Man and Superman: India’s Prospects in the Age of AI (Part 1)

(Sramana Mitra discusses India’s Prospects in the Age of AI at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture in Kolkata, India on November 3, 2023)

It’s a real pleasure for me to return to this forum after four years. Thank you very much, Maharaj, for having me again and again. History is evolving rather quickly at the moment.

Since I was last here, we’ve experienced a once-in-a-century pandemic. Russia has started an unprovoked war against Ukraine, putting the world on the brink of  Nuclear threat. By challenging the legitimacy of perfectly conducted elections, various political leaders are playing with destroying democracies around the world, including in America.

Simultaneously, Artificial Intelligence, the subject of my talk today, has burst into the forefront of popular consciousness with the advent of Generative AI, Large Language Models, ChatGPT and so on.

When I first spoke here in 2016, I spoke on the Future of Capitalism. I discussed how mass-scale automation engineered by Artificial Intelligence stands to render human beings useless. With nothing to do. With no mechanism to earn a livelihood. The Economic impact of AI on society was my primary concern. My general conclusion was that we need Universal Basic Income – a form of economic redistribution – to keep society from spinning out of control.

This conclusion is now, by and large, an accepted remedy in a world that is about to go through extensive automation.

However, it is likely to take a couple of decades to fully infiltrate society.

So we’re not quite going to a post-work world immediately.

In my second talk in 2019, I spoke about Man and Superman – the impact of how AI-driven augmentation of the human species will render one part of civilization – MAN – extinct. The other part, the part that becomes enhanced by AI, will thrive. This enhanced Superman will compose music like Beethoven, write poetry like Tagore, make scientific discoveries like Einstein, etc.

Do we still consider this AI-enhanced species Mankind? Maybe not. But that’s beside the point. This enhanced organism is the direction in which evolution is taking us. This is the future of Artificial Intelligence. There will be Superman in the not too distant future.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Man and Superman: India's Prospects in the Age of AI
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