Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
An AI world
Every change brings new challenges, and artificial intelligence (AI) is another one of those changes. Subhash Kak’s book The Age of Artificial Intelligence thoughtfully explores AI’s trajectory, blending technical insight with philosophical, historical, and cultural perspectives. Kak is a Regents Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Oklahoma State University. An AI pioneer and an acclaimed Hindu philosopher, Kak also serves on the Prime Minister of India’s Science, Technology, and Innovation Advisory Council under Narendra Modi.
Early AI systems were expert systems designed for specific tasks, and robotics was their commonly understood application. In the early 1990s, I watched Stanley Kubrick’s acclaimed futuristic film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as part of my graduate class in Computational Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Natural language processing was critical in developing artificial intelligence. LISP and Prolog were two of the first programming languages I learned.
However, AI is now a much more complex system. All use AI, from natural language processing to speech/face recognition, AI customer service agents, and AI-assisted medical procedures. In 1968, Odyssey’s HAL 9000 computer had already let people know that it could “think” when it said, “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
AI brings liberation
The Age of Artificial Intelligence examines AI’s potential to liberate humanity from mundane, machine-like tasks. This prospect brings hope and optimism. While warning of its potential risks—alienation, homogenization, and other existential threats—Kak does so without sounding alarmist. He brings credibility to his analysis, grounding the book in historical context and contemporary challenges.
I was drawn to the book because of Kak’s take on current events from an AI perspective. I contacted Kak to discuss India’s PM Narendra Modi’s meeting with President Donald Trump in Washington, DC. During our exchange, he presented his thesis on an ‘AI State.’ In Kak’s conception, an AI State is “a bureaucratic state on a steroid” where algorithms decide policies until a crisis emerges and a reset is needed. He contends that in EU countries, for example, the “Algorithm” of the AI State has pushed bizarre and self-destructive policies such as deindustrialization, mindless climatism and resistance to fossil fuels, unrestricted migration, and the need to fight a war with a neighboring nation for the sake of extending a “security treaty [NATO].”
Impending population decline
With the embrace of transgenderism, racism, Islamism, and other woke agenda, Kak said, the AI State has breached the response threshold of its citizens. “The reset in the AI State [EU or USA during the ascendancy of Obama and Biden with its 73 genders],” explains Kak, “will be done by people who, like the child who said the emperor had no clothes, use common sense and say, “hey, This doesn’t make sense.”
In The Age of Artificial Intelligence, Kak predicts that power will be in the hands of a select few because they can control people’s minds through algorithm-driven propaganda. As totalitarians and religious regimes disallowed specific ideas and introduced their dogmas and orthodoxies, “AI will be harnessed [by tech oligarchs and totalitarian governments] to turn certain ideas disreputable,” Kak warns.
Kak discusses the impending population collapse in great detail. This collapse is more evident in the West and Europe than in the rest of the world. Social scientists discuss population decline as a function of a multiplicity of facts—breakdown of the traditional family, cost of child-rearing, etc. Kak points to a more substantive decline in societal value in raising kids due to the lack of personal fulfillment and sense of gratification in such activities. However, Kak thinks that the impact of AI “points to an even more drastic population decline than the one forecast by demographers.”
AI Promise & Disruption
The idea of replacement migration is related to population decline, which Kak thinks will bring chaos to the world, similar to the kind we see in Europe and the US. According to the UN, replacement migration “refers to the international migration that a country would need to prevent population decline and population ageing resulting from low fertility and mortality rates.”
Kak draws on his extensive computer science and AI research background to apprise readers of the base-level assessment of AI’s capabilities. He acknowledges AI’s strength and promise in robotics, education, medicine, etc. At the same time, Kak warns readers about potential disruptions—AI’s ability to reshape human society, culture, and freedom.
Kak’s book focuses on potential disruptions, places AI in a broader civilizational context, and lays a framework for navigating those disruptions. Towards that end, Kak provides a comprehensive and crisp analysis of how Western, Chinese, and Indian civilizations have dealt with prior large-scale disruptions, such as industrialization, colonization, Marxism, and communism. Kak’s assertion that “culture and memory serve as safeguards” for human dignity is profound in that it emphasizes the role of human values in navigating technological innovations and progress.
Ethical AI develoipment
Drawing from his vast knowledge of the Indian Knowledge Tradition (IKT) and Hindu philosophy, Kak emphasizes how understanding truth and meaning could navigate ethical AI development. This understanding adds a distinctive perspective rarely found in Western-centric AI literature, making the book particularly valuable for readers interested in global technological perspectives.
With its rich background in the IKT, specifically in the fields of mind and cognitive sciences, Kak says, India can expect to play “a significant role in the future development of AI.” Kak thinks that India’s rise in the age of AI is unstoppable.
Paninian grammar of Sanskrit (Așțādhyāyi, 4th century BCE) has greatly influenced linguistics and mathematical logic, which, in turn, gave birth to computer science. Indian thought, Kak reminds us, was also central to the development of Boolean logic. George Boole’s wife, Mary, Kak tells us, claimed that George Everest (Mount Everest is named after him) had lived in India for a long time. Everest was an intermediary of Indian ideas to influence many scientists, including the Booles, Augustus de Morgan, and Charles Babbage.
AI in India
The Indian government is implementing AI in the social, healthcare, agriculture, and financial sectors. However, Kak sees the Indian judiciary, the colonized education system, left-wing activism, and other challenges as the biggest challenges in the march of AI in India.
“Much of politics,” writes Kak, “is about the representation of the past, and at its nastiest it is about erasure.” As a Kashmiri Hindu of India who was displaced from his sacred ancestral land, whose places of worship were destroyed, and the names of places that carried civilizational memory of over 5,000 years were erased due to the excess of Islamic terrorism, Kak has a unique perspective on how AI can be used as a tool in erasure. “The only reason people want to be the masters of future is to change the past,” Kak quotes Czech novelist Milan Kundera to drive his point.
While that talk among AI scientists may be lurking around the idea of ingenious and “conscious” systems, we may also be dangerously close to potentially disruptive AI. The prospect of AI doing more harm than good may not be that far-fetched. Experts suggest that weaponized AI could play a big part in future global conflicts, and the late physicist Stephen Hawking suggested that humanity might soon find AI to be the biggest threat to our survival. We saw some of it in the use of digital vaccine passports during the COVID-19 pandemic and the debanking of the Freedom Convoy protestors by the Justin Trudeau government. Transhumanists, such as Yuval Noah Harari, on the other hand, want to “upgrade” or “enhance” human beings through “biological algorithms.”
Readers who were looking for a technical book on AI would be disappointed. There is more to AI than just technology, and The Age of Artificial Intelligence is an intellectually stimulating book on that parameter.
The Age of Artificial Intelligence by Subhash Kak, Garuda Prakashan
