The risk and reward of using AI in stock market

Got invited to a talk on “A.I. for wealth creation in the stock market” at an investor’s meet in my hometown and came away completely bamboozled. The speaker, the CEO of a brokerage firm, seemingly an expert on stock markets had zero knowledge about how AI works. He threw up a few slides on AI that were incomprehensible to the largely local non-tech savvy attendees and then started demonstrating ChatGPT as the way of using AI in the stock market to make better returns. But when he was asked to query ChatGPT to predict the next day’s stock market outcomes it couldn’t.

AI is mostly being used in automation and prediction now. Fundamental to AI is data and data analytics which leads to predictive analytics. The core aspect of AI is machine learning (ML) and there are two basic types of learning – supervised and unsupervised learning. All predictions from continuously changing data such as forecasting stock or trading outcomes and market fluctuations is through supervised learning. Pattern recognition is how AI systems identify patterns in data and then use those patterns to make decisions or predictions. One of the prevalent algorithms used for more accurate predictions is the backpropagation algorithm.

Now, an ideal investment portfolio would be a combination of high risk high reward investments (stocks, mutual funds) and low risk low reward investments (government bonds), the low risk ones to offset potential losses from high risk ones. Better AI prediction models can increase investment in high risk stocks leading to higher gains. But human sentiments and emotions play a major role in stock values and we are prone to mass hysteria. AI has no emotional intelligence so AI prediction models cannot factor in data on human emotions and can consequently lead to huge stock market losses.

Why we need to understand our origins and history before building artificial intelligence

According to ancient Sumerian tablets, a race of beings from another planet called Anunnaki descended on Earth in search of gold. Why they needed gold isn’t clear yet but they needed lots of gold. When the slaves they brought with them to mine for gold revolted, they extracted the genes of pre-human race of beings (Neanderthals, Homo Erectus) and combined with their own genes to create us. This is up for a lot of debate and in Genesis 1:26 in the Bible, God says “let us create them in our own image” where “let us” means there is no one God that created us. I am a believer in this story for two reasons:

1) Our natural tendency to look up when we pray which indicates the Gods we are worshiping came from above us

2) Unlike metals like iron, copper and aluminum, gold is useless to us. Then why take all the effort to mine it and why is it precious to us? Tons of gold have kept in a temple in India under the protection of the temple God for hundreds of years. This means gold is important to the Gods which is why it is precious to us.

Most importantly, the story is an indicator to us that we were created as biological robots to obey our creators. Why didn’t the Gods simply build mechanical robots for mining and why did they take all the effort to engage in genetic engineering to create us? Because they wanted us to think on our own and also have emotional intelligence. Why emotional intelligence? Because they wanted to control us emotionally and not mechanically. How? When we talk about Gods, we do not ask ourselves how did the concept of God and the fear of an unknown all knowing entity became embedded in us. We are in the 21st century and with so much of technological advances we are still under the control of Gods through various religions. There is nothing more advanced, complicated and powerful that can control us than the concept of God.

Do we have a similar controlling mechanism for the intelligent machines we are building? What would happen if AI grew to a point where it could think and act autonomously? The scene in The Matrix where Agent Smith tells Morpheus that human beings are the most dangerous virus on the planet has stuck with me. It is not only true that we do behave like viruses, if intelligence created by us becomes powerful enough to come to such a conclusion, what is shown in the Matrix and Terminator series will become real.

When I see all the excitement and euphoria over what AI can do all it tells me is how blatantly ignorant we are about ourselves and our past. 

The startup ecosystem is all about money and nothing about innovation

The recruiting head of a startup company based out of my home state in India contacted me recently for a senior role. Seemingly buoyed at my profile being a good fit for the role, she immediately set up an online interview. I went through the company website and checked out the team. When the interview invite came, I saw that the CEO was in the list of attendees and checked his LinkedIn profile. Turned out he had done all his education and all his work experience was with companies in my home state. He has never stepped out to work and has experience only in working with small to medium local companies and not with large and multinational enterprises. Having the polar opposite of his background I would have been a complete misfit in his company. Just as I had thought, during the interview it was evident from his body language and his way of speaking that he had no intention of hiring me. Couple of takeaways from this.

1) Recruiters look for match between job description and candidate profiles and largely ignore the cultural fit aspect. It isn’t about the organization culture but the specific team culture for which the hiring is being done and the tone of the culture is set by the hiring manager which is defined by the manager’s personality, technical and people management competency and at times even their academic background. In the case of startups the CEO/Founder sets the tone of the organization’s culture. When candidates are rejected before/after interviews cultural mismatch is one major reason which is never mentioned. Whenever people have asked my opinion about joining companies I have told them any organization is fine what matters are the role, the manager and the team’s culture. At the lower levels of the corporate pyramid, team culture doesn’t matter much but assumes significance as responsibilities grows with roles.

2) The head of a department in a government engineering college in my home state once told me that students are no longer interested in completing their degrees and are obsessed with starting companies. This startup culture is being fueled by the glorified stories of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg being college dropouts and going on to build Microsoft and Facebook, Sabeer Bhatia founding Hotmail and selling it to Microsoft and by the relative ease of acquiring funding now. The new trend is the growing obsession of having one of the CXO designations. Startups are largely associated with innovation which has distorted the meaning and purpose of innovation. Innovations have impacted, improved and drastically changed the entire human race. Radio, TV, Telephone, Fan and Penicillin are some of the best examples. For me, an air conditioner is not an innovation because it is still a luxury and hasn’t reached the majority of human population but a mobile phone has. How many of such innovations do we see coming out from the startup ecosystem and impacting humanity positively? Now it is all about money, go-to-market strategy is all about commercializing ideas and monetizing them, raising funds, achieving breakeven, becoming profitable, paying back investors, equity and financial ratios and percentages. The concept of innovation and business being for the people and by the people has largely eroded away. When I asked the CEO what his future plans for his company was he replied that he wants to expand internationally but not in India. Someone who knows nothing about international work culture is having lofty aspirations to go global with his business. Clearly, his focus is on generating higher revenue by leveraging on the weaker Indian Rupee compared to the Dollar and Euro. With such narrow vision these startups and CXOs aren’t going a long way ahead.

Welcome to Googlopathy, the new millennium treatment method

More than a month back, as Dad was walking towards the gym for his cardiovascular workouts one morning, he suddenly became unsteady and ungainly. He had been complaining about general weakness and fatigue for some time. In a couple of days his left side became weak and was unable to move his left hand and walk properly. I took him to a physician nearby who is a M.D and is in his late 70s-early 80s. He did some basic checks on dad (he has all sensations intact on his arm and leg), checked his BP (perfectly fine at 110/80), Dad doesn’t have diabetes (his blood sugar is always less than normal though he can still eat voraciously and devour sweets), so the doctor told us to do some lab tests the report of which was all clear. Then the doctor, suspecting stroke because of possible blood clot in dad’s brain prescribed couple of tablets to make his blood thinner and dissolve the clots and another tablet to improve his nerve functions. Then he told me to improve dad’s diet and take him for physiotherapy sessions. A doctor I know who was the senior doctor at a government hospital and is pursuing P.G in general surgery now told me the weakness could be because of Vitamin D deficiency (Dad hates sun after he had a severe bout of migraine) and asked me to put dad immediately on high dose of Vitamin D tablets once a week and daily calcium tablet.

Dad slowly started feeling better but wasn’t confident about going for physiotherapy sessions so I looked up on YouTube and started basic exercises to strengthen his arm and leg. Then people who know us started getting to know about dad’s condition and were shocked that we did not consult a neurologist and did not do his brain scan. Couple of days back, he finally agreed to go for physiotherapy. The physiotherapist we went to was agitated and demanded us to meet a neurologist, do a scan and then meet him. So I went back to the first doctor and he laughed before prescribing for CT scan. Yesterday we did the scan and everything was fine in the report. The doctor told me dad may have had a Transient Ischemic Attack (TSA) which lasts for a very short period possibly because of minute old clots mentioned in the report. Dad is going to take a while to be back to normal but he has already started moving his hand and is walking better now. The weakness he was complaining about could have been because of Sarcopenia, a condition where people lose skeletal muscle mass and strength due to ageing.

Then the doctor told me something insane. People no longer believe in physicians and clinical diagnosis. They just run to specialists every time they assume something is wrong with them. On top of this they ask for scans and lab tests to be done. Headache for two days and people go on Google, start reading things with no understanding of human anatomy, diseases and their diagnosis and go to doctors suspecting brain tumor and asking for scans to be done. They no longer care or believe in physical examination and diagnostic abilities of doctors no matter how experienced they are. This is what is Googlopathy.

The other doctor whom I spoke to threw a different curve ball at me. A regular doctor or physician could go wrong with his/her diagnosis but it could quickly earn bad reputation for specialists that’s why they are left with no option but to recommend lab tests and scans for every medical issue. We are on herd mentality behavior now where we blindly believe we can be cured only by specialists who charge high fees, do frequent consultation and prescribe tons of tablets, scans and lab tests. Our mindset has changed into believing that when we spend more money on something we will be getting more in return. The specialists are essentially tricking us into exploiting this mindset we have.

Even the regular doctors and specialists are practising Googlopathy now. I had taken dad to a nephrologist in a private hospital a few years back for suspected kidney weakness because his feet were swelling intermittently. The nephrologist, probably in his late 30s-early 40s took his mobile tablet, searched on a website (probably webmd.com) and asked us to do 10 lab tests. I was horrified. With my extremely limited knowledge of medicine and treatment I could have done the same. He did not even bother to ask what dad was experiencing, if he had other health issues, etc. I did the tests and took dad to a nephrologist who was working in a government hospital and was much older (in his 60s). He glanced at the lab report, cast it aside and said older people will develop slight swelling on their feet because of ageing which can be safely ignored.

I told dad the doctor we consulted was experienced enough to send him to a neurologist if he suspected dad had suffered a stroke. The confidence with which he told dad to go home was extraordinary and it came from his wealth of experience which no technology can match. The so called alternate treatment methods such as ayurveda and homeopathy have treated people for hundreds and thousands of years only through diagnosis by understanding the symptoms. Sadly, even those doctors are gravitating towards scans and lab tests now because it makes diagnosis quicker and easier. Our abilities to create and use technological devices is killing our natural ability to do clinical diagnosis.

This degradation is not limited to the field of medicine. Technological devices are destroying all our natural instincts and abilities. Birders use binoculars to identify birds at long distances. Birds are found in specific habitat, the way they perch is different and the shape and size of their wings is different which we can see when they fly. Birders should train themselves to identify birds using these aspects. Doing something the easy way does not mean it is always the best way. Our preference is to eat tasty food but no food in nature is tasty and animals choose food for nutrients not for taste. Our craving for taste has allowed unhealthy food industries to thrive and destroy our health. If we are topping this up with Googlopathy and consuming medicines at will we wont be needing an asteroid strike or nuclear war for our extinction. A bed ridden relative who passed away last year was being fed 17 tablets in the morning (17 you read it right). The line between amusement and horror blurred momentarily for me when I saw it.

Deconstructing the hype around digital transformation

There has been fervent buzz around digital transformation in the past decade. Using technology to improve and transform businesses was already on the ascension when I took a break from the IT industry to pursue a MBA degree because I had felt that with my background in technology a better understanding of businesses will help me add more value to the work I was doing. But in the intervening period between 2011-2012 when I was in the MBA program, technology itself underwent radical transformation. AI, Robotics, SMAC, IoT, Cryptocurrencies, Blockchain, Agile, even software programming has undergone drastic changes from that time.

As I started understanding all the new jargons, it became increasingly evident that most of what has been projected as new and disruptive innovation is only incremental innovation. My engineering college project 23 years back was based on AI so theoretically AI has been existing for a very long time. It was just a matter of how it was going to be integrated into existing technologies. Many companies were using virtual servers created using software like VMWare so it was only a matter of faster and reliable internet services to be available for virtual servers and applications to be provided over the internet thus kickstarting the Cloud phenomenon. There was humongous amount of data generated from users through their various interactions with the businesses so it was just a matter of time before businesses decided to sift through all that data and find out what users like and dislike and how customer engagement can be improved and increased. Thus analytics was born. Rudimentary social media was born when we started sending and receiving emails and messages from our mobile phones. Orkut demonstrated that a digital social media platform is possible. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like had to just piggyback on that experience. We have been using computers with operating systems and software applications for decades now so once we developed mobile phones creating sophisticated operating systems and applications for phones was only a matter of improvements in hardware technologies. What I do find disruptive though is the use of robots in industries and especially the use of drones for commercial purposes.

What I have understood from digital transformation is the exponential use of technology to manage and run businesses, solve business problems and improve and scale business environments. Managing and scaling businesses is possible but can technology solve all business problems? I was leading a transition team for the outsourcing of the IT infrastructure of a retail giant in the UK to India when one day I curiously asked the IT head of the client what problems did he see and face in the retail sector. I was expecting an answer but what I got from him was a question which changed my perception about business entirely and helped me understand why I need to take up a MBA program. After they embraced eCommerce and integrated it into their website, their customer size had increased but customers visiting their brick and mortar stores had dwindled. Their stores have amazing ambience and are primed to provide great shopping experience to customers so the question he asked was how to bring the customers back into the stores. There was no way to coax people to choose buying from stores over buying from their website. It was a business problem technological transformation couldn’t solve. One suggestion I gave him was to set up video cameras inside the stores and enable video sessions from their website so that customers can do in-store shopping virtually and interact with the customer executives at the stores. This would give customers greater understanding and control over what they are buying.

When my parents decided to set up a cloud kitchen, we decided that it would be operational only during peak lunch and dinner hours as prior preparation takes time. Our focus shifted entirely from getting more customers to creating better customer experience and getting repeat customers. After a year of being operational and being through the trying times of the pandemic, our business volume is low but repeat customers are slowly on the rise. People are calling us to enquire about our food items. A repeat customer who couldn’t place his order on the delivery platform called us to place his order and came to our place to pick up the order himself.

Customer experience has always been the heart and soul and bread and butter of all businesses. New technology tools and platforms are enabling businesses to reach out and connect with customers. But technology does not necessarily help in creating better customer experience every time. Imagine a distress call to a helpline number of a hospital for medical assistance being received by an AI powered automated system which asks for the name, age, presently experiencing symptoms and prior medical history and then the system takes it’s own time to analyze the medical problem and find out if a relevant doctor is available before assigning an ambulance. The patient needs immediate attention from any qualified doctor. Detailed examination and treatment can be done after the patient is admitted in the hospital.

Consider online food delivery companies replacing their delivery executives with drones to deliver food and groceries to their customers. When it comes to human needs, especially the basic needs such as food, clothing and shelter, there are too many aspects involved. Neither the food outlets nor the customers will be able to have any interaction with the drones. During the peak time of the pandemic when there were many containment zones in my city and delivering food was not possible in many places, we used to speak to the delivery executives and understand the situation on the ground from them before deciding on opening our kitchen. Delivery executives have even bought our food items when they came to collect client orders. None of these would have been possible if drones are being used.

Over thousands of years of our existence, we have evolved and are hard wired to communicate in person with one another. Technology may alter our behavior but it is impossible to rewire us mentally and emotionally in the span of a few years. The introduction of emojis on social media platforms is the best indicator that no matter how we communicate, we need to express our emotions continuously. An AI powered chatbot or automated system can never replace the reassuring voice of a human being on the other side when we are reaching out for help.

Digital transformation may not be a complete fit for all organizations and all types of industries. Business transformation will have different meanings, objectives and outcomes for different organizations and digitalization can only contribute in varying degrees as part of the business transformation program. There will be areas in the business environments that can be automated and simplified using technology but technology will never be able to replace human interactions and interventions completely. Companies will have to do their due diligence and assessments thoroughly and weigh the pros and cons very carefully in every aspect of their business before they embark on their digital transformation journey.

So if digital transformation is not the next big thing what is? An invention on the scale of electricity, TV or mobile phone that caters to basic human needs or the internet that jump started and exploded technology. Improving technologies and adding new features to devices is incremental and not disruptive innovation. I believe human civilization will reach its zenith when we attain the potential and ability to use our minds for our different needs. Telepathy, telekinesis and remote viewing may sound like sci-fi now, but references to them in texts from ancient civilizations is a sign for us. Even if we are not ready to believe those texts, if we have the ability to create such sophisticated technologies and devices why can’t we use our mind to communicate and move objects? Sony is coming out with a camera that can be fixed on the eye and can shoot photos when we blink. We are already observing and recording information with our eyes so why can’t we just download those images from our mind on to devices? We will continue chasing technologies and devices till we realize the true potential of our minds if the technologies and devices we are creating do not lead us to self destruction and extinction.

How Zomato’s & Swiggy’s business model is creating & choking food outlets

 

Online food delivery companies Zomato and Swiggy have completely changed how urban India eats it’s food. Sensing how Indian families like to eat home cooked food, Swiggy came up with a smartly enticing ad with the slogan “eat some home made food eat some from Swiggy”. Though several small local players have come up, these two companies have largely monopolized the market, Zomato going so far as to buy UberEats, the food delivery arm of Uber.

Both companies have very similar mobile apps with small variations in their features. The process they follow to add food outlets on to their platforms is also very similar. Create a new food outlet on the platform and list the items on the outlet’s menu in the app with the photos. Then a general template is followed to add options to turn on/off the outlet on the app and turn on/off individual items on the menu. Then the outlet is all set to start doing business on the platforms. All of this sounds well and good but then comes the tricky part.

When they created the option for customers to rate the food of food outlets, they chose an easy and clumsy way to do it. They simply added the option to rate the food outlets instead of the food their customers ate. This is the archaic method of rating restaurants based on the entire dining experience at their premises. With food delivery apps, there is no dining experience. There are only a few parameters to check such as if the food has been prepared with good and fresh ingredients and the behavior of the delivery executives.

Lets see how the rating dynamics plays out. So for example, a restaurant has 50 items on it’s regular menu and they are listed on the apps of Zomato and Swiggy and a customer orders 2 items from the list. Depending on how much the customer has liked the food, ratings can be given from 1-5, 1 being the least and 5 being the best. Let’s say the customer liked the two items immensely and decided to give 5 rating. But note that the rating is going for the restaurant and not for the food items he/she had ordered. On the flip side, if the customer did not like the food at all, the restaurant might get a 1 rating.

The fundamental problem with this rating system is, a customer who gives a lower rating in their first experience is less likely to buy again from the restaurant and this is irrespective of the fact that he/she has just tried 2 of the 50 items in the menu. Now let’s say the customer who gave 5 rating the first time ordered another two items from the same restaurant and didn’t like them. Where does this leave the customer? Should he/she rate the restaurant again? Giving a lower rating has the psychological effect on us of being less likely to buy from the same restaurant again.

Both Zomato and Swiggy mandate that outlets receive a certain number of ratings in a specific number of days to show as rated outlets on their platforms. Customers who give good ratings on their first order from an outlet is more unlikely to give ratings for further orders, even though they might be ordering different items on the outlet’s menu since they have already rated the outlet. This has adverse effect on food outlets with less items as they need more new customers to buy their items and rate them to stay rated on the platforms and they have no control over it.

Now what if the ratings are given for food items rather than the food outlets? One food item may have slightly different tastes in different food outlets. A customer may like it the most from one food outlet and not so much from the others but it will not have the effect of the customer avoiding food outlets because of one unsavory experience with them.

The inherent problem lies in the design of the apps. Food outlets are listed in the apps and under them their respective food items. Then there are some categories of food items listed, like for example Pizza. Inside Pizza, the food outlets selling pizzas are listed along with their ratings. Customers have to select an outlet to go to its menu. Now, how would the design look like if food items were rated instead of the food outlets? Under Pizza, types of pizzas will be listed. So when the customer clicks on, say, Margherita Pizza, the list of food outlets selling the pizza from the best to the lowest rating will be listed.

Even more bizarre is how customers are able to give lower ratings to food outlets by simply stating that the taste of the food was bad. They should also be given the options to specify what about the food was bad. Maybe the ingredients were not good or fresh, food was burnt or not cooked properly, etc. Simply allowing customers to give lower ratings because taste of the food is bad is ridiculous. Imagine going to a restaurant, ordering food off their menu and then telling them that the taste is bad. What they are giving is the taste of their food. They are not forcing anyone to go and have their food.

So what would be the benefit of rating food items? Competition among food outlets will increase on individual food items. Food outlets will start specializing on certain food items because it will become impossible to focus equally on all items on their menu. Outlets that cannot survive in the competition will close down. This is the reason why Zomato and Swiggy are rating food outlets rather than food items.

Both earn revenues by charging food outlets for using their platforms. Both are looking to onboard as many food outlets as they can on to their platforms to increase their revenues. They also provide option for food outlets to offer discounts for their customers which in turn will increase overall sales on the platforms. Moreover, when it becomes hard for food outlets to differentiate from one another, offering discounts become the last option. If Zomato and Swiggy decide to rate food items instead of outlets, quality of food items will improve and outlets will not have to offer discounts but number of outlets will decline considerably. With their business model and app designs and the concept of cloud kitchen, they have created the illusion that anyone can make food and sell on their platforms. Amazon and Flipkart have similar business models and apps, but selling food items is vastly different from selling other goods.

Many smaller food outlets that were catering to the student community and earning a large portion of their revenues through Zomato and Swiggy were forced to shut down due to COVID-19 lockdowns in my hometown. The fee that Zomato and Swiggy charge outlets for using their platforms is increasingly becoming unbearable for many outlets. There was a recent report that the hotels and restaurants association in my home state is planning to develop their own online delivery platform to escape from the steep platform fee of Zomato and Swiggy. No matter how many platforms come up, online delivery of food will not improve as long as the current business model of Zomato and Swiggy is followed.

Understanding Pfizer’s and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines and their efficacy

The trending news globally now, apart from Trump trying to usurp democracy in the US is the development of the COVID-19 vaccine. Many pharma manufacturing companies have been in the race to develop the vaccine. Pfizer and Moderna seems to have surged ahead of the rest, ending their phase-3 trials with 95% and 94.5% effectiveness respectively.

Vaccines have been traditionally manufactured with either weakened viruses or purified protein signatures of the viruses and vaccines train the immune system with the information to identify viruses and isolate them before creating antibodies to destroy them. This is similar to how virus signatures are added to virus definition files in antivirus software, the signatures comparable to header information of web pages.

Pfizer and Moderna are developing a new type of vaccine that contains the messenger RNA (mRNA) which is the genetic material that encodes the protein of the virus. The immune system uses the information contained in the mRNA to create the most important part of the viral protein inside the body without actually infecting the person with the virus. This technique helps the immune system to learn about the virus and create antibodies to counter and destroy the virus if the person gets infected in the future.

But this isn’t so simple as it sounds. Our genetic and immune systems are extremely complex, the sophistication achieved through millions of years of evolution. Then our anatomical differences from thousands of years of separation based on religion, color, race, caste, geography, life style, food habits, etc. In India itself, the degrees of separation become stark as we move from one state to another. This is why types of medication and dosage of medicines vary so much from one person to another.

Now what implications do 95% effectiveness of the vaccine have? Does it mean 5% of the global population could still be affected by COVID-19 after taking the vaccine? That is a huge number of people. Without any serious side effects means the possibility of having mild to medium level side effects will exist. What if these side effects weakens our immune system and makes us vulnerable to contracting other diseases? So, essentially we are going to get vaccine shots that may not prevent us from getting infected by COVID-19 and on top of it we could be exposed to other diseases.

Pfizer has supposedly tested the vaccine on 43000 volunteers. Assuming human population to be 7 billion, this means the vaccine has been tested on merely 0.006% of the population. When they could achieve only 95% effectiveness on 0.006% of the population, what is the guarantee that the 95% effectiveness will be consistent as the vaccine is delivered to millions and billions of people? There is a reason why Six Sigma is used in the manufacturing sector – to minimize errors. It follows the rule of having only 3.4 errors or less in a million samples. When pharma companies are not following these standards to manufacture vaccines, what is the point in having Six Sigma at all? Even outsourced IT support projects require 98-99% uptime of the IT infrastructure in the Service Level Agreements(SLAs).

I see the difference between the traditional method of making vaccines and the new mRNA method from the perspective of the difference between supervised and unsupervised learning models in AI. Traditional vaccines seem to follow the supervised learning model where the vaccines use the complete details of the virus to train the immune system to identify the virus later. The mRNA method seems to follow the unsupervised learning model where the vaccine provides only a snapshot of the virus to the immune system and leaves it to the immune system to create the most appropriate antibodies to fight the virus when the body gets infected.

From what I have understood about the COVID-19 virus till now, it is more likely to be fatal for people who are already suffering from other life threatening diseases. Being a new virus strain, the immune system is apparently unable to identify and isolate the virus in its first step to counter the virus. This leads to the immune system furiously engaging with the virus and getting overloaded so it cannot handle the existing diseases properly. This is how people have been dying, of their existing diseases, their deaths hastened indirectly by the COVID-19 virus.

Pfizer’s and Moderna’s phase-3 trial results not withstanding, I am intrigued to see how effective the mRNA method is going to be on people suffering from one or more life threatening diseases or comorbidity. When the vaccine is given to such people, how well can their immune system understand about the virus from the viral protein sample when it is already fully engaged with combating existing diseases? Even if the immune system is able to identify the virus when there is a virus attack I do not know if it would be able to create relevant antibodies strong enough to fight the virus. All of this is going to be more cumbersome in aged people. There could be unintended consequences and immune system reactions, ranging from curing other unrelated ailments to exposing the body to other diseases.

There are larger questions to be answered. For a viral infection from which the recovery rate is more than 99%, why do we need a vaccine and that too with 95% effectiveness? Why hasn’t the pharma community discovered a vaccine for seasonal flu because of which so many people die every year? Or for common cold which has been affecting almost all people forever? These are also contagious diseases like COVID-19. Why are we being overwhelmed and worn down in the name of a virus that is only as potent as a flu virus and why is the vaccine getting pushed on to us? Companies have made windfalls selling face masks, sanitizers and disinfectants. Is the vaccine another windfall for the pharma companies to run riot on or is there a bigger agenda?

Meanwhile, to add to all the uncertainty, this happened in India.

How technology and business strategies have influenced the subtle art of photography

Don’t we all come across jaw dropping pictures on the Internet every day? Those awe inducing images have enticed millions into the world of photography. Now social media is inundated with photographers who claim to teach photography to people. Most of the time, their sole skill lies in handling different cameras and camera equipment and that is what most of their sessions are all about.

Pictures are stories that photographers narrate to the world from their travels and observations. Most amateur photographers are being made oblivious to this fact by diverting their attention to camera and camera equipment. Technological advancements have ensured that cameras and associated equipment are filled with dazzling array of advanced features that empowers anyone to take sharp and bright images. What people overlook is the simple fact that photography is also an art and another form of painting. My grandfather was an excellent oil and canvas painter but he was predominantly a portrait painter and the ones of nature he painted was by looking at available pictures. He was neither someone who used to go out to nature to create his paintings nor did he travel around, come back with images in his mind and paint them. Photography is painting in real time and it takes observation prowess, focus, concentration, patience and perseverance to take those photos that mesmerizes us.

Technological advances have made cameras so sophisticated that using them in all their default settings is enough to get many of those dazzling images. Contrast this with the photo I saw of an owl in flight at night taken with a roll film camera and flash of the past. The technological features inside present day cameras help us to pretty much point and shoot at anything we want. This had narrowed down our vision to only the subject of the picture and we no longer care about the background, angle of light and other aspects other than in portrait photography because of the features of the camera and advanced software available to fix issues with the photos.

When I was looking to buy a camera 3 years back, what I understood was that it all comes down to the purpose of taking photos. In order to print pictures, greater amount of information of the subject and it’s surroundings have to be captured in the photo and stored as pixels otherwise the available pixels would spread out on the paper and hinder it’s quality. For this purpose photos have to be taken in the RAW format which can be done only in DSLR cameras. Software available to edit photos in RAW format have advanced features which enable fine tuning of the light, color and other features of the photos. But, if printing is not the primary objective of photography, DSLR cameras are not an essential requirement. Also, the clarity of pictures when viewed on computers and mobile devices decreases with the decrease in the number of pixels. Photos taken in jpeg format are usually good enough to be viewed on bigger screens. In Adobe Acrobat software, there are two options to print a document: Online and Standard printing. If the objective of making a document is to keep it on the computer only, there is no need to increase its number of pixels and thereby increase its size. The same rule applies to pictures as well.

Then how do manufacturers of cameras and camera equipment manage to sell their high-end products? Its through the creation of a popular perception with smart business strategy that unravels right under our noses. Be it for any purpose, the sharpest and brightest images get noticed the most and to shoot them what we are being made to believe is that the best cameras and equipment are required. Even more cunning is in how only the sharpest and brightest images win photography competitions. This has permeated into our conscience so deep that the moment we decide to take up photography, we automatically start searching for the best piece of camera and lens even if we have to buy them on heavy loans.

Manufacturers have different categories of cameras and equipment and photography competitions have different categories such as portrait, wildlife, etc but these competitions do not have categories based on different types of cameras and equipment. This forces photographers who aspire to participate in competitions to buy the premium equipment. I have an entry model DSLR with lens of reasonable zoom. None of the pictures I take will ever win a competition because the pictures I take are competing with pictures taken with the best equipment and not with pictures taken with equipment comparable to mine.

An argument could be made that the best competitions such as the ones run by National Geographic would print the competition winning photos in their magazines. We are in the digital age and there is so much clamor going on over deforestation and discouraging us from printing to save trees. Even when we take the case of events, we upload the photos to the internet and send the links to most of our contacts. The photos can be seen on any device from computer to phone. Then what is the need for the photos to be printed? Then there are photography exhibitions which require photos to be printed and framed. Why not just show the pictures on digital screens which can be hung on or attached to walls? Technology has made this possible as well.

Buying cameras and equipment should essentially come down to the area of photography we choose to become experts in and what we want to show to the world. I am primarily a nature and wildlife photographer and specifically in wildlife photography I have no interest in taking portrait images of animals since they are already available in more than plenty on the internet. Moreover the real beauty of wild animals can be seen only when they are in action. The biggest available lenses are good for mainly portrait photos because of the amount of zoom they can provide and is too heavy to be used for hand held photography. Attaching a pod to the camera means missing out on much of the most important action including birds in flight especially up in the sky unless the ones using them are experts and thorough professionals who spend their entire time in photography and have chosen photography as their occupation. I have read about lenses that offer zoom from a very low to high level and stability would likely become a problem at both levels.

I have come across people who have bought the high end cameras and associated equipment and who try to take photos of everything they come across. Photography, like painting is a subtle art. No one creates cartoons with oil and canvas. We need to find our niche first before we make a full length dive into it. I dabbled with a point-and-shoot camera for more than 2 years till I was convinced that I can take better pictures than what I was taking with the camera. That is when I bought the camera I use now. Someone had seen the pictures I had taken with my point-and-shoot camera and told me not to buy an entry level model DSLR. I have never been a big bang model guy and I always prefer taking it slow, learning and going ahead. My camera and zoom lens are still giving me excellent pictures and the flexibility to shoot what I want to but some times, I feel that a better lens would have been helpful. A lens with a bigger zoom is still some distance away.

The meaning of “artificial”​ in Artificial Intelligence & its ramification on our future

If we have to understand the crux, meaning or purpose of something, the question that needs to be answered is why. There is a business model called 5W (Why, What, Who, When, Where) +1H (How) which can be easily applied to all aspects of our lives. All the mysteries around the world we keep talking about is because the question why has not been answered yet. If we find the answer for why, everything else will fall into place.

When I did my project in artificial neural networks as part of engineering course 20 years back, I felt uneasy about something but I did not know why. Again the why. I know now that what made me uneasy was the word artificial. Why do we call the intelligence we create as artificial? The antonym of artificial is original so are we claiming that our intelligence is original? Are we basically saying that we created our intelligence through evolution? The problem with this is, we are implicitly assuming that the creation of Universe was by accident and intelligence evolved within it with time.

When we create artificial intelligence now, it is because we have become intelligent enough to create intelligent beings on our own. So it is also possible that other intelligent beings may have created us as intelligent beings. There is a gap in human evolution wherein there is a quantum leap from Homo Erectus, the early hominids to intelligent Homo Sapiens which mainstream science has not been able to explain. More than intelligence it is intelligent communication abilities that is more baffling. In the evolutionary time span, such a big leap is simply not possible. Our genetic structure is 99% similar to that of apes so how can a mere 1% make us so different from them in terms of intelligence and communication skills? Ancient Sumerian tablets have helped to unlock this mystery with the information that an extraterrestrial race of beings called the Anunnaki manipulated the genetic structure of early hominids to create us. Again the why comes into significance. They created us as their slaves to mine gold for which they had come to earth.

People might scoff at this as mere fantasy stories but again the why rears up it’s head. Why do we look up when we pray to God? Why is gold precious to us when metals like iron, copper and aluminum are the ones useful to us in our daily lives and gold has no practical use? Why did the ancient Kings of Travancore in the state of Kerala in India store gold worth billions of dollars in a temple in the name of Gods and why is it forbidden for our use?

What we need to realize and accept is that just like we create robots now to do our work it is also possible that we may have been created by beings with far superior intelligence to do their work. In ancient Indian texts, Brahma the creator of the Universe creates Manu who is given the task of seeding life across the Universe. In the ancient Sumerian tablets it is Anu who is the master of creation of life. Scientists and researchers now believe that seeding of life across the Universe has been happening through a process known as panspermia so then Manu (Anu) must be the one providing intelligence to different life forms. So the question here is, is creation of intelligent life forms a continuous process? If we consider that the Universe is a creation of an infinitely higher order of intelligence, then lower orders of that intelligence will have to exist within it’s realm for it to grow and expand. Spreading intelligence within the Universe is what must be helping in it’s own evolution. So the most important purpose of the existence of every being in the Universe could be the spreading of intelligence.

But where it gets interesting is in the way we have started fearing the intelligence we are creating which has spawned movies like the Matrix Trilogy, The Terminator series, I, Robot and countless other ones. Why are we in fear that the intelligence we are creating could grow out of our control? This is where I concur with the scientists and researchers who believe in Ancient Aliens theory. They believe that the Anunnaki could have had easily created intelligent mechanical beings for mining gold but they must have chosen not to for the same reason we are fearing now. It is not possible to create emotions in mechanical beings and the intelligence of mechanical beings can evolve to a point where they start believing and acting on mere logic and devoid of emotions. This is exactly what we are fearing now and what has already started happening. So the Anunnaki smartly chose to create biological robots by genetic manipulation of existing beings and they created us in such a way that we could be manipulated emotionally. The best example of this is, they must have created us as their slaves by controlling us through fear which would not have possible with machines and this could be why we still live with the fear of God.

So as AI takes center stage in all aspects of our lives, we need to look at the past and learn from our own creation and evolution. The Anunnaki did not make us as intelligent as they were and they left the earth a long time back, leaving us to evolve with the intelligence they gave us. They must have also known that two different beings with similarly evolving intelligence cannot coexist just like no two adult male lions can live in the same cave. If we allow AI to start thinking and acting on it’s own it should only be when we are ready to leave the planet to them and go away. A self sustaining AI will be disastrous for us for the simple reason that it would deal with us only on logic and our existence has always been more on emotions and less on logic.

Comprehending human violence – why we are so brutal to our own kind

Haven’t we all wondered at least once in our life why we are such a violent species? What are the origins of humanity’s seven sins? Or have we even pondered over these, ever? Rapes, cold blooded murders, looting, arson, hooliganism, the comprehensive list ends with the use of atomic weapons. Right from bullying and ragging in schools and colleges, we have all accepted violence as part of our societal life to the extent where men who cry and cannot endure physical pain are ridiculed and looked down upon. What is important here is, we have been incomprehensibly brutal to our fellow beings. Why?

Animal world is brutal without doubt. Animals have evolved to survive all conditions on our planet. But animals do not kill their own kind other than for mating rights and on extremely rare occasions. Territorial disputes do occur but that gets over in fights and not deaths. Moreover carnivores exist to control the population of herbivores which in turn prevents wanton destruction of vegetation. The perfection of nature’s design is in the fact that carnivores have taste buds that are evolved only to eat meat and not evolved enough to understand the taste of flesh and blood or rather the lack of it.

Human history is replete with violence against its own kind and if we look at our history closely, our evolution has been more significant for the destruction of fellow beings. From wooden to nuclear weapons, we have spent bewilderingly copious amounts of time, energy and intellect in creating and perfecting weapons to use against ourselves. We glorify ourselves for the manner of our evolution from cave dwellers to the technological advances we have been able to achieve in present times, but we do not talk about what we have done against ourselves in the same breath. From Egyptian civilization where soldiers were killed to supposedly travel with their dead Pharaohs in their afterlives to how the entire group of people and soldiers who dug Genghis Khan’s grave was butchered to keep his grave a secret (for reasons still unknown) to the Crusades to African slavery to all the wars especially World War I and II and the atomic bombs we dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our brutality against our kind is dumbfounding. What is more mind boggling is, we use our superior intelligence to annihilate ourselves whereas less intelligent animals know how to protect and conserve their species. Have we ever wondered why or what drives us towards this unexplained behavior?

The primary issue is in the understanding about the origins of humanity. The conflicting theories of human creation and evolution makes it all the more confusing. If we believe in the theory of evolution, there is a massive gap in our evolution that science has not been able to explain. Our intelligence has literally exploded in our evolutionary timeline in a very short period of time and more bewildering is the development of our communication skills especially our speaking ability. There is also the question of how apes evolved into humans all over the world at the same time. There are no more evolved and less evolved humans among us. If we believe in the creation theory, the story begins from Adam and Eve and they supposedly had 3 male children. Now hold on to this thought and then look at the whites, blacks, orientals and all the numerous types of human beings. What is the probability of such humongous human evolution from 3 siblings and that too without any women to procreate with?

Ancient Sumerian texts explain in detail how the less evolved versions such as neanderthals were genetically manipulated by aliens to create us in our present form. That can explain our evolution in intelligence and communication. But how did we start looking so different, developed different societal ways of life and most importantly, where does this violent streak towards our own kind come from?

Looks like the secret lies in the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. There were just humans at the time and not different types of humans. The story goes that the humans decided to build a tower that would rise so high that it would touch the sky and be the bridge between earth and heaven. What does this story indicate? It could be a metaphor for the fact that human development had reached a point where it was at the threshold of becoming equal to that of the creator Gods. So the Gods decided to punish the humans by corrupting their minds and destroying their unity. This video explains it all (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_mTsX6jovc). Now this could also explain why we ended being whites, blacks, orientals etc because the same Gods must have manipulated us genetically, created different versions of humans and scattered us all over the world. To add to this, corrupting our minds against one another is where the origins of our violent streak could lie. The premise must have been that the Gods did not want humans to become their equal or it could be that they believed humans were not ready for what they were aspiring for at that time.

Question is, do we need to believe in yet another fable? We do not need to, but the results are before us in our history. Have we ever wondered why we have so many religions? We could say that newer religions such as Buddhism, Christianity and Islam have more and improved rules for human existence in society but what have they ultimately done? Fragmented humans even more. Now what we have is situations like white Christians fighting white Muslims. Lower caste Hindus cannot drink water from wells “owned” by upper caste Hindus even in the 21st century. Same skin color so caste became the divisor. Psychological assessments of hardcore criminals have revealed that they are themselves not able to explain how they committed the gruesome acts of violence and have no comprehension of their state of mind at those moments. We are all supposedly having genetic information from 7 previous generations. What if the violence was coming from an ancestral gene acting up? Money and wealth tops all other divides now and two new groups of humans are getting created, the haves and the have-nots.

So what can we do about it? Understand ourselves first. We are endowed with unlimited intelligence and resilience. We have always been able to absorb all the after shocks of violence and move on which is why we are where we are now. Every problem has at least one solution but to find the solution the first step is to accept that the problem exists. We have to accept that though we are segregated by many factors, we belong to one species called Homo Sapiens. We have to consciously start look beyond monetary, political, religious and all other differences that separate us.

It could also be that the creator Gods have put us to our ultimate test. Overcoming all our differences and uniting as one species could take us to our next stage of evolution. Maybe that is when we will be able to successfully build the tower of Babel or whatever it represented. Advanced civilizations like Atlantis supposedly failed because even though it achieved technological heights it may not have had a united population of people. All ancient texts talk about the return of someone, Kalki in Hinduism, Jesus in Christianity and so on who would return to unite all humans. If we use our intelligence and commonsense we do not need to wait for anyone to come and remind us that we are humans above everything else. The choice is and has always been ours.