The Real Togetherness

The real joy of togetherness is subjective, yet many will reach consensus that the love for nature brings always us together. Yet, I would like to present my thought on the same and try to create an aura of understanding that I have developed over a period of time, seeing the a very different generation in my childhood days and now.

To answer the really subjective question of real joy of being together, I would like to refer to one of the video shared by Kissan, embedded below:

The video give a very deep lesson for the society and suggest a way to socialise. The virtual world has given us a big escape from the real time opportunities. People feel much better in the virtual world. They stay what they want to be without being judged. People are forming community but the campaign raised remain virtual. Nobody works real time to bring the real change - the real togetherness!

In the last post, I wrote about StayZilla, where the innovation was created to socialise the virtual people. Kissan has given a innovative tool to the society to connect together. It is said, people work only if there is some platform and reason for doing so.

Nature is a part and parcel of one's life. The real joy of togetherness for me is the quality time spend in person with the people who have impact on your life. Since, I'm a 90's kid, I do had a real life and hence the real joy in my terms. I remember working on doing horticulture. At least, I had a house with empty land around to grow my hobby plants.

I guess, now the dilemma of virtual vs real has now being being answered. People have now started recognising the importance of connecting in the real time. One whoever have watched the above video, will always appreciate the value of getting connected. Moreover, the importance of nature is a link of doing so. It is the nature earth, that we all share. Nature doesn't discriminate amongst us.

Moreover, people will not understand the importance of something, unless and until they have it. Since people are satisfied under the blanket of virtual world, they don't know the real joy of togetherness. People have created artificial nature, but still there is nothing anything close to as refreshing as the breeze of real mother nature.

At last, not least, I would like to motivate people to be together, at least for the mother nature and I guarantee the real joy. People can only survive being in a society and it is the society that provides us with various ways to enjoy life.

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Stayzilla - A new way to socialize

Internet is said to create a new world for human beings. This so called virtual world is so addictive that it has give a whole new face to escape from day to day life. People are missing out various opportunity to exchange experience on face-to-face basis.

Stayzilla has tried to use the virtual world to connect people. There has been a lot of advertisement which ask people to disconnect to connect. The addiction of virtual world has made people to miss out a lot of opportunity that pass by, in front of eyes. The irony of Stayzilla is that it has used the virtual platform to create some real life connection. This kind of connection has enormous impact as its scalable and people are able to reach people who don't have any connection in between like that of used in lead generation in case of LinkedIn.

The Stayzilla app is a feather touch steering of a Mercedes and move with your hand in line with you and hacks into the mind of traveller. You needn't login to search your abode for stay. Stayzilla, based on the the input given about oneself, finds out the perfect matching profile of stay through it's roboust underwriting. There is also an option to make new buddies who matches your interests. This can further lead to the traveller and his buddy to share a room at stayzilla hotel and splitting the amount, making the stay more affordable too. At last, not least, one can take souvenir for his/her staybuddy.

The front look of the app is so simple and apt that it tempts you to surf through. The text distribution and tabs are available for all possible requirement, which doesn't make you go to desktop website for certain functionality.

So, used the Stayzilla app and #StayConnected #StayZilla

Being #together

I live in Delhi-Sonepat Highway, the so called NH1. Believe me, it’s more boring that what it sounds. One find day, at my flat, there was a Notice put up by the Residence Welfare Association about a 6 hours power cut. Being first time to National Capital Region, makes me often wonder, what to do and what not, as you don’t know the city. Suddenly, my cell rang up. It was my childhood friend. Thank God, you truly are omnipresent! I rushed to take bath and started with no delay to Connaught Place. We finally met at Palaki Bazaar. It’s quite rejoicing when you suddenly meet your childhood friend at once; especially when there is 6 hours power cut at your flat. My friend is very practical guy. Our meet, mostly end up a monologue from his side towards life and inspirations, but believe me, I love it and I live it to the fullest.

Finally, he asked me if I would like to drink tea. I’m not much of tea guy previously, but Delhi has made me one tea fanatic. He took me to the Chawri Bazaar to a shop, which was too remote. I was very surprise by his choice initially, but when I drank the tea, I knew, what it actually was! I have never ever in my life, ever drank such tea. I have gone places and drank the so called “special tea,” but it was literally a special one. It is rightly said, sometimes, you don’t need any advice, a tea suffice to all. It stimulates everything inside you. If it is good, its mind blowing and removes each and every thought process, and further, above all, when it is with your best friend, it’s just and Buddha Enlightenment, the so called “Nirvana.”

We ended up drinking more than two cups of tea. When the tea is good, you can’t remember the number of cups, and especially when, your friend pays for it! We continued talking and this time, the whole argument went about politics. It’s quiet strange, we always start taking about our own life and then end up discussing other’s life – a phenomenon, so obvious, but never comprehendible.

Although, I have spent many a times with my many friends, but this turns out to be the best amongst those. Precisely because, it gave me lot of optimism that was required by me for the moment, especially when you stay alone for the first time. A small chit chat over tea sometime, matters more than spending whole day, doing fun things, with hell lot of good friends. I call it, ‘The Tea Tweak of Optimism.’ A lot of things can happen over tea also!

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Studying language reveals the structure of mind!

Language is the strongest tool to put forth your thoughts and I feel it does reveal a lot about the speaker. In intra-language communication, when one has exact words to express our thought, the body language radically changes & so does the confidence level. It is seen people with a command on a language, on vocabulary and delivery, are not only able to speak better but also comprehend better because they have a language to assist their thoughts.

Language does shape the way we see the world, the way we think. So not only it helps in expressing our thoughts, it many a times constraints them too. This is where we need to observe people who are bilingual/ multilingual. When speaking of inter-language interaction, people who speak more than one language can generally articulate better. This might be because they have more words and tones for expression. For example, my Nepali friend uses different words for exclaiming in different situation like “achu” on touching something too hot, “attu” when she’s too cold. In Hindi belt, generally the expression is “ahh” for exclaiming. Using such words also form the part of the language you speak. One might conclude, Nepalese is more expressive than Hindi, and so might be the people. Japanese speaker would be more sound oriented, English speaker more tone oriented.

If we compare the use of language to say a working of a computer, language requires real time mapping between words and meanings. It’s like you hear a sentence, nerves take it to the brain, then looks for meaning of the word, then the formulation of sentence, tries to draw inference from its stored knowledge and then accordingly creates a picture in the mind. The process is too quick and shows the structure of the mind. People who know more than one language have thus a larger data to retrieve information and to picture it.

Language does tell us a lot about the mechanism of mind and seen that our ability to think both emotionally and logically is very much dependent on the kind of language we use.

There is no specific domain for the expression of language. Two person can speak the very same expression with a much distinct representation. The way one expresses the thought, often reveals the way, s/he is thinking. Even the same sentence spoken by a person can actually differ in the way it is expressed. However, at times, we often find some people to be over-expressive and certain people to be monotonous. This can be justified by taking his or her attitude towards the subject under conversation. This leads us to visualize language as the complex mixture of thinking and emotions. Thus considering all the three major functions viz. cognition, feeling and volition. This provides the tick to checkpoint for a way to understand, how a mind is structured.

If one inquiries into the reading habits of a person, one finds, a certain type of people, reads the sentence and then hear it and thereby recognize the meaning. Another set of faster reader, reads the sentence in mind and then captures the meaning of the sentence. But, there also exist a much faster reader, who out of vision of looking at the sentence phrases, recognizes its meaning. This trend shows that our mind is trained to look at a particular sound or symbol and relate it to particular image in the mind. A person who is impaired to do such a matching suffers from dyslexia. It’s more like developing an understanding of dependent variable based on the knowledge of independent variable. Now, suppose a person has matched a particular set of symbols to an image in mind and now that he articulates what s/he is thinking, s/he is basically converting is image of thought in mind to this set of predefined symbols. Thus, in a way we are able to capture the structure of flow of thought in mind. However, a strong critique of it could be that, due to language, a particular person is trained to think in those directions. Given the free will of mind, one may choose to think differently, but due to conformity problems, one has to give up his/her own way of thinking. This is quite observed when an amateur SVO person, trained in SOV, is asked to converse in SVO. S/he often end up distorting the SVO into SOV. This is because, s/he is not initially coming up with his/her own mother tongue and then translating it to the foreign language; rather s/he is directly converting his thinking into the words of foreign language and that s/he is trained to think in SOV lines. Still, we can bit by bit generalize some universal grammar; which is quite an insightful in providing a major way in which one’s mind is structured, leaving aside the free will freedom.

“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform” - An objection by Lady Lovelace

Lady Lovelace in her memoirs (1942) states that how so ever a learning machine evolves with technological advancement; its execution would always be restricted to its programming (set of instructions), fed to it by humans. A machine can never produce original thoughts & ideas. Turning defying the argument said that the kind of machines Lady Lovelace saw lacked such properties. She couldn't witness sufficient evidence to prove that when speed and storage capacity of the machine will increase, machine might “surprise” you. Further he adds that even humans are trained specie. The thoughts they generate are either results of the genetic information they inherit at birth or due to their nurturing by various social institutions. I beg to differ with Turing’s arguments.

Turing hoped that in the new millennium, with increased speed and storage capacity a machine might be able to imitate human mind. But as we can see, Machines till now are only capable of deduction and induction mechanism. They cannot produce original ideas. E.g. Let us take the invention of Submarine. A human mind observed the motion of a fish in water, how its stream lined body facilitated its movement. It thus made a mental representation and imagined a watercraft designed on similar lines to travel water bodies. I doubt that a machine fed with similar information could generate the idea of a submarine. Moreover, can a machine think of using paper towels to wipe liquids by observing the capillary action in a tree? Can a machine perform ‘jugaad’, innovation? Answer till now is a NO.

Humans, undoubtedly are nurtured under various institutions, be it family, school etc. But there they are educated and not trained. They are imparted knowledge, yet have the power to execute their choice. It is not the case with machines. Their outputs are restricted to the set of instructions given to them by humans. Many AI theorists propose that if machine’s table is included with some kind of probabilistic calculations, it might produce original, unexpected results. Arguably the results would be unexpected and ‘by chance’, not by ideas and innovation which only human mind is capable of. Machines are thus not empowered but bound by programming which leaves them inefficient to generate new ideas.

Turing Test

The essence of the Turing Test revolves around whether a computer can successfully impersonate or imitate a human given the subjects communicate solely via messaging system. To pass the test, a computer would have to be capable of communicating, at least as competently as a person. As there is no restriction on the subject matter, anything within the scope of an average human being can be asked by the interrogator. This comes out to be having possibilities of discussion in different fields like art, science, personal history, social relationships etc.

I believe the scope of the communication between the interrogator and the machine being so vast and diverse, it is highly unlikely to imprint all the various possibilities into any system, with which it can behave in same way as a men do. Moreover the machines do not understand what they are doing. They just process imprinted information present within them. They also lack instinct behaviour and common sense which can be observed differently in different human beings.

I believe that no machine can replace /imitate a human perfectly. The ‘free will’ that men have is absent in machines. Decades of artificial intelligence have made machines better but could not provide ‘free will’ to them. This would mean that while two identical men in the same situation might respond differently, two similar machines under same situation would respond the same way. Along with the time, we tend to evolve which makes us highly unpredictable. Even the most advanced AI (Artificial intelligence) systems or machines just uses some specific or predefined symbols for pattern matching there by producing an output .They actually don’t understand the meaning of the symbols. To a machine, all the symbols are similar. If the meaning of a specific symbol is changed then they would never be able to give a correct output. I believe that machines can be used to facilitate human interaction than to replace them.

Are there ways that AI can have thinking power, going forward?

Turing felt that within 50 years of his paper, that is by 2000, computers would’ve been designed which could pass his ‘test’. Why do you think it did not happen? Turing believed in constantly evolving embedded intelligence in a machine. But if we see the present trend, it’s more of a complexity question. People are into developing a faster computing device, given that time has gain paramount importance, equivalent to money! Turing nine arguments to object the question of intelligence in machine, attacks the prevalent notion and itself justifies that speed and ample memory is just the prerequisites, but not the end.

The foundation of AI lies with the neural networks, fuzzy logics and genetic algorithm. These networks are trained with specific domain values in order to produce the results. This delimits space under test to a restricted function. After a machine is trained with the set of rules and functions, it only thinks on these lines and predicts the probability of a set of possible outcomes. Moreover, the idea of making a choice is so deterministic and guided that it lacks self-evolution. Now suppose, we have a system which is self-evolving, it will be able to generate its own intelligence. For example, a simple AI machine, by touching a hot water will make sure, it will not be touching it any further; but if this machine has self-evolutionary power, it will be able to generate its own gloves that will protect it in future.

As per Charles Darwin, living being embodies the survival for the fittest. It is this nature that makes living being evolve over time and handle the problem likewise. Now suppose, a machine is developed on these lines, it will surely evolve its own assets and understanding of its environment, just like what humans do, and so will be able to write a sonnet. This in-turn implies that they will possess a certain feeling of its own as experienced by the surroundings. Human emotions are guided by the hormonal levels. There exist certain biomedical chips, which are based on the similar principles. It processes the data based on level of chemical (an analogue signal). This can be viewed as a certain kind of feeling that the machine had towards the input – a case similar to desire. If we see human body, we in-fact are surviving due to the digesting action of E. coli bacteria present in our intestine, on our food. This show that humans alone in itself, can’t work the way they are working, in isolation. What I feel is that, we mislead in the direction towards the development of a machine that can pass the Turing test, as we are grossly ignoring the two major aspects of intelligence, i.e. evolution and mutual-existence. If we try to incorporate these two into the AI development, we will be able to embody the free-will into the machine.