1983 –Bombay (now called Mumbai) city was gripped under cricket fever as this was the year in which India had won the first Cricket World Cup. Boys and girls gathered after school in the backyards of their apartment buildings to indulge in this great sport. I watched my friends leave aside our little girly games and join the boys. They were quite good at it, but I couldn’t say the same for myself. I was soon labeled as the “Kaccha Limbu” (meaning unripe lemon), a term commonly referred to an amateur player in Bombay. I was not given a coveted place in the batting lineup and was only allowed to field. But after my butter fingers missed some critical catches, I was thrown out of the game. Crestfallen, I stepped back and resigned to the comfort of my home. I turned on my radio and picked up a book to read. Having a television at home was not that common during those days. Some of my friends had it, but it wasn’t allowed at home as our parents thought it would impact our studies.
Soon it was time to go to college, but none of the lectures excited me enough. Life went on…until one fine day when I decided to follow my friends who enrolled in some computer classes in the evenings. My eyes widened as I looked at the row of computer terminals.
An instructor was showing the students how to write a small code in the Basic programming language. He invited me to write a small snippet to print “Hello world”. Soon I created a loop that resulted in those two magic words scrolling down endlessly on the terminal. I was delighted at the thought of something ready to follow my command and at the thought that I could control something. That day I knew what I wanted to pursue in my educational journey. I dabbled later with many different programming languages like Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, C, etc., but was most fascinated when we were taught “Lisp”. It was introduced as the language for Artificial Intelligence. My first program in Lisp was to detect “Who is the murderer?”. Lisp’s approach was to treat code and data in the same fashion, allowing programs to manipulate their own code, leading to powerful metaprogramming capabilities. Its expressive nature and ability to represent knowledge made it a popular choice for AI applications.
Although everyone has started talking about Artificial Intelligence suddenly, it is a concept that has started seeping into our society for decades. The early concepts of machine learning started in the 1950s and up to the 1980s we were focused on rule-based systems. However, they struggled to handle uncertainty and real-world complexity. The concept of Neural networks was also born in the 80s. However, it could not go too far due to the limitation of training data and computational resources. As the use of the internet exploded in the late 1990s and the era dawned into the 2000s, big data technologies were born, and the generation of massive datasets enabled more complex models. At the same time, cloud computing and improvements in hardware (GPUs) led to the resurgence of deep learning and excelled in tasks like image recognition and natural language processing.
We tell our children today, “During our times we used to play with our friends after school or go for a ride on our bikes. Why are you always stuck with your phone or the computer?”. But growing up has never been easy. When I was young, all I had was my little radio playing old Bollywood songs to give me solace. Every evening I used to go out for a walk with my best friend. The tight hugs, those reassuring words, the wiping of tears rejuvenated me. The invaluable advice that I got, helped me carry on.
Today the radio is replaced by video games which take our children to this new world where they are the masters of their own destiny. There are friends, but not the kind that you could pour your heart out to. The shiny armor, attractive weapons, and difficult terrains bring forth new challenges every day. Without realizing stress levels rise, and the young minds are captured in a maze of twists and turns. The video game industry keeps thriving thanks to another type of machine learning called Reinforcement learning where an agent learns to make decisions by taking actions in an environment. The agent receives feedback in the form of rewards and penalties, which guides its learning process. Over time, the agent refines its strategy to achieve the highest possible cumulative reward. The games toy with the psychology of the players through the Zeigarnik Effect which makes it extremely hard to break away as the human mind feels a deep urge to complete unfinished business. Not only video games, but this concept has also been applied in various fields including advertising, where marketers might use open-ended messages to engage and maintain the audience’s interest. As the young vulnerable minds go deeper and deeper into this rubble of make-belief, they go further and further away from the physical world where real people are waiting to hold their hands and listen to their troubles.
AI is hitting us like a Tsunami and there is no stopping it. It is up to the new generation to decide whether they would want to be swept away or to behave like the dam that not only controls the floods but also helps create a more productive future. It is time to embrace the AI revolution and hop on the bandwagon.
There are two trains of thought now. One says that AI will take away all the jobs and the next generation will lose their thinking and reasoning abilities. Another is that AI will take away some jobs but will create many more. Children will be much smarter and more creative than their predecessors. What lies in the future is yet to be seen. For sure, the learning experiences in the universities will change. Programmers will benefit tremendously from Git-hub Copilot and other generative AI tools that code for us, but when it comes to fixing, assessing, improving, combining their output, or integrating into complex projects, expertise will absolutely be needed. A doctor will get a lot of help, but we will still rely on their expert judgment.
Today, we have all the big giants competing against each other to bring more and more advancements in AI. There are talks about an ethical and responsible AI where concerns about fairness, bias, and accountability are being addressed. I do hope this is taken very seriously, otherwise we never know where this will ultimately take us. The Chat-GPTs, the Geminis, and all those LLM models can help our children do their homework, can help our corporates increase our productivity multi-fold, and even show us how to plan our children’s birthday parties or show us whether our omelet is fully cooked or not. Just as many years ago, we never imagined how one could survive without a Google search or how one could reach their destination without a GPS, someday soon AI will be an integral part of our lives.
Imagine a world where generative AI will progress so much that it will be able to learn from the feelings and touch of a human being and will be able to reciprocate. We will have Robots living amongst us who will be able to emote and engage in conversations. But nothing can compare to the tenderness and comfort of a mother’s arms or the care and protection of a father who remains your pillar of strength. Or simply a true friend who genuinely loves you for what you are, and says as you walk together into the sunset, “No matter what happens, I will always be there for you!”.