Below is a transcript of a human-recorded podcast. The transcript has been formatted using AI tools while preserving the original content, including all speech patterns and informal language.

Hello, friends. This is probably, in fact, quite possibly the last episode of this podcast that I'm recording in 2024. You will be listening to this sometime in the middle of January because I, you know, schedule episodes in advance these days on account of the fact that I need to get rid of the tendency in me that has to do everything now. And I'm trying to bring more order to the way I make things and the way I work.

But, you know, new year resolutions are a dime a dozen. I think I did fairly well on the resolutions I made last year. I had promised myself that I will cook at least a full meal all by myself for my entire family and I did not do that. But I did promise myself that I will have some more discipline in my personal life as far as social media is concerned, as far as waking up and going to sleep is concerned and I did do that fairly well. I failed on occasion, but by and large, I did fairly well. And I also promised myself that I just spoke about social media. I promised myself that I will reduce my reliance on social media tools, etc. And I did that really well. I really quit Instagram and Twitter and Instagram. I'm now social media free and that I'm very happy about.

My father recently went to a school reunion. Everyone there, like him, was in their seventies. Some had back problems, some had their joints giving up, some had diabetes ruining their meals and some had had multiple heart attacks. Everyone was dying.

But everyone also had full heads of nice black hair. Everyone was dyeing.

Some time ago, a somewhat unoriginal young man tried to goad me into a "debate" with him on his tiny and rather vile YouTube channel, presumably in pursuit of social capital. One of the things he managed to come up with to anger me into playing his game was a joke about my "receding hairline". Turns out, he was rather fond of the phrase and tried to stick it on another long-haired YouTuber later that month. I guess he didn't want all the mental labour he had put into creating that joke (I'm sure it took a lot out of him) to waste. I can appreciate the hustle, feeble as it may be.

Someone wrote to me responding to my view that the capitalistic intent behind AI companies will send them down the same path of monopolisation as some previous information technologies, like social media.

Something about the response was off, so I pasted it into GPT Zero to find if it was AI-generated. Turns out, it probably was, partially.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the podcast.

In case you are not already kind of sort of off the school of thought that social media is bad for you because it is full of bad faith actors who are engaging in rage bait with the sole intention of generating engagement in the form of likes and shares and retweets, et cetera, so that they can maximize the revenue they make from that particular platform. Here is another problem that is going to raise its head. In fact, it has already raised its head. It's a problem that is going to get much worse in the months to come, even weeks to come. And that is bots.

This problem has already sort of started becoming apparent on BlueSky. But it is probably not even going to be something that anyone at Twitter or X flinches at, given the nature of the discourse there. You can now create bots that will interact with people completely on their own based on a certain prompt. I recently saw a video by Hank Green who was wondering what this might mean for us in the future about whether the solution to this problem is going to be whitelists or blacklists. And I have a different opinion on this, of course, I will tell you. And my opinion has to do with the fact that Twitter is not the problem. The problem is the format itself. To replace Twitter with another microblogging platform is replacing one disease with another. The very format where people post microscopic text updates and react to other microscopic text updates is not designed for a good, healthy discourse. In fact, it seems to be designed for the exact opposite.

These AI bots that I was talking about are basically, you know, automated accounts, which you can create and you can, uh, get a chat bot to generate responses to particular posts made by people. And you can have the chat bot generate responses that are of a certain variety. The one that Hank Green was talking about has to do with disagreement. So it's a bot that politely but firmly disagrees with whatever you have said. And Hank Green shows a few examples. Uh, there are also other things that it is possible to do with these bots, you know, so in discord it, the problem is the kind of problems you needed a human to create right now in the very near future, it will be possible to have tens of thousands of bought accounts that are creating that manner of problem without anyone actually having to engage or spend time on Twitter.

There was a short fantasy film some time ago on YouTube called Ahalya. It is only tangentially related to the point I am making here so I won't spoil it for you, but I am reminded of the feeling of being stuck inside my own body, unable to communicate that I am a human being.

I am writing this to you at 8:34 in the morning as certain worries tumble around in the back of my head and noise fills my soundscape and my body hungers for bread and butter. I am a human being expressing my humanity through the words that you are reading. I feel confident that when you read this, you will come to the conclusion that a human being like you has written what you are reading. At least, I used to.

Because text can now be machine-generated. It can be churned out in reasonably good quality and in large amounts. You can't know if I wrote what you are reading. I can no longer be confident that you will know that what you are reading was written by a human being like yourself -- that it was written by me.

If you have ever run into a reel or short where a gullible “podcaster” is engaged in an “interview” with an astrologer and wondered who these people are and why you have never heard of them despite their apparent authority and popularity, join the club.

Of course the simple answer is that this is a mix of familiar old marketing practices being put to use to poison our feeds and, by extension, our culture.

Much has been said about how the Liberal media of America inadvertently fed Trump’s popularity, but we don’t apply it to our political condition and how the same dynamics sustain demagoguery closer to home. Add to that the fact that there are numerous smaller demagogues in the making at any given point of time, building their tiny toxic empires on social media platforms.

Some amount of media literacy might put us on a path that leads out of this morass but it seems a distant dream in a country where people bathe in excrement in order to get rid of diseases.

It has been a year. Like any other year, it has had ups and downs. I am someone who kind of forgets the negatives and only remembers the positives. But I feel like the negatives exist to teach us something so they are worth remembering.

I am therefore, compensating for my selective memory shortcoming by making a note of what I learned from my mistakes this year so I maybe don’t return to these faults again.

This could get to be a habit. Who knows? Maybe even a good one.

If you want, you can watch this video on YouTube by clicking here.

Imagine there are two spoons. You go to decide which one to buy. One is made of aluminum. One is made of steel. One is quite beautiful and ornate. The other is just functional. One, it seems, will not last very long. The other will not only last, but it will also be nice to look at. But they both serve the same function. They're both spoons. They are both going to be used for the exact same thing, putting nutritious items—hopefully—into your mouth and feeding you or feeding the people you choose to make food for.

Two spoons are essentially the same thing. We find that we live in capitalism, inside markets, and the value of an object is decided on the basis of a few factors. In the case of these spoons, it is probably going to be durability because it is not even possible, I think, to improve the spoon as far as design is concerned. There is a book called This Is Not the End of the Book, where the authors—one of whom I think is Umberto Eco—talk about how there are some machines whose design it is impossible to improve. One of those things is the spoon. The other one, ironically, is the book.

I say ironically because the topic of this episode is what differentiates art and why it is not always healthy to describe art as a consumer product or a commodity whose value is only going to be decided by how much people choose to pay for it. While two spoons are essentially the same, two stories are not the same. They may serve a similar function as far as appearances are concerned. For example, for any two stories, the thing you’re going to do with them is read them and get some variety of edification. You’re going to find yourself happier, sadder, more excited, or wiser at the end of reading a story. Or at the very least, you’re going to be entertained, as in the story is going to help you pass the time. That is the function of a story.

But is that all a story is? Like the spoon, is the story eventually reducible to the thing that it does to us? I do not think so. I think that at the heart of art is uniqueness. The reason we go for art, the reason we consume art, the reason we appreciate art, is because we want something unique. We want a unique experience. We want a unique insight from the thing we have read. That is primarily why we go for art. We wish to find something relatable. We are different from other people, and we are looking to find something unique out there that would validate that feeling in us. Something that would tell us, "Yes, you are strange, you are different, but you are also equal to everyone else in the sense that everyone is different, and everyone is unique in their own way."

I was speaking to someone about the kind of issues we often have with our parents and chanced upon an expression of the problem that I had not used earlier.

"I think my father has trouble dealing with the fact that I am not him," I said.

My friend agreed. I feel a lot of people would agree. I think we all realise what the issue is. It has to do with the impulse behind reproduction and the drive behind parenthood.

We have this running theme that AI is going to help us fix the world. That AI is going to solve problems like climate change or bring the solution to cancer and things like that.

And we keep forgetting that ChatGPT doesn't actually do anything on its own.

ChatGPT or other similar chatbots or LLMs don't actually do anything. They only do what we ask them to do.

So when we say that AI is going to solve climate change, we seem to be thinking that, like this seems to be falling into a similar trap as before when we left things to God, where we said that...

Reference links

1. Is ChatGPT getting worse?

2. AI is hitting a wall just as the hype around it reaches the stratosphere

3. AI trained on AI churns out gibberish garbage

4. People liked AI generated art when they thought it was made by humans

5. No, today's AI isn't sentient. Here's how we know

6. on AI skepticism

I was looking to write something and felt stuck, so I asked ChatGPT to pretend to be an alien and ask me questions. Basically, I used it as a source of writing prompts. Questions it asked me are in italics. My answers are in regular type.

🖥️ What does it mean to be "alive"? How do you know you are not simply matter in motion, like the rocks and winds of your world?

Recently, an IIT boy was arrested for sending rape threats to Virat Kohli's little daughter anonymously on social media. Though the culprit has been arrested, many on the social web are wondering how an IIT student could have done this.

Here's why people - even right thinking people - are amazed that an IIT boy could have sent an anonymous rape threat to a little girl. In any society where the privileged maintain the illusion of superiority by claiming to be intelligent, over time, intelligence becomes associated with the appearance of the privileged.

India is no stranger to this. For ages, we have associated intelligence with the appearance of the Brahmin. Shaved heads or flowing white beards, and saffron clothes. It doesn't matter how stupid someone might be, all they have to do in order to be considered wise is take on the appearance of a "wise man". Look at all the pseudo-science spouting guru characters around you. We don't decide someone is wise after looking at their conduct or the content of their character. We do it by looking at their clothes.

There was once a centrist who wanted to be equidistant from both extremes. So he built his home at a spot that was 10 kilometers from the sea on the right and 10 kilometers from the edge of the forest on the left. He was thus satisfied that he was the same distance from both sides.

Time passed and the climate changed. Water levels rose, and the sea came closer. Deforestation caused the forest to recede away.

But the centrist kept telling everyone proudly that he was equidistant from both sides.

Time continued to pass. Eventually, there came a day when the forest had receded so far away that it wasn't even visible from the centrist's house. And the sea had come so close to the house that it was practically beachfront property.

The problem with tech bros looking to decide the fate of all humans is that they lack the multiple perspectives that are necessary to gain a holistic understanding of the human world. I am not claiming to have access to all those perspectives either, but then again, I am not looking to tell the tech bro how he should live his professional life.

There is a mediocre median that dominates the discourse surrounding technology in India. It is always _amazing_ and worth having. Not much thought is paid to whether the new toy is needed or necessary or even healthy. Our tech bros, having grown up in this morass, hardly pay any thought to these matters either. Their motto seems to be - can do, will do. The should of it doesn't feature anywhere in their mindscape.

Their Western counterparts are no different, but because they grew up in a society where the ethics of technology does feature in drawing room conversations sometimes, they at least pretend to worry. In India, the range of these worries does not extend beyond price, battery life, and packaging.

Our popular tech discourse is in serious need of an upgrade. People shouldn't have to be convinced that their privacy matters, that their humanity matters, that their brain and all they can do with it matters.

So, largely, there are going to be two kinds of people in your life—in anyone's life, really. These are going to be people who are good to you and people who are bad to you. People who you get along with and people who you don't get along with. People who care about you and people who don't care about you or actively dislike you.

The mistake a lot of us make is that, like, let's visually imagine them as two different folders: people who are good to you and people who are not good to you. People who are mean and nasty to you, people who are actively working towards your detriment, and people who care about you, people who want you to do better, people who want to help you, and people who do help you. Right? These are the two broad categories.

The mistake a lot of us make is that we want to live in a world where everyone is in this folder, where everyone is our friend and cares for us and wants to help us. We want these people—the ones who don't care about us—to be in the folder containing people who do want to help us. This is a mistake because it is never going to happen. You are never, ever going to live in a world where everyone likes you, cares for you, and wants to help you.

I call it a mistake because I find a lot of people trying to turn these people into these people. They want to spend time making sure that the people who dislike you become people who like you. I'm not saying it is impossible to do so. I'm just saying that the inordinate amount of time many of us spend doing that is mostly wasted time because you are never going to become absolutely successful at it. And even if you are a little bit successful at it, you will want to be more successful at it. And you're not going to be—it’s not going to be, I put in one effort and I got two result. Therefore, I will put five effort and get 10 result. There is an upper limit to it. Some people are never going to become part of this folder.

The Marvel series Loki introduces us to the idea of the sacred timeline. It is a singular view of the universe where things are allowed to happen in only one way. When someone diverges from this “one true way”, they are punished. This is a lot like some of us having this idea of “true history” — a singular view of the past that corresponds with our political views and how alternative ways of recalling the past are frowned upon or even punished. There are tribal histories, minority histories, Dalit histories and mythologies that are not remembered because they are the equivalent of divergent timelines. People who speak of these pasts are punished for doing so. So the MCU is perhaps not as much of a fantasy as it might seem because of the visual effects and the muscle mass that come with it.

And much like our real world and the leaders who seek to rule it, Kang offers an alternative. The climactic scene of Loki is almost a sort of “If not Kang, then who?” choice. The choice is simple — Should we let one individual’s control of the system continue or should we end it and allow free will to flourish. We saw something similar to this when Thanos was the big bad of Marvel. He also offered two choices — let chaos continue or bring “order” by killing half the people in the universe.

Order is a seductive idea. People like order. It allows things to be predictable and it offers no unpleasant surprises. Once we have gotten used to living an orderly life, any chaos seems like a threat. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying chaos is always a good thing. Chaos can be destructive. But when we remove the potential for unpleasant surprises, we also remove the potential for pleasant surprises. Surprises like a feeble young man becoming a righteous super soldier. Or an arms dealer becoming a superhero to protect innocent lives. We remove the possibility that the world might be saved from impending doom. We remove hope.

Hey everyone, so this is something new I'm trying. I'm just recording directly onto Substack, and I'm going to try to turn this into a newsletter.

The thing I wanted to talk about—this won't take much time, I promise—is that when AI tools came over the horizon, we were hearing a lot about how they're going to make people more productive. And there were studies to this effect. There is at least one study by McKinsey, which predicted a productivity growth of 0.1 to 0.6% by 2040 from AI use. But 2040 is far away, and until now, we haven't seen that. In fact, we may actually be seeing the opposite because a recent study done by Intel says that productivity is actually down.

They followed 6,000 employees in Germany, France, and the UK and found that AI PC owners were spending longer on digital chores than using traditional PCs. The reason behind this, of course, is that you cannot hold AI tools accountable. If you are someone who has AI tools, who has a workplace where AI tools are being used to achieve something, you can't fire an AI tool. In fact, you're paying money to use the AI tool; you're paying money to the company that made the AI tool. At the end of the day, the person you can hold responsible, the person you can hold accountable, is your employee. You can tell them that if this job does not get done, your job is on the line. You can't say that to an AI tool.

So, the work at the end of the day is still being done by someone who's using the AI tool. And now, while earlier they just had to do the job, now they have to train the AI to do the job, make the AI do the job, and check what the AI has done. And in some cases, probably many cases, fix the mistakes being made by the AI.

We are apes. We came from an ape-like ancestor roughly ten to fifteen lakh years ago. We have made our way on this planet by using a few qualities that evolution bestowed upon us. One of these qualities is imagination.

From human imaginations came structures that hold society together. These structures were not physical ones, but they did end up being the foundation for a lot of physical things in our lives — places of religious value, sacred artifacts, clothes that mark some members of society as being different from others (priests and monks), ideas like good & evil, morality, and even justice.

I have personally come to the conclusion that the idea of justice, more than anything else, is the reason behind the idea of an afterlife.

We keep wondering why aliens have not made contact with us. And we keep wondering why we have not been able to find intelligent life in the universe. But do we even know what we are looking for?

Imagine an anthill somewhere near the building you live in. In it, are ants who wonder if there is life outside the anthill. Their explorers venture out into the grass that extends in all directions and come back with nothing. Their astronomers (antronomers?) train their telescopes outwards and report that they can see no anthills. Largely, the ant community comes to the conclusion that they are alone in the universe.

Occasionally they see immense objects wandering about in the vicinity of their world. These are too large for them to make sense of and mostly stay clear of the anthill. The ants sometimes daringly climb up these objects to look for other ants but they find nothing and find themselves mysteriously brushed off by unseen forces. The view that they are all alone in the universe takes root among the ants.