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 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.

Degrees of customer centricity in today’s business world

Born in the 70’s, “Customer is King” was the business mantra I grew up listening to. But it no longer seems to be the case. While the advent of Internet has been the biggest disruptive force to hit the world of business, there is a lot more behind the journey of the business world to where it is now.

There are two factors to be clearly understood and even wary about when driving a business enterprise to it’s success – acceptance and adoption. In the brick and mortar model of business, it is extremely difficult to foresee changing customer preferences or what factors would drive customers to change their preferences. A simple example is the Indian film industry. A commercially successful movie was supposed to have a certain number of action sequences, songs, dance scenes, emotional scenes and comedy. It was the blueprint for success in Bollywood (and still is in some regional film industries) until a first time director (Farhan Akhtar) shattered the stereotype in 2001. It was the fear of acceptance that had kept Bollywood from evolving out of the rut it got stuck in. Same was the case with the world of business as well. The same fear of acceptance kept Kodak from disrupting it’s own business model by embracing the digital camera before it was too late.

The increased adoption of technology in business made collection of data from business easier and software applications made it possible to collate data from different business segments, analyze them and understand what factors are driving businesses up and down. Adoption of the internet and the advent of eCommerce finally broke the fear of acceptance and adoption as online stores does not even cost a fraction of the brick and mortar ones.

One fear gave way to a new one – customer support and satisfaction. As customers started adopting to technology and accepting new and radical products, it became imperative to measure and understand how satisfied the customers are. Back in 2004, my life was meandering through regular IT support jobs when I was hired for the project of a European client, at a time when I had no idea that IT support services were getting outsourced. One incident changed my professional life and helped me understand my way ahead. One of the client’s software applications had stopped working and it was reported to the support team I was part of. We worked on the issue as per the priority on which the issue was reported. When we informed the client that the issue was resolved, we got the feedback that what we worked on was an invoicing application and in the time we took to resolve the issue, they had lost a number of orders. The problems associated with it were manifold. Poor understanding of client’s business applications, wrong prioritization of their issues, all of these stemmed from the lack of understanding of client’s business environment and their requirements which led to the support team working on an issue with no understanding of its business impact.

In my next job, I worked on a product in a client’s environment for more than 2 years and was able to create a new system design for the product’s upgrade in a few hours, not merely because of my knowledge of the product but because of my understanding of the client’s business environment and the needs of its different business units. When I was sent to a client’s premise in the UK as the leader of a team for a large transition program, what was important to me was to understand the client’s business environment and what technical issues were currently affecting the client’s business. As the client’s entire IT activities were getting outsourced to the company I was working for, it was just commonsense for me to understand and resolve existing issues before owning the responsibility of the environment.

That was back in 2010 and technology has come a long way from that time. This is the age of AI and Analytics and putting them together has resulted in predictive analytics which is helping businesses to take informed decisions and make successful plans for their future. But how much of all of these have filtered down into the traditional brick and mortar stores? At home, we buy groceries on a monthly basis from a grocer we have been customer of for 15 years. For daily purchases, we go to a nearby supermarket store. There is a particular pattern to the items we buy from the supermarket store, like milk, eggs, bread, etc but more importantly there is a pattern to the items we do not buy, like cooking oils, pulses, rice, wheat, soap, etc. No one in the store has asked us yet where we buy these items from. To be successful in business in these times, companies have to be at the top of their game and continuously keep looking for opportunities to be innovative to not only attract new customers but to retain them as well.

I received a call from an aspiring startup’s co-founder some time back for advise. They were planning to create an online platform from where anyone could place an order for any item and they would deliver it. The word anyone was a concern for me. There is a very good reason why India will never be a completely digital market – people’s purchasing power or the lack of it. A big chunk of its population of people make their daily purchases on debt. The local grocers keep accounts of these purchases and people keep paying as and when they have money with them. Even the local restaurants in many places especially the smaller eateries do the same. This is a business model supermarket stores can never replicate and hence they can never erode the relevance of local grocers and small time traders.

This is an important reason why the India government’s decision to demonetize its currency notes has destroyed India’s economy as it has further weakened people’s buying ability. When I mentioned these aspects to the startup’s co-founder and asked him how he was going to tackle them in his business model, he had no answer. Borrowing or getting inspired by a business model in another country is fine, but there can be no excuse to not knowing about their own country’s business nuances.

As products and companies of all sizes throng the online market and jostle for space to find their feet, nothing is more valuable in business now than customer loyalty and repeat customers. One look at Amazon’s fulfillment center (https://gadgets.ndtv.com/videos/behind-the-scenes-at-an-amazon-fulfillment-centre-521443) is enough to understand the complexity of its customer-centric business model. More than the number of its business segments, what is mind boggling is the fact that an individual could be its customer in multiple business segments and would expect the same level of customer service across all business segments. Multiply this by the probability of doing business with a few thousands or a million such concurrent customers and maintaining the highest quality of service across business segments is beyond comprehension.

Is customer still the King or has business become the Emperor of the King?