Frederick Noronha
“We are what we eat.” You’ve probably heard that one. What about other similar sayings, like: We are what we repeatedly do (apparently this is often attributed to Aristotle, via Will Durant). Then: We are what we think. Or even, We are what we read.
Disha Kathuria Daniel now gives us ‘We are what we ask’. In this slender book (112pp, ISBN 979-8-90112-638-7, Rs 299, NotionPress.com) she brings together so many questions about an important field facing us all–AI, or artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence poses significant risks, challenges, and potentials to humanity because it amplifies human capability at unprecedented scale and speed, as we have heard so often. Yet, its potential lies in improving healthcare, education, scientific discovery, and productivity, enabling more efficient solutions to complex
global problems.
There is reason for concern
and uncertainty.
AI, or artificial intelligence, holds great potential to enhance human life. It also poses serious risks by amplifying inequality, bias, job disruption and loss of control if poorly governed. Its impact ultimately depends on “how responsibly humans design, regulate and use it”.
Well, the paras above are largely generate by AI itself. So you need not take it as the ultimate truth, nor do we know at this stage who’s right and who’s wrong.
But author Disha Kathuria Daniel takes a more serious route to approach this perplexing issue. Or, an issue of perplexity, pun intended. She gathers over 450 questions that come from great thinkers of our times. To get these, she has assiduously followed podcasts, interviews and online platforms.
She doesn’t opt for punditry, predictions or arguments. Instead, her book looks at the “questions” that are shaping our times. As we wonder what AI will do in terms of “trust, power, intimacy, intelligence, danger”, she wants to record how we understood “a moment larger than us”.
Artificial intelligence as most would know by now, is the development of machines that can learn, reason and perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence. At this moment, its potential is just unfolding. We are still caught up in being undecided over what its impact will be. Is it the greatest revolution since the printing press and the opening up of cyberspace? Will it change human life unrecognisably? Could it spell doom for the dominant species of the planet? Or, is this all just over-hyped?
Disha Kathuria Daniel tells us that this isn’t a book about AI, but about “the questions themselves and what they reveal”. She obviously sees questions as a mirror to ourselves, and explains it well. Interestingly, it is not a book which tells “you what to think
or believe”.
This is not a boring manual of endless questions. The copywriter that is Disha has packaged the issues in a way the human mind can easily understand. It’s a light read on a heavy topic, light in the sense of the time it could take you to read it, not how many more questions, thoughts and bewilderment it leaves you with.
You get a map of where the book is going in the neat table of contents. The book breaks up the issue in 11 different approaches towards AI and the main themes it raises. For instance, there are positive and negative possibilities. Then there are questions on the impact, safety, dangers, potential and development of AI.
For many of us, how the ‘big brains’ of our times wonder about the impact of AI on governance might be an important read. Can governments even keep up with AI’s progress? What can the government do to reduce risks? Can there be an AI government with no special interests, considering that governments often wrestle with
self-interests?
Such questions offer hope: Could AI cure cancer? Will robots and AGI deliver a world of plenty? (AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, means a kind of AI that can understand, learn, and do any intellectual task that a human can, not just one specific job.)
But there are so many negative possibilities being seen too. Could AI take away our safety, our privacy, our freedom and even our sense of even being human itself? Is AI already
manipulating us?
At the start of the book, a two-page chapter titled ‘Why Focus on Questions?’ makes a strong case on why our world needs more good questions than tentative, all-knowing answers.
Disha notes that to put this book together she sifted through 450 questions from 26 podcasts and interviews with “seven of the leading voices in today’s AI conversation”. On her list are the historian-futurist Yuval Noah Harari, physicist-AI theorist Max Tegmark, AI safety advocate Eliezer Yudkowsky, tech entrepreneur Elon Musk (also the planet’s richest human and also prominent 2024 Trump supporter and funder whose equation might have become “complicated”), AI executive Sam Altman and tech CEO Sundar Pichai.
We ran into each other at Broadway (the bookshop in Panaji, not the similarly named theatre district in Manhattan, NYC), when the writer was browsing through the titles there. She and her husband Jasper Daniel (also a copywriter, artist and the author of the equally brief though intriguingly-titled ‘Salted Biscuits’) are based in Goa after choosing “a life of less earning and more learning”.
In the author’s words, her focus is not on technical explanations or even predictions. Its focus is entirely via questions. She explains her work in a sentence: “It brings together 450+ questions posed to AI researchers and thinkers in public
conversations since 2020.”
Disha comes across as a thoughtful, young author, who does not fight shy of wading into complex waters, and fields which are just emerging globally. Her book is modest in size but impressive in its goals.
At the very start, in case you’re not convinced by her credentials to take on such a task, there are testimonials and quotes from professors from impressive locations (Sydney, Nevada, Los Angeles).
The last quote also recognises the worth of the book.
It reads: “What this book captures—better than any summary of facts—is the restless arc of your questions… In gathering these questions, Disha Kathuria has created a mirror more than a manual. It is a record of your time and a portrait of your uncertainties, an archive of how you sought to understand both technology and yourselves.”
Guess whom that’s from? Right, it’s by ChatGPT Plus (Open AI)!
