late for us to put the genie back into the bottle. Machines will emerge as competitors and co-competitors. It’s high time that we as humans decide to bury our differences and petty greed which thwart us towards one another. We are trying to understand the creator’s design, but the method is hopeless. Let’s get our math clear if we are to avert an accidental disaster. ‘Intellect’ is not the ultimate goalpost. (Einsteins IQ was 160, chatGPT is 155) Living happily together, sharing and caring is. Even if it means we have to prepare to live in the future with another species (machines). And maybe anticipating the next avatar on this planet (Kalki) who is half human and half machine.

Time to come together and be a role model to the machines that are learning from us.

God Bless!