Kamal Ghorui
In his very inimitable style that blends clarity, with a dash of provocation, Nobel laureate and physicist Richard Feynman remarked:
“If our small minds, through some convenience, divide this world, into pieces – physics, biology, geology, astronomy , psychology, and so forth – keep in mind that nature is unaware of it!”
Human knowledge and intelligence are fragmented into multitudes of domains and distributions. Modern-day artificial intelligence (AI) stands at the summit of integrating and processing all these domains at incredible speeds. It is a highly efficient, protocol-driven form of computational intelligence. Its efficiency lies mainly in access to terabytes of data, speed of data retrieval, and picosecond processing and output generation.
Much of today’s AI operates as a black box. Models are based on vast datasets, and their internal workings often oblivious even to their creators. Modern neural networks can contain millions, sometimes billions of adjustable parameters. There lies an inherent limitation of mistaking noise for meaning. Neural networks produce outputs that look fluent, confident, and sometimes uncannily intuitive and insightful. They seem to provide succour by providing speedy solutions to the gluttonous appetite of man’s quest for control, and conquest.
Unlike the cultivated, functional, logic-based AI, ‘natural intelligence’ has an aesthetic to it. An intelligence characterised by adaptive complexity, organic syntropy, and a deep, intuitive synergy with the environment.
Richard Feynman viewed this higher ‘intelligence’ as a vibrant, interactive, incredibly complex system operating as a unified, seamless, and unpredictable whole. For Feynman, investigating the ‘intelligence ’ of nature was not about finding a final, absolute truth, but rather about appreciating its ‘beauty and harmony’ through a continuous process of discovery.
Despite all these technological advances and upgrades, AI still pales in comparison to the innate, organic intelligence of nature. An intelligence blessed with sanctity of discretion and compassion for each of its creations. Knowledge that has not been broken up into fragments by narrow, myopic self-centred indulgences. A self-rectifying intelligence that can genetically engineer strands of DNA to outsmart and rein in the exploitative, selfish, destructive, inconsiderate machinations of one of its own. An intelligence that has honed the skill of walking the razor’s edge without swaying to any extreme or playing favourites.
An intelligence with benevolence that celebrates and evolves. An impartial, unbiased intelligence sans any ego. A truly democratic intelligence – of nature, for nature, by nature.
As aptly stated by Arthur Compton, physicist, who won a Nobel Prize for discovery of the Compton effect, “For myself, faith begins with the realisation that a supreme intelligence brought the universe into being and created man. It is not difficult for me to have this faith, for it is incontrovertible that where there is a plan there is intelligence. An orderly, unfolding universe testifies to the truth of the most majestic statement ever uttered: ‘In the beginning God…”
Amidst all this hype, apprehension and hysteria surrounding AI and the threat it can pose to mankind, natural intelligence most certainly will triumph and have the last laugh in this game where there are no victors. Only survivors with the eternal will to survive and celebrate.
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