Prema Jayakumar
Two pieces completely unconnected news provoked this article. One was the death of Jay ant Narlikar, scientist and visionary, who had devoted his life to the study and teaching of physics. They spoke of the Hoyle-Narlikar theory of gravity obituaries were very eloquent, enumerating his achievements, a near miss of the Nobel Prize and so on. One of the sentences said that ‘Narlikar didn’t just study the cosmos, he rewrote its history. They mentioned his books of cosmology and black holes. But all the obituaries I read forgot to mention that he had written a novel, a science-fiction novel, published in 1989, that predicted what is taking place now.
The other piece of news was an interview with a doctor, a pulmonologist, who ruefully admitted that AI had read and digested the report of a patient and diagnosed the disease in two minutes. It had taken him, a pulmonologist, thirty minutes to do so. His question was whether he had become redundant, whether it would be better to entrust the duty of diagnoses to artificial intelligence.
Why did I find this to be so relevant in connection with Narlikar? The connection is not with his scientific publication, but lies in the story narrated in his ‘Return of Vaman’. The story starts with an archaeological dig in interior Karnataka where they find evidence of a civilization that was scientifically advanced than our own (do remember it was only 1989). After all, 1984 did not happen in 1984, but that type of surveillance is everywhere now, not just CCTV and so on, but checks of messages sent, phones tapped and above all the ‘double-speak’ where the torture chamber is the ‘Palace of Pleasure.’ Back to our story. As they go further, they find a cautionary note that tells them to read the letter left at that level before they go further. The language is difficult, and they decide to read the letter when they have deciphered the script more. They set aside the letter, and go down further where they find the design for a robot far more advanced than any they have seen. Engineers come and are excited. The design had by-passed many problems that they were encountering in their research.
The engineers, challenged by the obscurity of the language, start working on the robot. A few voices among the group do try to ask them to go slow, since they did not know why a civilization so advanced had been destroyed. But faced with the exciting design and the challenge of decoding a language that was new to them, the engineers are not deterred. And so, Vaman is created.
Vaman, once created, is all they had ever dreamt of, absorbing instructions, performing them to perfection, learning anything that was put before him. They had made him as human as possible, part of their family, they taught him, including games, and finally the best chess player among them is defeated by his student. The next step is to teach him to make another like himself so that the robots can multiply without human help. Vaman is impatient to have the company of others like himself.
In the meantime, the letter that had come before the level where the designs had been stored is deciphered. It told the cautionary tale of an advanced civilization which had created super-efficient robots and handed over the running of their lives to them. They lived lazily, dependant on their mechanical creations for everything. Soon the robots took over, making human beings redundant. The only need for them was to create more robots. They decide not to do so. They knew they would die out, but, with them, the robots would also die out. If you, like me, want to know the ending of every story you read, Vaman is destroyed because he absorbs hubris also from his human teachers, and they attack him through that.
It is a matter of opinion whether a doctor is only a machine that reads your body correctly and prescribes correctly for a particular ailment. What happens when ethical questions, arise? What happens when empathy is needed? We have taught machines not just to calculate correctly and solve problems. We have even taught them to read, write creatively, play music. But can we teach them the quality that is roughly called ‘humanity’? And until we can, are we justified in handing over our lives to them?
