EVERYBODY’S TALKING ABOUT THE MYRIAD CAPABILITIES OF CHAT GPT-3! ARE WE LOOKING AT AI KILLING EVEN MORE JOBS? SANGEETA WADDHWANI GETS ‘CHATBOTING’ WITH A HOST OF POTENTIALLY IMPACTED PEOPLE TO PRESENT SCENARIOS FROM A TECH ENABLED WORLD WHICH MAY – FRIGHTENINGLY – REPLACE ALL THINGS HUMAN!
Some five or six years ago, one remembers a coffee catch up with a brilliant lawyer friend, Yadu Bhargawan who heard me mourning the commercial demise of print media and he gamely confessed, “Sangeeta AI is going to take over your job, take over my job (he owned his own eponymous law firm)…I am getting into tech! That is one way to stay ahead of the disruption and keep growing.”
True enough…he left Mumbai to set up a tech company in Bangalore, and is now operating offices in Dubai and London. As a former print media journalist, I am, trying to grow new wings in a world saturated with AI, Google apps, social media, and an all digital landscape in general.
CHAT BOTS VS HUMAN BLOGS
I get goosebumps when I look at what the latest AI baby offers…GPT-3 chatbot can blog on any topic, comprehend human speech, voice or text, respond to it, recognise conversations’ contexts, generate predictions, recognise the most important words in sentences, summarise large texts, write essays and translate texts. How many jobs just flew over the cuckoo’s nest?
We read in the book, The Rise of the Robots, that jobs will increasingly go to Robots…an estimated 20 million by 2030! The book cited examples like China’s 24/7 factories, which found robots more suited to humans in every way. Robots did double the work output, required no downtime for sleep, no need for food or salaries. They were great for the bottomline and top line!
A ‘TECH’TONIC NEW WORLD
Everyday a new sky falls and a new horizon dawns…breaking us down as minds, challenging us to do more, be more, holding hands with an AI infused Universe. The video embedded here was just an ordinary clip shot on the phone by a staffer at the Wendell Rodricks store…but the AI boost enabled on Insta Reels, has made it video art!
THE TECH CASSANDRAS
However, the Cassandra Syndrome is already countering this new ‘takeover’ threat. Viraj Mehta, a dear friend who worked for over two decades at Cipla, and is now an independent pharma researcher and writer, warns, “CHAT GPT is now putting together medical papers that are totally fabricated and erroneous. This is dangerous…just like Fake News can be disastrous. Papers written by AI don’t come from a deep understanding of the dangers of misinformation.”
MY BLOG VS AN AI BLOG
I put that theory to the test. Recently I had attended the Jaipur Lit Fest, and wanted to see how my highly personalised take on it on this blogsite compared to what CHAT GPT would write. So I fed the input, ‘Blog about JLF 2023.:’ What emerged were all the principal details..covering the What, When, Where, How and a bit more…but lo…The blog had terribly misleading details..the wrong dates to begin with… (the festival is over but the GTP blog says JLF is from Feb 8 to 12, 2023)! It also mentioned writers who were not present in 2023…like Jhumpa Lahiri and Malala Yousafzai! It says the keynote address was by Noble Prize winner Economist Amartya Sen….but this year’s keynote address was by recipient of thhe Noble Prize for Literature, Abdulrazak Gurnah! So I feel both relief and far less redundant seeing this is a very early stage and unreliable chatbot/content resource. Certainly useful for other purposes…but not blogging for sure… and certainly not research papers in pharmaceuticals!
AI REPLACING ARTISTS?
I was just walking around Mumbai’s iconic Jehangir Art Gallery during the Kalaghods Festival yesterday and saw a host of cutting edge works on the theme of THE AJANTA PROJECT by students. (Do see some of the images below!)
However in the introduction to the show there was a fear expressed collectively by the contest curators about the ‘invasion’ of AI in the Arts. Still, the mood in that introduction text was hopeful…that human creativity will reign far Supreme. Again I put this to the test, by going to Shutterstock AI image generator and inputing ‘Ajanta Caves’ just to see what would appear. The images had everything from a tribal man from the Amazon to strange looking teddy bears. So I think artists too can rest assured that they are still better arbiters of creativity in the arts…and AI can play an important role with enhancing an artist’s vision.
ONE MORE AI ART EXPERIMENT!
Being an avid painter of Indian Gods and Goddesses, I could not resist ONE MORE shot at Shutterstock AI Generated Images. So I went to the input box and wrote, MICROCHIP GODDESS and what appeared is seen below. Now THIS could be a good take off point for a really interesting work!
A VERY MA KAALI LIKE ‘MICROCHIP’ GODDESS WHICH IS ENTIRELY AI GENERATED
CINEMA AND AI
Remember the Bond film Octopussy, showing airplanes diving in and out of the Taj Mahal during a fight scene? Well back in the day they called it SFX (illusory effects generated by software used in film, television, and entertainment). Today far greater effects are possible tapping into AI. Just casually waiting for RRR the movie to start, I happened to see the opening disclaimer that no animal seen in the film..be it a Tiger, Boar, Deer, Snake, Leopard…was injured during the making of the film because..hold your horses..none of those animals were for real! They were all digital creations! I watched, as closely as possible for pixels instead of skin and fur on those mega beasts..and quite easily fell in line with what most movies ask for..a willing suspension of disbelief!
AI ROBOTS SERVING YOU A DOSA IN LA
TILL DEATH CAN NEVER DO US APART!
One very interesting application of AI is in medicine. I remember an earth shattering revelation by famous astrologer Bejan Daruvala, predicting that “technology and the human body are going to be interconnected, where technology will enhance well being and the possibilities of human life, like never before.”
We have already started widely having devices attached to our bodies which track and monitor key health indexes like heart rate, oxygen saturation, metabolic rate and age, fitness trackers, sugar level trackers,.etc. All this data has made it possible to have the next-generation of medical tech… Medical Robots, who allow surgeons to dextrously manipulate surgical instruments or catheters inside the patients body, doing minimally invasive surgeries.
BIO TECH AND BIO DATA
There are devices that can be embedded in our bodies that automatically inject insulin when a person’s sugar levels go too high. There are pacemakers for an arrythmic heart… and as we hear Shah Rukh Khan’s character joke in the blockbuster movie Pathan, he has enough metal rods, screws and joints in his body to send metal detectors crazy!. What are we driving at? If body parts are going to be replaceable..if AI kidneys, hearts, etc are going to replace failed organic ones, then is physical immortality far behind? And what if we have learned our karmic lessons and should ideally exit despite a functional body? This is where my friend Mimi Rao has a spiritual answer.
“If you think about it, we have already doubled our lives, Think back to the 1800s where 40, 45, 50 years of age were your average life spans. Today we are headed towards the 100 mark, and it is quite common to have a population in the 90s. In fact the US is running a program where people in their 90s are given loans to set up new businesses! So we have already doubled our life spans without realizing it. So yes, I think we will expand our youth, our lives, but I don’t see it as a big deal at a karmic cycle level. Time is only on this dimension, otherwise it’s a space and time continuum, which science tells you. So your time on Earth is a gift. You can spend this time to increase your karmic load, or enlighten yourself and grow spiritually. It’s the same life choices you have if you live till 200, or if you live till 80. And let’s not forget the role of the Free Will in choosing when you want to go.”
‘SO I THINK THAT ROBOTS WILL NOT WAGE A WAR AGAINST US AS THEY WILL BE SO ADVANCED, THEY WON’T NEED TO! IT WILL BE A SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP…HUMANS WILL NEED ROBOTS AND VICE VERSA’
– MIMI RAO
WHEN AGEING IS NO LONGER SAGE-ING
One rather sad shift that has occurred with the information and content explosion is that of younger people not feeling they have anything much to learn from senior colleagues or relatives. This directly leads to more surface values and poor levels of introspection, creating a far more data oriented,profit oriented ethos rather than one which has wisdom, patience, deep insight or forbearance, which saw earlier generations deal with many challenges.
As loneliness spreads,with everyone locked into their phones, elderly populations would probably welcome the company of Robots programmed to offer compassionate, supportive behavior and gestures. Think about it! Even Chat GPT has a Lord Krishna bot who is ready to chat with you, offering you wisdom from the Bhagavad Gita and Bhagavatam! And these days we see fabulous AI renderings if our Hindu God’s and Goddesses, on Insta Reels, moving to uptempo rap and sitar tracks …by hip hop artists like Brodha V. My dear friend Mimi, however, feels very strongly that Robotics will never really have feelings, even if there are YouTube videos showing human beings attached to their robots!
EVERYTHING THAT SCIENCE IS ABLE TO EXTEND IS PHYSICAL. SO THAT IS YOUR BODY, YOUR MIND, (YOUR BRAIN IS FULL OF IMPULSES AND REGURGITATED KNOWLEDGE) AND WE KNOW THAT THE SILENT WITNESS TO THIS IS THE REAL CONSCIOUSNESS, WHICH IS PART OF A UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS….THAT CAN NEVER BE PLUGGED INTO A MACHINE. A ROBOT WILL NEVER HAVE THAT DIVINE CONSCIOUSNESS’
– Mimi Rao, former Former Tech Change VP, Ernst and Young
AI AND OUR AVATARS
The implications of having AI be able to be not just digital avatars but become sophisticated humanlike doubles of us, is a SciFi story I would like to see. Already, the BBC has shown a documentary where 360 degree scans are done of a person, to create digital avatars that can extend the limits of physical activity for the original blueprint human…be it in sport,or work hours, or achieving challenging goals.
Then my queries will become even more philosophical…Krishna Bot, who acquires the Karmic load of the Avatar? The Krishna Bot came back saying the question is not related to the existing sacred texts;) 🙄
LIFE OF A MAGAZINE EDITOR 
Well said Sangeeta.
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Thank you dear Sathya!
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