Redacted history

Historical perspective seems to be valued. This despite the fact that history is always redacted by powerful arbitrators to create narration of control. History is subjective to who is in control, hence it is rarely about common people or issues that matters to them or defines the society (nor is it about egalitarian progression of humanity or logical evolution of knowledge or wisdom). History is about control, and it varies with the heuristics of contemporary needs and haggling power. These infect international to national to local, so European history becomes world history while happenings in Delhi or other power centers becomes Indian history. It is as if history of human societies are defined by sociopath dynasties, greedy psychopaths and salivating power brokers who bring in the morals. Shockingly this degraded extrapolated power matrix of few philistine charlatans of past and their narration is postulated as history to evaluate present whether issues of Russian invasion of Ukraine or whatever is the next flash point for eyeballs.

There is an unhealthy importance given to history that often debilitates the present. An oft repeated quote asserts that to understand present we have to understand past. This really is nonsense for two specific reasons. One, as mentioned, history is redacted by power. Secondly, present is too complex with varying influences that is dynamically evolving the reality. Redacted history is invoked by controllers to value narration for influence and to hide their incapacity to evaluate complexities of contemporary hence this stampede to get the historical perspective. They lazily repeat semantics of the past to evaluate the present in the process attempt to freeze the contemporary in the strangulate grip of the past thus exciting the herd to recreate past fractures and replicate patterns of violence. Redacted history is ignited by controllers while they clumsily attempt to evaluate the present. They do immense damage. Primitive people, manipulators with ulterior motives, give importance to history as they lack ingenuity to deal with present. Feudal forces built edifice of past cleverly mixing myths of greatness to invoke fantastical view of present. They pride redacted history and fantasies as they are insecure of the present and lack faculties to deal with future. They are also constant threat to democratic ideals.  

We need to be extremely wary of power play of redacted history into contemporary issues. Fault lines of the past are false narrations for the present. There are no follies in history (since it’s dealing with complexities of the time) but in historians. History cannot really teach us anything (as it is redacted, and devoid of complexities of contemporary context) but can make us aware of immense absences hence must be allowed only minor influence on contemporary discourse. We must also have critical thinking to negate things that never happened and acute sense and wisdom to perceive what is happening. There is a precious space between real and unreal. We shouldn’t be lulled by lazy version of history by equally incompetent contemporary arbitrators worried about eyeballs and attention span hence simplistic version of present. It's impossible to sow fertile imagination of future in the barren land of decrypt past. Dynamic complexities of present make future increasingly vibrant to human ingenuity and uncertain challenges. This is something AI -fed on consolidated history and pattern herein, cannot conceive. It’s this that makes us human. Only humans can attempt to deal complexities of present and speculate vibrant paths of future. 

 

37th move, interesting coincidence

So, in my earlier blog I mentioned about the year 2012, and the coincidence of generative algorithm and CRISPR Cas9, as also add to it the doomed year mayan prediction, apocalyptic movie 2012 so on. It’s quite clear that generative algorithms have potential to create serious havoc in the society, keep in mind how humanity was found wanting to deal primitive recommender algorithm. Generative AI can be pernicious as it weaponize misinformation, disinformation, trust on which facts are exchanged and opinions shared. What is seen as amusing tech toy has potential to create devastating dilution of democratic institutions and fragile setup of social contract on which society hinges. Crispr tech is equally significant, it has revolutionized the dealing with life form, that has amazing benefits and also potential to create havoc -specifically tampering germ cells that can alter offspring as also cripsr gene drive -that can wipe out whole specie (ofcourse fast breeding short life cycle species). These are as significant as atomic energy. There was a world before atomic energy and then world after atomic energy. The world was not the same again. Humanity has acquired the potential to annihilate itself (ofcourse there are benefits of nuclear energy). The world also changed in 2012. There was a world before generative AI and Crispr tech. There is a world after Generative AI and Crispr tech. So that is an interesting coincidence, as also the call by developers of both these tech to stall.   

There is another coincidence that really spooked me, this after I watched AlphaGo about five years back, I even wrote about it in the comment section but failed to get traction so ignored it (as also living in a herd churning world which overwhelmingly values nonsensical crude miracles, herd riveting divine crap, religion driven hallucinations/faith, holy book fantastical trash, cheap entertainments that nurture these so on, I was reluctant to pursue this interesting coincidence). In the recent time the spookiness of move 37 is back in the scrutiny so thought of writing about it. In the second GO (a game so complex that there are more possible configurations for pieces than atoms in the observable universe) match of DeepMind’s AlphaGo with Seedol the move 37 in 2nd game was out of the world, Go master Fan Hui said “It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play this move. So beautiful.” (you must see the documentary to get the full impact of the move). The move was counterintuitive that even experts thought it was a mistake but eventually turned out to be decisive, as a commentator wrote insightfully “move 37 condenses the complex undecidability of machine creativity into a single moment”. “The position is not as absurd as it might sound, especially when one considers that Darwinian natural selection is purposeless, directionless, and creatorless, yet it is the most creative force known to science”. This was much before ChatGPT so few us, nontechs, were aware of something incredible in the horizon.  Now, I do follow chess (quite an average player and add to it impulsive tendencies, in recent times atrocious, and I do a replay analysis to study my deteriorating brain! Interestingly I play few games of chess before writing my blog to get into logical serious thinking frame while if I play chess after writing some prose I play wonderfully bad!) and I recall tracking DeepBlue Vs Kasparov in 1996-97, and much discussed match that was won by DeepBlue, not many recall but it was the 2nd game 37^th move, the Bishop c2-e4 -the positional move, not the expected materialistic move from ‘machine’ -Queen f2-b6, that was the most discussed, and for many beginning of AI -optimizing problem to maximize objective function. I also recall reading an article ‘From DeepBlue to DeepMind’ few years tracing the development of AI.  

Watch where this takes

 

Approximation

Approximation 

How much can we approximate, the reality

The truth always eludes, and so it goes on

We live, we die

Bewildered even to recap the scene

The past is ransacked from the fertile imagination of present

We are the alphabets from which new words get written, and erased

  We are the clones from which future is modelled, and approximated