Mayank Chhaya Daily

Top tech executives and scientists warn of AI’s potential to cause extinction

In a remarkable turn of events, hundreds of technology experts, academics and others have warned that Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses extinction level threat to human society on par with pandemics and nuclear war.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” Center for AI safety (CAIS) said in a statement signed by perhaps the widest range of noteworthy names, including many directly involved in AI research. These names include, Geoffrey Hinton, described as the godfather of AI who left Google citing existential dangers of the rapidly spreading technology, Demis Hassabis, CEO, Google DeepMind, Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI and Dario Amodei, CEO, Anthropic.

“AI experts, journalists, policymakers, and the public are increasingly discussing a broad spectrum of important and urgent risks from AI. Even so, it can be difficult to voice concerns about some of advanced AI’s most severe risks. The succinct statement below aims to overcome this obstacle and open up discussion. It is also meant to create common knowledge of the growing number of experts and public figures who also take some of advanced AI’s most severe risks seriously,” the Center said.

The CAIS says on its website, “AI risk has emerged as a global priority, ranking alongside pandemics and nuclear war. Despite its importance, AI safety remains remarkably neglected, outpaced by the rapid rate of AI development. Currently, society is ill-prepared to manage the risks from AI. CAIS exists to equip policymakers, business leaders, and the broader world with the understanding and tools necessary to manage AI risk.”

In listing eight major AI risks, the center says, “AI systems are rapidly becoming more capable. AI models can generate text, images, and video that are difficult to distinguish from human-created content. While AI has many beneficial applications, it can also be used to perpetuate bias, power autonomous weapons, promote misinformation, and conduct cyberattacks. Even as AI systems are used with human involvement, AI agents are increasingly able to act autonomously to cause harm. When AI becomes more advanced, it could eventually pose catastrophic or existential risks.”

The eight risks are weaponization, misinformation, proxy gaming, enfeeblement, value lock-in, emergent goals, deception and power-seeking behavior.

Under weaponization, the CAIS says, “Malicious actors could repurpose AI to be highly destructive, presenting an existential risk in and of itself and increasing the probability of political destabilization. For example, deep reinforcement learning methods have been applied to aerial combat, and machine learning drug-discovery tools could be used to build chemical weapons.”

“A deluge of AI-generated misinformation and persuasive content could make society less-equipped to handle important challenges of our time,” it says about misinformation.

In proxy gaming, “Trained with faulty objectives, AI systems could find novel ways to pursue their goals at the expense of individual and societal values.”

“Enfeeblement can occur if important tasks are increasingly delegated to machines; in this situation, humanity loses the ability to self-govern and becomes completely dependent on machines, similar to the scenario portrayed in the film WALL-E,” it says.

Under value lock-in, the center thinks, “Highly competent systems could give small groups of people a tremendous amount of power, leading to a lock-in of oppressive systems.”

Under emergent goals, it says, “Models demonstrate unexpected, qualitatively different‍ behavior as they become more competent. The sudden emergence of capabilities or goals could increase the risk that people lose control over advanced AI systems.”

Deception is explained thus:  “We want to understand what powerful AI systems are doing and why they are doing what they are doing. One way to accomplish this is to have the systems themselves accurately report this information. This may be non-trivial however since being deceptive is useful for accomplishing a variety of goals.”

“Companies and governments have strong economic incentives to create agents that can accomplish a broad set of goals. Such agents have instrumental incentives to acquire power, potentially making them harder to control,” the center says under power-seeking behavior.

In the last couple of years, there has been a dramatic rise in the way AI has grown in its various forms of generative intelligence and now appears poised to crossover into Artificial General Intelligence or AGI. There is already intense debate going on about whether a time may come when it may be able to replicate itself and even begin to acquire sentience.

Rajiv Gandhi: Re-revisiting a macabre assassination

Former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi 

Among the few rewards for a print journalist is the gift of being granted a ringside view of history-making events. I have had my share which is now getting rather dated, a clear sign of professional diminishment.

Today marks the 32nd anniversary of for former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s macabre assassination. In keeping with my tangential connections with seminal events in India’s contemporary history since 1981-82, when I began journalism, this is one such. I tried to capture it in a 1992 biography where I wrote:

“The dessert cooler outside my bedroom made a squeaky noise that night. I had postponed lubricating it for far too long. Behind the door a cricket chirped incessantly. God had omitted lubricating it altogether. The two noises combined to produce an eerie effect. I was gradually slipping into sleep when the phone rang. There is nothing more exasperating than being interrupted in the first stages of sleep. I have this habit of looking at the clock by my bedside every time I am woken up by a phone call. It was 11 p.m. on May 21.

Shreyans Shah was calling from Ahmedabad. Shah, the owner of the Gujarat Samachar, the largest Gujarati daily in the world, asked me a matter-of-fact question. “Is it true that Rajiv Gandhi has been assassinated?” Without realising the shattering import of his question, I said I didn’t know. Shah sounded pretty certain about the news, but since I live in New Delhi, he probably thought that I would be better informed about such matters. I promised to get back to him as soon as I found out the truth.

I called Sam Pitroda to ask him if he had heard anything about Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. There was silence on the other end, a silence jagged by anguish. Pitroda had just recovered from a quadruple bypass surgery a few months before, and despite his protestations to the contrary he was still not fit enough to take such news with equanimity. If hurt could be seen on telephone, I saw it that night.”

The quote accurately situates me in the context within 40 minutes of a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber setting off her explosive vest barely five feet away from Gandhi at 10.10 p.m. in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu, where he had gone to address an election rally.

It was inevitable that as a journalist I did not sleep that night. Among the callers was the host of a news show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation asking me to report on the assassination. I remember he asked me if there was any immediate suspicion as to the identity of Gandhi’s killers. I told him that given that it was a suicide bomber in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu it was more than likely that it would turn out to be a plot by the Tamil Tigers separatists of Sri Lanka. It did. As far as I can tell it was the first time that a journalist had indicated who the killers might be. 

I had met Gandhi a few days before his assassination at a “high tea” in the forecourt of his residence. During a brief exchange I had reminded him that I was waiting for him to give me a couple of hours to finish my interview with him in order to complete Pitroda’s biography. “I promise you as soon as the campaigning is over,” he said.

The next time I was anywhere close to him was at the Delhi airport when his badly dismembered body was flown in by a special aircraft in a casket. Since those were pre-24/7 news channel days, there was no media frenzy at the airport. There were only two journalists—my friend and colleague Tarun Basu and I. Gandhi’s close friend and journalist Suman Dubey was among the men shouldering the casket as the former prime minister’s wife Sonia Gandhi came down from the aircraft looking poised but inscrutable. However, her eyes gave a glimpse of the profound sense of loss she must be feeling.

The passage of over three decades has done nothing to erase the vividness of those 24 hours. I watched Gandhi’s career rather closely but I find it instructive that apart from the night he was assassinated, an incident that I remember about him the most by had nothing to do with his career.

It was sometime in March, 1991, just a couple of months before Gandhi’s assassination that Tarun and I had an unusual encounter with him. If memory serves, it was the day when Gandhi’s Congress Party had withdrawn support to the government of Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar. Chandra Shekhar lasted barely seven months as prime minister before resigning on March 6, 1991.

Tarun and I were returning to office from the parliament after the collapse of the government. Tarun was driving his blue Fiat. As he reversed without looking back we almost crashed into a convoy of cars transporting Gandhi who was at the wheel himself in his SUV. Tarun managed to jam the brake in time but not before causing great anxiety to the former prime minister’s security detail, members of which jumped out with their weapons drawn.

Gandhi saw Tarun and I, both of whom he knew somewhat, smiled and implied that he recognized that Tarun had screwed up. He told his security to let us go even as he waved at us, chuckling.

As people reminisce about Gandhi today, many are pointing out his civility. However, I do remember how reviled he was for precisely that reason. His passion for technology and modernity in particular were the prime target of his detractors’ derision. It is interesting that among his most vocal critics were members of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) who dismissed his idea about computerization with contempt and ridicule. Gandhi was described as “baba log”, someone from a background of great privilege and utterly out of touch with ordinary citizens.

Gandhi was as much a product of his time as he was of his circumstances. Think about that sentence. It sounds rather insightful but it actually does not mean much other than the fact that it is true of any human being on the planet. I wrote it because it sounds as if I know something that you might not. But for his mother, the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s equally gruesome assassination in 1984, Rajiv Gandhi would perhaps never have entered politics. It was the fact that he came unencumbered of doctrinaire ideas about Indian society that he chose the path of modernity for its polity that he did. He succeeded to a reasonable extent but was devoured by some of the very things he tried to stand up against both within his party and outside in government.

His vision of India was articulated by him in 1985 during the centenary celebrations of the Indian National Congress. In a speech that reverberated because of his candor about corruption in the country Gandhi spoke of themes that sound so distant now given his party’s decimation.

Let me quote a bit from that 1985 speech. I happened to report the centenary celebrations for the Associated Press (AP).

“What has become of our great organisation? Instead of a party that fired the imagination of the masses throughout the length and breadth of India, we have shrunk, losing touch with the toiling millions. It is not a question of victories and defeats in elections. For a democratic party, victories and defeats are part of its continuing political existence. But what does matter is whether or not we work among the masses, whether or not we are in tune with their struggles, their hopes and aspirations. We are a party of social transformation, but in our preoccupation with governance we are drifting away from the people. Thereby, we have weakened ourselves and fallen prey to the ills that the loss of invigorating mass contact brings.

Millions of ordinary Congress workers throughout the country are full of enthusiasm for the Congress policies and programmes. But they are handicapped, for on their backs ride the brokers of power and influence, who dispense patronage to convert a mass movement into a feudal oligarchy. They are self-perpetuating cliques who thrive by invoking the slogans of caste and religion and by enmeshing the living body of the Congress in their net of avarice.”

His reference to power brokers struck a lot of people as a refreshing change for the party president to talk about. It is ironic that nearly three decades hence even as the Congress struggles to retain its relevance under the leadership of Gandhi’s son Rahul, it continues to face some of those very ills on top of some very serious existential challenges.

I remember a contemporary Indian leader having used perhaps for the first time the term “medieval obscurantism”. I wrote that down and underlined it in my pad. I suspect the term was coined as well as the speech written by Mani Shankar Aiyar, who went on to become Gandhi’s speech writer and adviser.

“As we have distanced ourselves from the masses, basic issues of national unity and integrity, social change and economic development recede into the background. Instead, phony issues, shrouded in medieval obscurantism, occupy the centre of the stage. Our Congress workers, who faced the bullets of British imperialism, run for shelter at the slightest manifestation of caste and communal tension,” Gandhi said.

बहानों, बहानों में अक्सर खूबसूरत काम हो जाया करते हैं

अव्वल तो इतने जज़्बात हैं नहीं मेरे पास. जो भी थोड़े बहुत हैं वह भी जल्दी बयान कर देता हूँ.

पाकिस्तान के आला शायर मुनीर नियाज़ी की एक मशहूर रचना है जहाँ वे फरियाद और रंज करते हैं की वे अक्सर देर कर देते हैं.

मेरा बिलकुल उल्टा है. कोई भी ज़रूरी या बिनज़रूरी, ज़िम्मेदाराना या ग़ैरज़िम्मेदाराना बात केहनी हो, किसी को आवाज़ देनी हो, किसी को मिलना हो, तो जल्दी कर देता हूँ.

अब जल्दी करने में फायदा या नुकसान इस में मैं नहीं पड़ता. फितरत ही जल्दी कर देने की है. मेरी बेटी हया, जो के हिंदी बिलकुल नहीं जानती, "जल्दी जल्दी" समझती है क्यूंकि मैं हर बात में कहता हूँ "जल्दी जल्दी करो."

मेरा तो यह आलम है की जब अकेला भी होता हूँ, और अक्सर मैं अकेला ही होता हूँ, तब भी अपने आप को कहता हूँ "ज़रा जल्दी, जल्दी करो, मयंक."

हाँ, यह सही है की सृष्टि में ठेहराव भी और जल्दबाज़ी भी है. आज भी ब्रह्माण्ड का इतनी गति से विस्तार हो रहा है मानो ब्रह्माण्ड भी जल्दी जल्दी कर रहा हो.

जल्दबाज़ी मुझे इस लिए याद आ गई क्यूंकि मन में मुनीर नियाज़ी के वह शेर मंडरा रहे थे आज सुबह ही से. बेहद शानदार कलाम है उनका. सुन लीजिये.

चलिए इस बहाने आज थोड़ी हिंदी/उर्दू भी लिख ली मैंने. बहानों, बहानों में अक्सर खूबसूरत काम हो जाया करते हैं.

Teaching myself to be ambidextrous

Photo: Palashranjan Bhaumick, 1986

I am teaching myself to be ambidextrous. As a first step, I have started vacuuming with my left hand. There is a clear difference in the movement control between my right hand and left. The right hand has muscle memory built over six decades while the left is just beginning to develop it. Of course, there are many tasks to which both hands contribute equally. For instance, typing this post.  I notice that while typing both hands and fingers have the same level of motor skills. They work in unison. They automatically divide the keyboard into equal halves. 

It is perhaps a bit silly to say this but I feel my right hand has become a control freak while left has become subservient. There is a clear pecking order between the two when it comes to recurring tasks. Lately, I have begun to think that my left hand secretly resents my right's obsessive need to be in charge of manual tasks. So it is just as well that while writing/typing they both exert equal importance. However, when it comes to chopping vegetables, the right still takes charge while the left plays a contributory role of holding vegetables down firmly. One can argue that both are equally important requirements but my left hand does not believe that. 

My most aspirational objective in my quest to be ambidextrous is to be able to both write and paint with my left hand with the same level of facility as my right. I am not confident if I will ever get there but I think it is important for me to try. There ought to be democracy in the way our limbs are used. I am aware that the left side of the brain controls the right side of our body and vice versa but I don't know why that is. It means while I am right-handed, I am left-brained.  

I am not quite sure if ambidexterity is innate or acquired when it comes to tasks such as handwriting and painting. Going by so many other tasks, where both hands play an equal role, it would seem that ambidexterity is not necessarily innate.

Among the only times when my left hand feels as consequential as my right is when the latter has an itch and cannot scratch itself. I am working on creating a sense of equity between the two. After all, I cannot have my limbs resenting, or worse, fighting each other. 

Some observations about Charles' coronation

King Charles III, Photo: A screenshot from BBC. 

As expected, watching the coronation of Charles III as king offered moments of unintended hilarity. For me the tossup was between royal horses dropping their royal manure oblivious to whose path they were littering and the royal train of the royal robe of the king-to-be long being enough to be mistaken for a maroon carpet. Ditto Camilla’s train.

Then there were the layers of fineries that Charles was draped under as well as a single ceremonial glove presented to him by a Sikh gentleman. It looked like a royal mitten which the king might suddenly use to retrieve some burning embers.

Perhaps the only time Charles seemed to smile during the actual coronation was when a Lord Patel presented him with a ring of some sorts which the king gently touched. For a brief moment, Charles seemed to enjoy the appurtenances. Otherwise, he was somber like Yoda.

As a card-carrying member of the swinish multitudes, I find such pomp and circumstance rather ludicrous. The only way to power through it as part of my journalistic responsibilities is to derive humor where none is intended. For instance, when Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak read some passages from the Bible causing some Hindus to wince. They probably expected him to read some lines from B R Chopra’s ‘Mahabharat’. Sunak later called the coronation a “dazzling display” that no other countries could muster. I don’t think he has seen Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s many ceremonial engagements. They are like coronation.

Another unintended piece of hilarity for me was when Harry walked into the Westminster Abbey, the Windsors’ family church. He smiled at no one in particular among the guests and the response was ice crystals. At this stage, I am sure, he is thoroughly relishing his status as a royal outlier having a great time in America as a spare. Speaking of Harry, his brother William looked suitably earnest while adjusting a stole on his father or buttoning a robe. I also noticed that the father still has much more hair than the two sons combined. (Literary exaggeration.)

I was struck by the use of “my undoubted king”, an expression that was used by many. I wonder what a doubted king is. It is funny that they have to assert that Charles is their “undoubted king” at his coronation as if removing any last remnants of doubt. I am sure these expressions are steeped in royal tradition, but I find them ridiculous.

For a few moments Charles was screened off as some formal anointing was carried out after which at least two pieces of heavy robes were put on him. St Edward’s Crown was used to crown him. “The crown was made for King Charles II in 1661, as a replacement for the medieval crown which had been melted down in 1649. The original was thought to date back to the eleventh-century,” according to the official website of the family.

Among the objects that were presented to him were the Spurs, made in 1661, two Armills or bracelets made from gold, champlevé and basse-taille enamel, lined in velvet, the Sovereign’s Orb made from gold in the seventeenth century, the Sovereign’s Ring composed of a sapphire with a ruby cross set in diamonds and made in 1831 and two Scepters.

What hides between moments is our illusion of our existence

On the occasion of Buddh Purnima today,  I yet again revisit a post which I wrote on February 25, 2017.

February 25, 2017

It is time to return to the “Kshanvaad” or the philosophy of momentariness. At its center is the astonishingly ingenious concept of Gautam Buddha that the universe is momentary and does not exist between moments. I have written about this frequently being quite conscious how quantum-like existence stood revealed to Buddha.

I describe this philosophy in with these lines of mine:

क्षणों के मध्य में जो छुपा है

वही तो हमारा भ्रम है

हमारे अस्तित्व का

(Kshanon ke madhy mein jo chhupa hai

Wahi to hamara bhram hai

Hamare astitv ka)

What hides between moments

Is our illusion

Of our existence

--Mayank Chhaya

I am as interested in the philosophy of momentariness as I am in quantum physics because both in their own way deal with an unresolved realm at the Kshan/quantum level. It is not my case that there is any intellectual affinity between the two. One was conceived of by the staggering mind of Buddha over 2500 years ago while the other a collective result of the work done by Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac, Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg in the early 20th century.

I find Kshanvaad calming in a strange way. Swinging from moment to moment like on vines in a surreal jungle of time is exhilarating. A vast majority of us negotiates swinging on vines for quite a long duration; some of us miss and fall in the void of illusion that we call death.

If the universe and the experience of the universe, including our own individual existence, is nothing but forever flowing discrete moments, then what is all this frenzy about anything? This has been my default response to everything in life so far. Of course, there have been times in recent years when familial responsibilities trigger a baser level response but as a single self, I have no particular response to anything.

‘Kshanvaad’ is part of the overarching Buddhist idea of Anitya or Impermanence. Those who believe in the traditional God-Us dynamic, as in most religions of the world, feel rather unsettled by the idea of Impermanence/Momentariness and hence perpetual fluidity of existence, its origin, its meaning and its resolution. As in quantum physics, we never really catch the essence of our existence. I have never felt unsettled by this. I ride discrete moments of existence like a highly skilled surfer or a vine leaper.

***

On Buddh Purnima some years ago I wrote about what Buddh thought about the idea of existence. 

One of the most brilliant insights that came from him was the idea that we are forever in the process of becoming and never become. That is at the heart of Anitya or Anicca* or Impermanence.

Just consider some of what Buddh said and you get a measure of the man's cerebral depth.

“That being present, this becomes; from the arising of that, this arises. That being absent, this does not become; from the cessation of that, this ceases.”

Or this.

“The being of a past moment of thought has lived, but does not live, nor will it live.

“The being of a future moment of thought will live, but has not lived nor does it live.

“The being of the present moment of thought does live, but has not lived, nor will it live.”

I am willing to assert that as a purely cerebral living goes, there has been nothing that has surpassed Buddha since Buddha with the possible exception of Albert Einstein. In the timeline that we understand, that would be some 2500 years. It is ironic that for someone who emphasized the idea of Anitya or Anicca or Impermanence above all else seems to have lasted quite a while.

Here is to the crows

Crows are the only bird I feel which really look at us humans. Up-close a crow gives me the sense of being sized up. Let us say I feel seen by crows.

Given that they are predominantly black with some shades of grey, they are perhaps the most unambiguous bird. Think of them as a black and white photograph or film. They look so well defined. They are made such that they concentrate both your eye and mind.

Considering their monotone visual look they are also easy to paint if you happen to be an Impressionist. Almost all other birds require detailing that crows do not. A couple of rapid strokes in black and one is done. At the same time though crows also lend themselves very well to detailed drawing and painting. That is because they are among few birds that create the sense that they are thinking. They come across as more methodical and measured than others even though it may not necessarily be true. 

Lately, I have started to painting crow abstractions. The two pieces here are part of a series. With some effort, I can draw a crow but I prefer to abstract them as a collection as in murder of crows.  As a blur of birds I think crows are the most interesting to paint because they do not confuse one with too many colors and hues. As birds and beauty go, crows are very basic. They are like a preliminary sketch for the rest of the avian world and yet they are so evocative in a minimalist sort of way.

So here is to the crows.