Tag Archives: Artificial Intelligence

The Machine is Learning- A critical and relevant novel

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Rakhi Dalal observes The Machine is Learning by Tanuj Solanki, which poses the question of human redundancy as AI/ML make headway in the techno savvy Capitalist world. (Published by MacMillan, 2020)

Tanuj Solanki’s first book Neon Noon was shortlisted for Tata Literature Live! First Book Award. For his second book Diwali in Muzaffarnagar, he was awarded the Sahitya Academy Yuva Puraskar in 2019. The Machine is Learning is Solanki’s third book. 

In the third chapter of the novel, the narrator recalls the famous game of Go, between Lee Sedol and Google Deepmind AI’s AlphaGo, where in the five match series AlphaGo had defeated Sedol, one of the best Go players of all time, by 4-1. He remembers how the IT buzzwords, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) were began to be used aggressively by IT sellers and how Lee Sedol’s loss was employed by the so called thought leaders to create hype by declaring the advent of a final Industrial Revolution where machines would become so smart that they would replace humans. 

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How the fear of Frankenstein haunts…

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Book Review by Suvasree Karanjai

The Best Asian Speculative Fiction

Title: Best Asian Speculative Fiction

Editor: Rajat Chaudhuri

Series Editor: Zafar Anjum

Publisher: Kitaab, 2018

Speculative fiction can no longer be dismissed as low-brow, trashy or pulp, or at the very least, unimportant and weird fantasy if one reads the collection edited by Rajat Chaudhuri, The Best Asian Speculative Fiction. To many readers’ surprise, this marginalised genre has lot to contribute philosophically to the dream of a technocrat’s world. The present age that can be well-described as an era of artificial intelligence (AI) is surely complementary to human intelligence developed with the purpose of mitigating our works in future. But the rise of AI and the philosophy of technocracy have, at the same time, given rise to multiple speculations regarding future of humanity — the fear of Frankenstein.

Speculative fiction is too large a subject to be represented exhaustibly in a book or a collection of Asian speculative narratives. The unique character of this specific genre lies in an impossibility to hold all its threads within a watertight definition. It encompasses several genres under its shed. Chaudhuri’s The Best Asian Speculative Fiction is indeed a suitable example of this broad compass.  We are on an enchanting rollercoaster ride as we leap from one imaginative narrative to another coming from diverse authors from sixteen countries of Asia plus more diasporas. Read more

Short Story : The Long Gone Home

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By Ankita Banerjee

Naihati
Los Angeles
Philadelphia
Calcutta

The skyscrapers along the nameless street grew four times bigger that afternoon, like a dozen of Hulks coming to life all at once. I picked up pace, but tripped over something and fell down on the sidewalk.  The result was a palpable twinge on my left arm. There was a clothesline tied across what seemed to my eight-year-old self as two gigantic green  skyscrapers and on it hung my mother’s petticoats and a pair of her old red ribbons. “Slow down, it’s going to pour,” she called out to me from faraway. But I was so close to where I wanted to be; I couldn’t wait.

“Fresh catches for only 50 taka (rupees in Bengali) per kilo!” fishmongers cried from the ferry terminal down the street. I walked down gingerly through its slushy stairs. Across the mighty river, Chandannagar sparkled with lights that brought to life mythological birds and animals and vivid blooming flowers sketched on display boards. And then I saw the silvery hilsa (fish found in the Indian subcontinent) — gleaming with a touch of regal pink, stacked all around.

I was still eight, sitting at the doorstep of my mother’s old kitchen and watched her fry ring-shaped pieces of the hilsa in mustard oil. She put two heaped spoons of steamed rice on my plate and mixed it with the oil of hilsa roe and a pinch of salt with her turmeric stained peaky fingers. “Let me pick out the bones for you,” the warmth in her voice echoed from the other end of time and coiled into a globe of ache in my chest. The pain on my left arm was no longer obscure. Read more

Short story: Falling through the Labyrinth by Joseph F. Nacino

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The Best Asian Speculative Fiction

For some time, I tried to find my way towards the centre of the station. I encountered dead-ends and paths blocked by fire, metal, and machines. I had to backtrack several times and wondered if I would be killed by a whirring gear out of nowhere, or impaled on an inopportune girder. After the longest hour of my life, I saw my destination: a massive metal ball in the middle of the station, supported by several pylons. With the propulsion rig, I roved over the ball’s surface to find a hatchway into the control centre. Steadying myself against the wall near a hatch, I keyed opened the door and pulled myself into the structure.

The inside of the control centre had a similar appearance to the command centre in the habitat section: a wide, 360-degree view of the whole interior of the station, two chairs instead of one, and a wide array of consoles and banks of monitors. Though it was dark inside the chamber, the viewing glass allowed the industrial lights around the centre to paint the whole chamber a stark white. Read more

‘The rise of AI would result in a huge split in the world,’ says historian Yuval Noah Harari

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(From The Hindu. Link to the complete article given below)

In the light of his theories about the human future, when Yuval Noah Harari was asked what must politicians be questioned for before elections, he said, “Ask them what will they do to lessen the danger of nuclear war, climate change, regulate AI and bioengineering, and their vision humanity in for 2050,” he said. “And if they don’t answer but keep talking about the past, then don’t vote for them.”

Taking off from his latest book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), which hit the shelves in August this year, Mr. Harari delivered the Penguin Annual Lecture 2018 in Mumbai on Sunday, titled ‘The New Challenges of the 21st Century’, during which he addressed topics of nationalism, ethical training, climate change, and the need for more philosophers.

To say that Harari’s last three books have been a global success would be an understatement. The author of 2014 bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (translated in 45 languages and sold more than a million copies worldwide), Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), has been endorsed by Barack Obama, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and referred to as the “guru of the liberal elites” by the media. In a roundtable interaction with the press before delivering the lecture, the Israeli historian declared that he neither has political skills nor are his books about the immediate politics of any country. “I can’t give particular political advice to any government or how to implement policies,” he said. “But what I try to do is influence the macro agenda of various nations and humanity as a whole.”

One can’t talk about Mr. Harari’s work without contextualising it in today’s socio-political reality — be it his arguments about race, genocide, war, sexuality or artificial intelligence.

Read more at The Hindu link here