I/Robot...

Battlestar Galactica’s finale largely sucked, with the same hand-waving explanations blaming everything on a higher power(read God) which plagued Harry Potter’s finale plaguing this series too. For more discussion of this, you can go to http://cinemablend.com/television/Why-The-Battlestar-Galactica-Finale-Is-A-Huge-Copout-And-It-Doesn-t-Matter-16337.html I am surprised that these otherwise astute authors and scriptwriters don’t realize that they have clearly bitten off more than they can chew. They just keep starting more and more strings right till the end of the series. I think that the problem stems from the fact that they don’t have a clear idea of how to close the strings when they open them up and are just hoping that things will kinda tie up on their own as they near the end of the story. Sadly, it rarely happens and we are left with an unexplained, if intriguing, mess. Stephen King actually discussed this issue at length in his Dark Tower series and openly admits that he had no idea how to end his story for 20 years. But when he finally did end it, oh boy, did he do it well. One of the very few series that led to a satisfying conclusion.

Anyway, for all its demerits, the BSG finale did spark an interesting line of thought in me. While our urge for technological progress is perfectly explicable, our urge to build humanoid robots is a little more intriguing. I can understand that we want to build robots, but why humanoid robots? Why not things that don’t have a head, have four arms and four legs? Why this determination to model ourselves?

I can think of three reasons for this. A totally unemotional answer may say the human body is a pretty efficient machine so it is only natural to try and model it. My answer to that is that the human body is a very inefficient machine, as has been proved time and over. Maybe I will add a link to a paper showing this later. However, I admit that the human body is a pretty wondrous machine (but after millions of years of evolution, it couldn’t have been anything else!). Therefore, maybe just trying to model that is a good place to start and we can get to the improvements later. Anyway, that’s one explanation.

The second reason has to do with our natural urge to procreate, I think. We have been genetically programmed to procreate(hence our programmed liking of errr…the acts that lead to procreation), so making humanoid robots is a manifestation of that urge. Because in the end if we can make robots that are indistinguishable from humans in every way, we have essentially procreated. This keeps driving us to make robots more and more similar to humans.
And finally, I think the third reason is that we simply want to play God(for lack of a better word!). No matter whatever else we do, God has one better over us till we can make ourselves. Our ego makes us believe that we are really special(and most religions encourage this belief heartily!) and creating ourselves will therefore be the pinnacle of our achievements. To make ourselves is just about the best challenge we could have been given.
The reasons I have listed here vary from the coldly practical to the totally intangible but I suspect that it is the intangible ones that drive this quest of ours more. And we are getting nearer everyday. For the brains, the progress in AI in the last 3-4 years has been astounding and the Japanese are doing a marvelous job on the body front. The irony is, for all our natural urges to make these robots, it seems that most of us believe that these robots will lead to our doom, which can be seen from the fact that most SF novels with robots as their central theme end up showing a dystopian future(with Asimov as the major exception here). Me, I’d just be so excited when these robots finally get done that I don’t really care if they take over the earth after that. So please get cracking, all you scientists out there!

I think, therefore I am

Continuing on from the theme of my last blog, I feel that one of the growing threats of our society is our determination to impose our views on others. And even more dangerously, the tendency of most to accept that and let others tell them what is right. The explosion of self-help books in the last few years testifies to this. So do the hundreds, if not thousands, of “gurus” with millions of followers hanging on to their every word.

And in the end, it is these followers who go and try to impose their(or rather, their guru’s) ideas on everyone else. It is actually the fact that they are not their ideas that creates in them the insecurity that leads to such behavior. Because they only have the guru/preacher/teacher/leader’s word for it, they cannot justify the ideas in their own head and hence see a different view as a threat and set out to demolish it. If they would have really come up with these views on their own, they would be quietly confident of them and not care whether others agree with them or not.

I am sure that Ram Sena activitists are not just afraid that they are wrong. People who are unsure about something argue with others about it. These people are sure, absolutely certain that they are wrong which is why they attack those who disagree with them. This is the trait of someone who has lost an argument and knows it.

And I would say that this is true for any religion going around these days. People accept religion out of fear, out of lack of confidence in themselves. This is why kids in POK, who have led lives of fear, easily fall prey to the talk of extremists posing as religious speakers. They are looking for answers and religion provides them with easy ones. Doesn’t really matter that they are wrong ones.

If I start a rant on religion, I won’t end anytime soon. Rather than that, I will come back to the original topic of why people accept another person’s views rather than their own. I wonder why they think that that person can tell them how to lead their lives any better than themselves.

I think one big reason is that it is just easier to park the responsibility of telling you what is right on somebody else. Day-to-day life is too complicated and busy as it is without having to answer the “What is the meaning of life?”, “Why am I here?” questions. Therefore people let others answer these ones for them.

A second possible reason is just the societal structure kids grow up in, I think. Till when into their teens they are told what is right and wrong by their teachers and elders. And a lot of times debates on why these things are right or wrong are not encouraged and sometimes are expressly forbidden. By the time teenagers finally get the right to decide what is right and wrong, they have lost the ability to think for themselves. Therefore they run to the nearest person who is answering the questions that are now sprouting up in their mind, which might be a guru or an inspirational speaker or whoever.

Sadly, this problem is much worse in countries like India with their social and educational structure. In social terms, this respect for elders stuff, for all its merits, does serious damage in this regard. Kids are expressly told- “Do not question your elders” and that’s that. In Western countries people have begun to realize the pitfalls of this attitude and actively encourage their children questioning them. Once a question has been asked by a child, the onus is on the parents to answer it the best they can. And this problem is even worse in our educational system. Most of our education is “this answer is wrong, this answer is right” type. They brook no argument. I cannot recall a single examination which asked me open-ended questions with no right or wrong answers. As I write this, it becomes more and more startling to me how almost no attempt was made to encourage independent thinking. Again, Western schools are far better in this regard. They make a very serious effort to encourage children thinking for themselves. And it seems to pay off in the end, doesn’t it? For all our science and Maths based education, we don’t seem to get any Nobels, do we? And I know that there are a lot of other reasons for that, but I am sure that this suppression of independent thought is a major one.

Since it is always easy to point out problems, I should also suggest solutions then. Well, I can only state the obvious- we need to think more for ourselves and have more confidence in ourselves. That is the only way we will be able to be tolerant of opposing thoughts. Lastly, and most importantly, we need to realize that–“There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”- Shakespeare

The ribbon of dreams

The worst thing you can do while judging a movie is to judge it by its message. A movie does not have a message. A movie does not judge. You judge. The only thing the movie can do is show light on some things, and even those don't have to be real or true. They can be made up. A movie asks what if, it does not say this is. Do not blame it for showing light on something you did not want to see. A movie stands alone, it is in a vacuum. You need to realize that the movie is not of this universe, it is of another, fictional universe. If a movie shows Saddam Hussein in a good light, don't blame it for that. The movie isn't saying he was good, the movie is giving you something to think about. Blaming the movie is like shooting the messenger, because the movie was only providing you a perspective.

This rant has been brought about by reading reviews of the movie “The Reader”, which shows a Nazi prison guard in a sympathetic light. The chief criticism I find of the movie is that how dare it say that Nazis were good. Well, my answer to that is, the movie doesn’t say that dumbo! The movie shows the fictional case of a Nazi guard who *would* have been sympathetic if she had existed in the first place. What’s wrong with that? Also, for this specific example, the movie itself is an allegory to show that our generation’s understanding of the holocaust is incomplete, but that is really besides the point. Even if the movie’s sole purpose were to show Nazis as angels, it’s not to be condemned. That is a perspective. You don’t need to agree with it.

In fact, if you go to a movie to have life’s messages taught to you, you are pathetic. You should be the one deciding what is good and bad, rather than let a movie or a book (or a person!) dictate to you.

"A film is a ribbon of dreams. The camera is much more than a recording apparatus; it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world that is not ours and that brings us to the heart of a great secret. Here magic begins." -Orson Welles