Class seemed puzzled at first, a couple students gave it a fair shot although to none avail. Then suddenly, a hand was raised, followed up a confident answer "42".. He then was asked how the one arrived at this number and he said - "it's the stops on the New York City subway A line". Indeed it is.
How anyone else that has never lived or even visited NY is supposed to know this?! This question seems unfair, as it rewards those with contextual experience of living in that area, and those who had experience interacting with the beautiful and chaotic mess of what we call NY public transport system. If one poses this same question to an AIG (super intelligent AI), what would it determine this answer to be? Would it guess and get it wrong? Would it be confident of it's answer? After all, no AI has taken a ride in a New York city subway. I guess, my point is, real intelligence is very difficult to achieve when it's stemming from only from one's interactions with real world, without contextual knowledge, and human experience. Which is perhaps why, in the world of exponentially growing computing power, in the world where we have manufactured a thousand times more microchip transistors than there are grains of sand in the world, we're still struggling to create anything resembling a general artificial intelligence, because how could one teach it what it's like to take a subway ride, to take a walk in a park, to smile to a stranger, experience our world through our senses, fears, memories. I fell into such thought trap once myself. I was trying to isolate myself from outside world, thinking I could manifest context just through thought alone, to be left alone with my inner voice and access to the world wide knowledge through the vastness of the internet. It took me a while to appreciate the value of experiencing real world. I've underrated the importance of other people in my life, how important it is for one's mental health being, how important it is for self improvement, to make connections with others, broaden your scope, take a peek at the world through a different lens, experience the experiences first hand.
Some say I'm very polite, or very diplomatic, perhaps even weak - almost never taking a firm stance against anything or anyone. I wouldn't call this diplomacy, for me, diplomacy is associated with dishonesty, lies, trying to get something in return, pretending to agree just out of courtesy and compromising one self's morality, all just to get something to benefit yourself or to benefit institutions you represent. In my cynical days, my favourite saying use to be: "Most people are wrong about most things" - due to the sheer difficulty how difficult it is to actually be exactly right about anything, and how easy it is to be even slightly wrong, with millions of different ways to be wrong on a single question, after all, most question will always have unlimited wrong answers. I don't endorse this saying anymore, it's a simplified thinking, thinking that there even is such thing as "absolute correctness" in the first place, or even if there is, that it is worth pursuing, a untenable dream. Reality is often subjective, and two people can have their owns truths, both equally as correct, both equally as valid. Ever since I got used to seeing things through other's perspectives, I don't feel as confident anymore, I take stance in not knowing and still accepting, not knowing the intricate details of other person's world view, their life, and their experiences, and I entertain, that there's at least a possibility, that they're right, no matter how much if I'd like to disagree. A world is often divided into false dichotomies, Tim Minchin has an excellent song called "The Fence", and here's an excerpt of that song:
I'm taking the stand in defence of the fence
I got a little band playing anthems to ambivalence
We divide the world into terrorists and heroes
Into normal folk and weirdos
Into good people and *****
Into things that give you cancer
And the things that cure cancer
And the things that don't cause cancer
But there's a chance they will cause cancer in the future
We divide the world to stop us feeling frightened
Into wrong and into right and
Into black and into white and
Into real men and fairies
Into status quo and scary
Yeah we want the world binary, binary
But it's not that simple
People seem to like having concrete answers, being on team A or team B, team blue or team red, team Palestine or team Israel. When will we stop dividing the world and start acting as a unison, accepting each other as just people, rather than enemies of opposing views.
In the end, I do believe in people, I believe in the good in our society, I believe in the kindness of strangers. Of course, none of us are perfect, and we all sometimes have a lapse in judgement, but in the end, we are creators, creators of the society we see around us and, and creators of all the future generations that are yet to come. We, as a collective human enterprise, are staring into the eyes of abyss, the eyes of second law of thermodynamics, and we're openly defying it. What could be the greater reason than that for us all come to together and live in understanding forevermore.
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