Earth day and it's impact

 A life lived in fear is a life half lived. -N D T

Some thoughts about COVID-19;

We are in the middle of a massive experiment worldwide, and we are the guinea pigs. The experiment is will people listen to scientists? Are we taking all kind of precautions issued by medical professionals for our own good? It seems that if we all listened and all paid attention to what scientists say, maybe the Coronavirus will just blow on by, with a minimum of cases. And then we could get rid of it for obeying the recommendations of scientists and how to minimize our chances of getting it. 

April 22nd 2020 was the 50th year of earth day. Let me tell you a story, we were actively going to be walking on the moon by 1970, with Saturn 5 spacecraft. Then we went to the moon and turned around and discovered Earth for the first time. And there it was whole, alone in the vacuum dark of space, and you see it, not as the social studies classroom globe showed you. There were no colour codes countries on it. All you saw was blue oceans and dry land and clouds. And at that very moment, everyone changed. Everybody astonished. They got a visual of pollution is not just this river behind my house or this lake, it is global. We have to think about the earth as a planet. Let me tell you some other things that happened in the 1970s,

Earth day was founded.

The environmental protection agency was voted into existence, by a Republican president.

Over those years that we were walking on the moon, through 1973, Leaded gas was banned.

The Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was founded to take a look at the climate on earth. No one before had thought of connecting the oceans and the clouds before and they are both in the same title of that agency. 

A comprehensive clean air act, clean water act all that happened.

Still, people ask “WHY ARE WE GOING TO SPACE?” Because a cosmic perspective can descend upon you in such a way that you are realigned with your own survival and the survival of others in such a way that maybe you’re going to do something about it. On the 51st anniversary of that, we need to keep doing it. And at last, as Di Caprio told in his Oscar acceptance speech about man’s relationship with the natural world, “Climate change is real, it is happening right now. It is the most urgent threat facing our entire species and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating. we need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters or the big corporations but who speak for all of humanity, for all of the indigenous people of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people who will be most affected by this, for our children’s children and for those people out there whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed. Let us not take this planet for granted”

Abyss Of Oblivion

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.    -N D T

When we grow up, we might not have a job-

We have no idea what the job market will look like in 2050. It is generally agreed that machine learning and robotics will change almost every line of work- from producing yoghurt to teaching yoga. In the recent past, we’ve already seen how a single biological virus can create a pandemic and caused a massacre. However, there are conflicting views about the nature of the change and its imminence. Some believe that within a mere decade or two, billions of people will become economically redundant. Others maintain that even in the long run automation will keep generating new jobs and greater prosperity for all.

So are we on the verge of a terrifying upheaval, or are such forecasts yet another example of ill-founded Luddite hysteria? It is hard to say. Fears that automation will create massive unemployment go back to the nineteenth century, and so far they have never materialized. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, for every job lost to a machine at least one new job was created, and the average standard of living has increased dramatically. Yet there are good reasons to think that this time is different, and that machine learning will be a real game-changer. 

Ironically jobs are easier to enjoy than free time because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate, and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.

Being human in the age of Artificial Intelligence-

Humans have two types of abilities- physical and cognitive. In the past, machines competed with humans mainly in raw physical abilities, while humans retained an immense edge over machines in cognition. Hence as manual jobs in agriculture and industry were automated, new service jobs emerged that required the kind of cognitive skills only humans possessed: learning and analyzing, communicating, and above all understanding human emotions. However, AI is now beginning to outperform humans in more and more of these skills, including in the understanding of human emotions. We don’t know of any third field of activity- beyond the physical and the cognitive- where humans will always retain a secure edge.

It is crucial to realize that the AI revolution is not just about computers getting faster and smarter. It is fuelled by breakthroughs in the life sciences and the social sciences as well. The better we understand biochemical mechanisms that underpin human emotions, desires, and choices, the better computers can become in analyzing human behaviour, predicting human decisions, and replacing human drivers, bankers, and lawyers. 

My opinion on AI vs Human Intelligence-

Intelligence is central to what it means to be human. Everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence

DNA passes the blueprints of life between generations. Evermore complex life forms to input information from sensors such as eyes and ears and processes the information in brains or other systems to figure out how to act and then act on the world, by outputting information to muscles, for example. At some point during our 13.8 billion years of cosmic history, something beautiful happened. This information processing got so intelligent that life forms became conscious. Our universe has now awoken, becoming aware of itself. I regard it a triumph that we, who are ourselves mere stardust, have come to such a detailed understanding of the universe in which we live.

In the last few decades research in areas such as neuroscience and behavioural economics allowed scientists to hack humans, and in particular to gain a much better understanding of how human makes decisions. It turned out that our choices of everything from food to mates result not from some mysterious free will, but rather from billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second. Vaunted ‘human intuition’ is in reality ‘pattern recognition’. Good drivers, bankers and lawyers don’t have magical intuitions about traffic, investment or negotiation- rather, by recognising recurring patterns, they spot and try to avoid careless pedestrians, inept borrowed and dishonest crooks. It also turned out that the biochemical algorithms of the human brain are far from perfect. They rely on heuristics, shortcuts and outdated circuits adapted to the African savannah rather than to the urban jungle. No wonder that even good drivers, bankers, and lawyers sometimes make stupid mistakes.

This means AI can outperform humans even in tasks that supposedly demand ‘intuition’. If you think AI needs to compete against the human soul in terms of mystical hunches- that sounds impossible. But if AI really needs to compete against neural networks in calculating probabilities and recognising patterns- that sounds far less daunting.