Human Eccentricities
Over the centuries, humans have cracked many of nature’s secrets, and scientists have discovered ever more laws that explain the working of the world around us. This knowledge now extends outwards, into the vastness of inter-stellar space, and inwards, into the human body and the minute genes that compose it. Much of this has been translated into technology: a variety of products in every conceivable field, and an ability to cure many health afflictions. Life has generally become easier, more comfortable, and healthier.
Neuro-scientists have begun to understand the functioning of the brain, and psychologists are fathoming mind and behaviour. Data analysts mine massive data sets to use such knowledge to model and predict an individual’s action (will you buy a shirt today?), or even to instigate it (what stimulus will trigger an impulse purchase?). Advertising – and displays in stores – are intended not only to create brand visibility, recall, or salience, but also to stimulate purchase.
Scientific advances and new technologies (including artificial intelligence) promise to take this to new levels of sophistication, triggering concerns about how this new knowledge may be used to even influence voter behaviour and, hence, election results. Advice your friends to quickly sell their shares in weapons companies: regime changes may no longer need the “awe and shock” of the force of arms; it could now be done more insidiously and unattributably. Worries about the power of the military-industrial complex are already giving way to those about the big-tech complex.
Yet, despite all the scientific advances, the human mind remains an enigma: unpredictable and illogical. Economic postulates of rational behaviour, or of maximising utility, fall by the wayside in the real world. Biological dictates of self-preservation stand exposed by the millions willing to risk their lives for a cause. Altruism is yet to be scientifically explained. Irrational individual behaviour while amidst a mob is largely inexplicable. Clearly, reducing humans – even human behaviour – to an algorithm is not possible. At least, not yet!
Like the “glorious uncertainties” of cricket, humans too are unpredictable. We are given to sudden mood changes, to snap or instinctive decisions, to intuition rather than logic, to saying “yes” when we mean “no”. Machines based on logic inevitably find it difficult to deal with or predict discontinuities: the leaps of faith or of imagination that the human mind sometimes practises. To see a piece of stone and imagine a sculptured statue emerging from it, or “To see a world in a grain of sand/And a heaven in a wild flower” (William Blake), requires an ability that a computer might find difficult to comprehend or emulate.
What this means is that machines and AI are not yet a magic solution to all our problems. First, the machine needs smart (intelligent!) humans to define the problem: designing a faster ship to carry people across the seas vs inventing an altogether new device (an aeroplane). Or to feed the appropriate prompts to Chat GPT. Then, it needs imaginative humans to look beyond the purely logic-based solution. Organisations that are gung-ho on replacing employees by machines might take a pause.
All in all, humans yet have a role!
*The author loves to think in tongue-in-cheek ways, with no maliciousness or offence intended. At other times, he is a public policy analyst and author. His latest book is Decisive Decade: India 2030 Gazelle or Hippo (Rupa, 2021).
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