AI and the Future of Faith
Religion has always been supported and spread using technology. Now, for the first time in human history, an actual human invention is being elevated to the status that was always reserved for unseen powers that we imagined into our image.
Intelligence is not competence
Something had been gnawing at me for years about the much-loved reinvention of Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes. Something about it didn’t add up. Since I am no Sherlock Holmes, it took me years to finally figure it out.
Reality as we know it
White supremacism is the idea that Whiteness is a superior value. It’s slightly more benign version is that Whiteness is a default value. That if we do nothing to the stories, they will naturally end up White and that the only reason people of colour are showing up on screen is because of political meddling. There are other similar assumptions too, like the idea of the male default. No one will ask you why all the characters in your story are male. But if you write an all-female cast, people will ask why. This happens not because there is something weird about an all-female cast, but because long periods of exposure to stories with majority male characters have given many people the mistaken idea that there is something natural about those depictions - something real.
I had almost 300K followers on Instagram when I shut it down
That sinking feeling you get when you see your follower or subscriber count drop is very probably a remnant of that ancient terror your ancestors felt when they found themselves abandoned or sidelined by their tribe. It is existential in a very real sense, and in that same sense, it is also something that tends to devalue your individuality.
Writing about robots in a world where robots can write
Back when the robot or the intelligent machine was little more than a figment of our imagination and had no social or existential footprint, it was easy to make it into whatever we wanted. Now however, we live in a world where that future has already arrived. Robots are no longer fictional, and perhaps we can no longer afford to treat them as metaphor-fodder.
Prisoners of identity
How many of your favourite influencers are prisoners of your expectations? How many of them are interested in appearing to be who they seem to be rather than being who they are expected to be? And here is an even more interesting question - how many of them are not who they appear to be and are only putting up the pretense because there is profit and / or social currency in being who they are pretending to be?
The average of our humanity
When we think of memorisation and reproduction of memorised information as markers of intelligence, no wonder we start thinking of AI as intelligent. When we do not include originality and radical new thinking as defining characteristics of intelligence, no wonder we feel threatened by AI when it does the things we have only seen "intelligent" people do.
The price of laughter
Art devoid of social responsibility fails to be all that it can be. It is mediocre and dangerous. Words (all words) are weapons. If someone is skilled enough to wield them, they should also be moral enough to wield them in service of the right causes.