Essays
We love to have a master
0I have long believed that we humans are genetically inclined to worship those who are more talented or those we think are above us. We worship a god who is beautiful and better than us in all ways. Adoration gives us pleasure. It comforts us to be able to serve.
From the ancient times we are not the masters but the servants. The first recorded king and queen in human history Paco! Narmer and his Queen Nthotep ruled Egypt, way back, around 3150 BC. When a human master was not enough, we invented a god, a MASTER above all gods. The need of a master comes from our animal instincts. We tamed animals, we are their masters, but what we are? Scientifically speaking we are over-developed apes, we are animals and thus we need a master.
Now when we are more evolved, We don’t believe in a master our ancestors invented. Now we choose our masters. We chose our gods. As children we sleep beneath the images of movie stars, pop-icons and sports-stars and dream about the mystery and grandeur of their lives. For some Sachin Tendulkar is god. For some it’s Steve Jobs / Linus Torvalds (LOL!). We serve them. We drink what they tell us to drink, we live to please them, even when our masters are not watching. As adults these posters comes off the wall only to be replaced by a steady stream of tabloid culture. We prefer jobs in multinational to serve a master. Even when we start our own enterprise, the first thing we do is put up a big poster with “Client is God” written all over it. What’s more? we are not satisfied with our masters. We love to ‘have’ a master, but we hate our current master. We want to see them fall with the hope that next one will be more benevolent. Before marriage a boy treats a girl like his master. He becomes a servant so good that even dogs envy him. But after marriage.. “Wife is evil” we say.
In todays fast-food life and 2-minute noodles, we can’t have one singles master bossing us around for years. We love to see them fall from their grace. It is much more fun when it is self-inflicted. Nothing beats the good old crucifixion of Jesus Christ. We love to read about scandals in those rags.
I have a theory for our this behavior. The answer lies again in our genes, in our DNA that we want to survive. We have a survival instinct. We want to survive at any cost. Deep down, we see the existence of superior people – people who are more beautiful and talented than us – as a threat. When these talented people fuck-up in an enormous way, we can’t help but think that it somehow improves our chances of survival. We feel better than our masters (remember the joy you had when your boss screwed up?). Every animal has this survival instinct, no amount of evolution can suppress it. Quoting the famous words of Chuck Lorre – “Evolution My Ass!”
I think we should do anything we want, be our own masters. We should have a free will. We haven’t tried that for a while. Maybe this time it’ll work. :-p
10 Things that make me feel good
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1.) Successful Compilation : When a program on which I’ve spent more than one hour compiles successfully it gives me immense pleasure. I hate debugging my code. Sometimes I prefer starting from scratch than debugging the code. It’s maybe cause of my messy coding habits like not using code comments and cramming code into one line (to reduce LOC and yes! I use KLOC as an effort matrix).
2.) Sleeping :
Not LOL-Cat - It's sleepy cat!
Who doesn’t feel good after a long nap of 8-10 hours? At times i can even sleep for 20 hours straight. Sleeping is an activity which you can do anyplace.We do it in class, we do it in buses, heck, we sometime do it in the loo too… Zzzzz…
3.) New Releases : Be it softwares/ games or movies – new always feels good. Do you remember how you were up all night when last Harry Potter book was going to release or when you got your hands on that Google+ invite, how much good it felt to finally try something new? New Feels Good, FullStop!
4.) TV shows : How I met your mother, The Big bang Theory, Raising Hope, , Breaking Bad, Mentalist, Glee or Friends. These TV shows create a world of their own. Ever had discussion with a friend that how you are more like Sheldon (Yo! Aditya, you reading this?) or when will Ted finally meet THE GIRL? You know we all debated over it. Watching these shows gives me a temporary escape from my hectic life. Watching them makes me feel good!
5.) Alternative Rock : Yellowcard, Linkin Park, Hoobastank, All American Rejects or Greenday… These are the gods of modern Alt Rock scene. Music soothes my soul, it inspires me. The lyrics have a lesson in each line. Music makes me feel good.
6.) Talking to friends :I am sort of an introvert when it comes to initiating conversations but i love gossiping with my friends. Whoever said men don’t gossip was a fool. Men do gossip except the topics change rapidly. One minute we are talking about last match between ManU and Chelsea the next we are discussing Demi Moore’s new photos (BTW you gotta check out the photos she posted yesterday on twitter.. it’s booyah!). Talking to friends makes me feel good.
7.) Looking at old pictures :
Leafing through my school yearbook & old family albums & laughing at my hairstyle, posture, dressing & face. Some of it is embarrassing alright; but then, that is how I started & then reached to being who or what I’m today. My personal growth & the journey of finding my own bearings, in this big, big world, fills me with joy & a sense of accomplishment..
8.) Learning something new : Someone told me once “Losers count the days, winners make the days count”. Each day I try to learn something new. A new word, a new trick to get that buggy software running, a new way to write some code. Sometimes I learn small things, sometimes life teaches me big things. It makes me realize that it’s the journey that matters, not the end. Learning helps me stay ahead, learning keeps me from falling and when I do fall, learning helps me stand up. Learning makes me feel good. 
9.) Helping someone or getting help from someone : 
When i help someone and he/she shows appreciation, it makes me feel good. Knowing that I matter for someone other than myself makes me feel good. At the same time when someone helps me, it feels good, that they think I’m worth helping.
10.) Discussions with my father : My father is my best friend. I never needed to hide anything from him. We talk everything, from movies to business. Sometimes I just sit there in front of him and he can deduce what i am thinking. We talk about 1 hour on phone daily (which is 95% of my phone time). I am an atheist, but if there is a God, for me, he is in my father. Being with my dad makes me feel good.
What makes you feel good?
The current state of Artificial Intelligence
0“Artificial Intelligence is useless subject ” – A Classmate
Is it really the popular belief? On more than one occasion I’ve heard students complaining about AI and it’s uselessness as a field of computer science.
Is it really a dead-end of a Computer Science field?…
This XKCD says a lot:
and they both react poorly to Showers.
To assess the current state of Artificial Intelligence we need to first define what is Artificial Intelligence?
As my professor of Artificial Intelligence puts it : “Artificial Intelligence is a field of computer science in which we study, how to make computer do things which at the moment, humans do better”.
As the definition suggests, this covers a broad number of topics from Natural Language Processing to Computer vision.
To properly study A.I. Computer scientists divided things or tasks humans are good at into three task domains :
1) Mundane or simple tasks
- Perception (vision, speech, smell)
- Natural Language (translation)
- Robot Control
2) Formal tasks or tasks with moderate difficulty
- Games (Chess)
- Mathematics (Geometry)
3) Expert Tasks or difficult tasks
- Medical Diagnosis
- Engineering (Design)
Initially scientists thought that since a Child learns simple tasks first then moves on to learn more difficult task, it will be easy to make computers to mundane tasks, like sound recognition or NLP. Turns out these tasks are much more complex than formal tasks like Designing, Predicting a pattern or Medical Diagnosis.
Current Applications of AI includes :
1.) Game Playing : When you play Chess or any game (Assassins Creed counts too) against a computer, it involves a fair amount of AI but computers play well against humans mainly via brute force computation methods–searching for thousands of moves and selecting the best one according to the criteria programmed. In my opinion that’s not really AI.
2.) Speech Recognition : It was touted to be the next big thing 90s, now we know it is just an EPIC FAIL! The sorry state of speech recognition is proven by the fact that you can type faster using just your left hand than you would if you use a Speech to Text software. It is still used in mobiles and other such gadgets to give simple voice commands. It has reached a practical level for limited purposes.
3.) Computer Vision : Microsoft’s Kinect anyone?
Microsoft's Kinect - A breakthrough in AI
Kinect is a real breakthrough in computer vision and real world object tracking (Kinect’s AI breakthrough explained ). Kinect is a motion sensing input device which looks like a cheap web-cam but employs a range of camera technologies which interprets 3D scene information from a continuously-projected infrared structured light.
4.) Understanding natural language : Currently if you want to give instructions to computer, you need to write computer programs in a specific specialized programming language like Assembly, C or Java (or any other). Computers are bad in understanding language which we humans speak. Google is working on projects in this area.
there are many more applications of AI. Companies like IBM with their Watson and Google with their gazillion projects are major players in this field.
IBM collaborating with American universities have developed a Computer Chip which is being hailed as a move towards “cognitive computing”.The chip contains 256 neurons, connected to each other in a way that mimics patterns of human brain. Now this is nowhere as efficient and powerful as human brain which has billions of neurons, but this is a step.
So the Big Question :
Is there a promising career in Artificial Intelligence?
Unfortunately, the answer is no. At least not in India. Though there’s a lot of demand for the techniques that someone competent in AI should know. A lot of these techniques are more appropriately classified as machine learning, but there’s a lot of overlap between these fields, so much so that sometimes machine learning is considered a subfield of AI (and I would assert that all those people are wrong, but hey, that’s just me). Machine learning has easy applications in e-commerce and data management, which together covers a huge swathe of the economy.
For those who do want to work in real “ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE” related field but not research in AI, You may still be able to find a job doing “AI” for a game company, but it’s most likely going to be 90% programming other stuff, 5% looking up AI that could be applied to the game and 5% trying to implement it. In order to do real, interesting AI work, you’re more-or-less looking at university work / research work, no escaping it :p .
You first have to decide which “field” or “camps” in AI you’re going to join. At this point, if you’re not knowledgeable enough to make that decision, I would highly recommend taking AI classes that expose you to all different kinds of AI. There’s three main “camps” in AI:
- Math-based: Simulate the intelligence and patterns of the human brain using complex, finely tuned algorithms, e.g. expert systems.
- Statistics-based: By collecting enough data (knowledge) about one particular type of event you can predict the occurrence of that event. This is used in stock-market and has other financial / sports applications.
- Biological-based: Simulate nature and the human brain in the computer, e.g., evolutionary computation.
Each major camp breaks down into even smaller specialized camps. There’s currently a huge disagreement among Researchers about which major approach is the correct approach. Researchers even within the same major camp often disagree with each other. Here’s my personal take on each camp:
- The math-based approach was the first major approach pioneered by MIT beginning in the 50′s and 60′s. MIT promised all kinds of great things coming from this approach and everyone got really excited about AI in the 60′s. Money flooded in to fund the research projects. Then… nothing came out of it. Everyone was disappointed. AI fell on the back burner. Thanks, MIT! This approach has produced some interesting intelligent machines (e.g. Deep Blue, IBM’s Watson), but they won’t ever be able to produce real general intelligence.
- The problem with the statistics-based approach is that it requires large amount of data beforehand. This is great for domains where there’s plenty of data from the past available, e.g. finance and sports, but what about domains where there’s no data available? We can’t just send 5,000 robots into space to crash and explode on Mars until we finally have enough data to predict how the robot needs to behave on Mars. Right?
- The biological-based approach is what makes the most sense to me. If natural processes, e.g. natural evolution, produced human-level intelligence, then simulating those processes in the computer should eventually be able to produce the same level of intelligence. The problem with this approach is that the results are often unpredictable and even their own creators have difficulty understanding how and why said result came to be.
Don’t just take my opinion as fact though. I’m sure many people will disagree with me. The best thing you can do is expose yourself to all the AI concepts you can and make the decision for yourself.
Here are some Artificial Intelligence resources you can follow to better understand AI concepts (I will add more later, so do check back):
1.) Stanford University’s Free AI-Class : It is a free online intro to AI course. It starts in October 2011 and is ran by Stanford professor Peter Norvig who wrote one of the best text books on AI and algorithms.
2.) Free eBooks on Artificial Intelligence.
Good Luck guys, and remember contrary to popular saying among students – Artificial Intelligence won’t short circuit your natural Intelligence!
It’s time for east to rule
1In last century the USA and a century before that the United Kingdom bestrode the world like a behemoth, the small group of nations around the Northern Atlantic, ‘The West’ literally ruled the world. For two centuries The Westerners have invaded the East (Africa and Asia) but Africans or Asians have not sent armies to invade Europe. We communicate in their language, we wear their cloths, we study their culture and we believe today is whatever date it is because they said so.
The World View
In 17th century many Westerners visited India and China and they were overawed by the wealth and sophistication of societies in Asia. But in 18th century many Europeans started to believe the Westerners were simply superior to rest of the world. According to French social commentator Baron de Montesquieu Europeans had “- a certain vigor of Body and Mind which renders them patient and intrepid and qualifies them for arduous exercises.”.
When asked why Europeans are superior to everyone else they often concluded that it was their ‘CULTURE’. Just look, they argued, at the doctrines of Socrates, the wisdom of the bible, or the works of Leonardo da Vinci.
In my opinion they couldn’t be more wrong. For example Socrates wasn’t the only philosopher in 5th Century BC. The years when he was active were also the age of Buddha and early Jainism in India and Confucius and first Daoists in China. They answered the same questions Socrates dealt with – The Meaning of reality, the way of good life and creation of
perfect society. Socrates was just the local version of a broader trend.
Buddha - Not Laughing!
Christianity was also a local version of a broader trend than something that set the West apart from the rest. As the roman empire fell in mid-first millennium, new questions arose – ” Is there anything beyond life? Can I be saved from the aftermath?” The Christianity provided the answers (let’s not get into the validity of those answers) and gained over 40 million followers. But in the same years in the wake of Han Dynasty’s fall in China, Mahayana and Buddhism were offering
their own answers to same questions. Soon enough Islam reached to Africa, the middle east and southern Asia. Leonardo da Vinci refined wisdom of ancient west to revolutionize everything from aeronautics to arts but 400 years before Vinci China has produced it’s own Renaissance men who refined ancient wisdom to revolutionize everything. Shen Kua
(1031-1095) published groundbreaking work in field of agriculture science, archeology and geology etc. Da Vinci would no doubt have been impressed. The triumphs of western culture were impressive but they were just local version of a broader trend and not lonely beacons in general darkness.
So if culture wasn’t the factor than what made Europeans superior? Answer is simple : ‘GEOGRAPHY‘.
Geography is unfair – societies evolve with the same sequence of cultural development. Geography dictates the speed at which different parts of World develop but the development can redefine geography too. 5000 years ago Europe was at a disadvantage geographically. It was far from centers of action Mesopotamia and Egypt so at the very beginning of recorded history geography made western Europe backward. Fast-forward to 500 years ago same geography gave western Europe wealth and power. Geography was the reason that it was Europeans and not Indians or Chinese who first discovered, colonized and plundered the Americas. India and China were as developed as Europe but geography placed them twice as far from American Continent as Europe, so Europeans got there first. But the western dominance will not last forever. History teaches that. The back-and-forth between Geography and Social development keeps on working. By 1900, the vast resources of USA made it the ‘top nation’. In late 20th century the human resources of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and eventually China and India made them newer global cores. If the process of change continues with the same pace in 21st century we can expect the East to overtake West by 2050.