Me, Myself, Augmented I

Lately, I have been pondering on what value do I have? Some would say as a retiree, that would be my experience. I would like to believe that but as is, I probably question that as well. Sure, the experience is there but would be this of value to anyone else? I don't know. Right now, I will just continue what I have been doing and majority of that is continuous learning; occasionally one stumbles into something new. Such new things are usually incremental. Breakthroughs are even more rare and they happen only for special individuals. I recall the following quote made by Einstein to Schrodinger (see https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9901023)

Our egoes often tend to get in the way for us to realise this. We are not as important as we think we are. Indeed, we often get upset if things that do not go on our way. Just look at the way comments made in social media. While mentioning this, I do worry about how things are evolving and what my children are growing into. As a normal citizen, fracturing comments and insults, superiority complex, stereotypings, remarks of 'testing the water' nature, false or partial truth propaganda, often show irresponsible behaviour of the individuals involved. Let's leave that for now.

Back to experience and continuous learning, even these seem to be 'threatened' by the current tools of AI. So, if these AI tools can give more and faster than our own experience and learning, what is our value then? We can comfort ourselves and say that individuals are special as humans (as opposed to machines), despite one's utilitarian value may have decreased to one which is negligible, do we really understand what this means. For now, I tend to resign myself to (without invoking religious ideas), the idea of AI-augmented human where we could use the AI tools to enhance our human capabilities. Presently, I am still learning these AI tools and with certain amount of familiarization, I may be able to do more than what I was able to do before.

One of things that I dream of doing is to do podcasts, though I have some reservations of such activities, fearing that they reduce to coffee shop talks (sembang kopi). First, I'm more of a writing person than a speaking person i.e. I write better than I speak. Recently, I did a video message for my classmates 50th reunion event soon, I was not that fluent in expressing myself spontaneously (see video below).

Secondly, I would need more resources particularly I need another person to interact. Since none of my family follow my academic path, I can't really do this in a podcast style. Even though, currently there is an AI tool that can produce an audio podcast, which I have seen being used by others e.g. Curt Jaimungal and AI-produced YouTube videos, I have yet to decide if it is worth doing (most probably they will ignored). Thus, I will just restrict myself doing blog posts and will continue to explore my 'augmented I'.

Note added: In my mind, I wanted to say more about the video above but it seems to disrupt the flow of thoughts at the time of writing. When I send the video to my schoolmate, Zulkifli Abdullah, he suggested that I should add more words like 'Let's forgive each other.' I responded that the video was shot with the help of my son and he was pretty busy.I asked him to convey the message to friends at the reunion. Zul much earlier had said that this might be the last time that we will see each other. My sister Zaizah had also asked me why am I not going. In a way, I feel really bad for not going because circumstances are not that favourable for me to attend the reunion in this period. In any case, I had passed some of high school pictures to Zul before this, probably to show as a montage at the event. Some of the pictures were of the band I was playing in high school band and what songs we were playing. So in the background of the video above is one of the songs that we played, Doscovery's Malam Sepi. I hope that will bring back good memories.

Keeping It To Myself and Not Losing Face

It seems that social media is still abuzz about the unusual claim(s) made by a local professor and has not died down (I'm tired of reading the posts when they appear on my wall). One comment goes even to the poiint of invoking Judgement Day for those who are supporting the said professor (I do not have such confidence in facing Allah swt with imperfect deeds). My position is the same: debate within academic circles and not social media (including the said professsor). Something seems to be wrong about how academia is, if these do not suffice.

Knowing full well how toxic social media (and back-biting) can be, I have decided not to do any rewrite of my post on Mostaque's ideas for a magazine publication (just saw that there is a NotebookLM version which I hope to check out). I was made to become aware of  'AI experts' ridiculing others who probably wanted to venture into the field amateurishly. Note that my own post is not so much on the AI materials but more on the ideas of physics underlying some of Mostaque's ideas. However, critiques or even insults are the least of my worries. The bigger worry is that the book 'The Last Economy' is really about economic phase transition due to widespread of AI tools. My only encounter with economics is when I was teaching Applied Calculus at XMUM for economic sciences students. So I dug out the books of Silberberg and Takayama, thinking I would read it for some reason.

I got particularly lost when Mostaque suggested the solution of the dual currency system, the foundation coins and culture credits. I know nothing about bitcoins and crypto-currencies. Thus, in my post, I do not dare touch these topics. Certainly there is a yearning to read more on this but it will probably take me a long time for me to digest the topic. Then I remembered about Svozil mentioning the problem of money when he was here for EQuaLS, but at the time we wanted to focus on quantum foundation ideas. He has an article in arXiv about this, which I showed to my family (hoping to stir some interest in the problem of money and later on cyptocurrency). My reading of the article (perhaps my interest is not here) is rather slow. The next step is perhaps to find a simple book on blockchains and cryptocurrencies. Thus, my understanding of Mostaque's dual currency system is probably a long way off. But there are other things which I have not understood. For instance, there is a Lagrangian given in Appendix A Part II whose form is not quite in the form of difference of 'energies'. Supposing that the optimization problem of an objective function is the same as action extremizing principle, it doesn't quite correspond to what I know as in physics. I did try to search the literature (within economics) if action or Lagrangian approach has been used, but the ones I got have different formulations. Sort of gave up at the moment.

Thus, my decision not to have another rewrite until I can understand at least partially what is going on. Today, I saw another podccast with Mostaque that had some verbal details of his ideas but I really wanted a written technical paper that I could read and digest. In the podcast, this is the second time, he raised the idea of wave-particle duality. Need more details of how he think about this, but I have always maintained this is simply due to configuration variable whose conjugate variables involving time derivatives (which I implicitly mention in my post about the flow). However, in this particular case, there seems to be no reason for incompressibility of the phase space volume (needed for an uncertainty principle). So for now, I will wait for more details and hence save me from possible ridicules for now.

Family matters: My son Izhar has moved out from his place in Shah Alam (losing the deposit due to broken contract) and set up his 'office' in his room at home.

He will probably travel to work from home now.

Just Want To Be Better

Hmmm ... my last post seems to have more traffic. Sometimes people think I should not raise certain issues. Maybe. I'm not siding with anyone. I simply want to raise some awareness that might escape people's attention (e.g. Black Athena). It is rather unfortunate, many times things are being framed here along racial lines. Coupled to this is islamophobia. The irony is islamic outlook (addressed to mankind universally) is against racial outlook. In any case, one should be aware the unconscious ugly psyche that creeps into discussions.

The post was probably the first time I cite Qur'anic verses in a blogpost (I can't really remember if there is any before this and I will not bother to check it). I don't want to pretend to be a religious person but I do want to be a better Muslim and also a better intellectual. Must say, there are struggles to do both. I wish that I know Arabic well to understand the Qur'an directly, but I don't. Being a theoretical physicist, we are still a minority in the physics community. Before retirement, I did try to push theoretical physics agenda because I don't think anyone else would do that for us (at the time). Anyway, my days are nearly over. Soon I'll be 63, which is around (or more than) the age when our Prophet Muhammad pbuh passed away. My other half has already warned about the books and papers I have, may become a burden in the hereafter. I'm trying to use them (and perhaps teach) as much as I can now and once I finish (very unlikely) or decide to stop, I will probably give them away (or sell them).

This morning, I started to watch YouTube on my TV. Some weeks ago, we were given the IPTV box for free. Watching it on TV, it allows freeing up the memory on my old laptop. I have just watched a Moonshot episode where they had Peter Diamandis hosting a forum in Riyadh with Eric Schmidt and Li Fei Fei. Some pics.

Currently watching The Tea hosted by Myriam Francois with Subhadra Das discussing eugenics and how they have currently transformed.

After a while, watching talks like these, there is a feeling of 'sembang warung kopi'. What do I get and how do these made me better? My frequent prayers that I'll be given beneficial knowledge.

What One Says or Writes

Lately, I prefer not to read postings on the social media because (insulting) reactions to (unusual) claims made by a local professor. What is troubling is perhaps this is not the first time and the person would have known what reactions that will come thereafter. Note that in any claim, the burden of proof is upon the person who makes the claim. The more extraordinary the claim that is being put forward, the bigger is the burden of proof. This is also true within the 'hard' sciences. The bigger the difference with the normative science of the day, the more resistance one expects. This is well understood. I recall having a potential PhD candidate (or was it MSc) who came to see me, wishes to prove that Earth holds a special position in the universe. Knowing modern cosmology's idea that there is no such specal position, I asked the person what is the latest form of cosmological knowledge that the person knew. The person did not respond directly to the question, emphasizing only the faith of the person. Naturally, I would not want the person to be my PhD student. Also, with respect to these claims, I may have some differences in the past with a colleague on some claims but whom I respected because of his Arabic knowledge and the ability to access primary Arabic sources. I do admire his passion of getting (non-English) historical documents, and their careful reading whose contents are largely unknown to many of us who are educated in the West.

Tried to view the whole episode within a larger lens; I remembered the book Black Athena (three volumes) whose claim is that Western civilization has its roots in North Africa and West Asia, not simply from the Greeks. I knew about the book from my reading of its review in Afkar Inquiry magazine. I actually bought its first volume and I still have it, but it is stashed away in the inner depths of my book shelf. While I think it is interesting, given the geographical proximity of the regions involved, history is not really my cup of tea. Talking about proximity, when I first heard about Golden Chersonese during my school days, I was already puzzled how our region gets its way into the literature of the Greeks because of the distances between Greece and South East Asia. This piece of history was learned together with history of Francis Light 'discovered' Penang and Stamford Raffles 'discovered' Singapore. Later, we do understand that these were just the perspectives of the colonialists. So, with respect to history, care must be taken on who is writing them. This is not to say that history has to be left to the whims of the historians. The better evidence, be it in terms of documentations or archaelogical evidences, the better the historical claim i.e. closer to the 'truth'. With respect to this and the Friday today, I remember the Qur'anic ayat:

The Cave (18:22) 

سَيَقُولُونَ ثَلَـٰثَةٌۭ رَّابِعُهُمْ كَلْبُهُمْ وَيَقُولُونَ خَمْسَةٌۭ سَادِسُهُمْ كَلْبُهُمْ رَجْمًۢا بِٱلْغَيْبِ ۖ وَيَقُولُونَ سَبْعَةٌۭ وَثَامِنُهُمْ كَلْبُهُمْ ۚ قُل رَّبِّىٓ أَعْلَمُ بِعِدَّتِهِم مَّا يَعْلَمُهُمْ إِلَّا قَلِيلٌۭ ۗ فَلَا تُمَارِ فِيهِمْ إِلَّا مِرَآءًۭ ظَـٰهِرًۭا وَلَا تَسْتَفْتِ فِيهِم مِّنْهُمْ أَحَدًۭا ٢٢

Some will say, “They were three, their dog was the fourth,” while others will say, “They were five, their dog was the sixth,” ˹only˺ guessing blindly. And others will say, “They were seven and their dog was the eighth.” Say, ˹O Prophet,˺ “My Lord knows best their ˹exact˺ number. Only a few people know as well.” So do not argue about them except with sure knowledge, nor consult any of those ˹who debate˺ about them.

— Dr. Mustafa Khattab, The Clear Quran (https://quran.com/18/22)

On the above controversy, the best place to dscuss or debate is within academic circles and journals. Social media is not a good place to have intense debate on this and most certainly only degenerate to gang-shaming. Social media is really a domain of attention-seekers, and not truth-seekers.

Social media is also prone to propaganda and narrative wars. I suppose people have the freedom to do these but be careful of what they entail. I saw a lot of Islamophobic narratives or comments. One of them, I saw this morning is about the splitting of the moon miracle (see also here) made by one writer. While not explicit, the intent is essentially to ridicule - the person showed pics of the moon in Arabia (split) but it was whole in other places - one explanation I have seen is that in far away places, they are in different time zones. But 'miracles' or out of the norm events do happen in other religions too, so in a way what the writer did was cherry-picking. There will always be parts of the religion that we do not understand. For me, the honest and humble thing to do is to reflect on places where we are asked to reflect (and not in places where one don't have the depth of understanding - very much the same in science, we leave problematic cases for others or future generations to expound on - or we can wait for the Hereaafter). On this note, muslims are not allowed to insult the religion of others as indicated in the following verse:

The Cattle (6:108) 

وَلَا تَسُبُّوا۟ ٱلَّذِينَ يَدْعُونَ مِن دُونِ ٱللَّهِ فَيَسُبُّوا۟ ٱللَّهَ عَدْوًۢا بِغَيْرِ عِلْمٍۢ ۗ كَذَٰلِكَ زَيَّنَّا لِكُلِّ أُمَّةٍ عَمَلَهُمْ ثُمَّ إِلَىٰ رَبِّهِم مَّرْجِعُهُمْ فَيُنَبِّئُهُم بِمَا كَانُوا۟ يَعْمَلُونَ ١٠٨

˹O believers!˺ Do not insult what they invoke besides Allah or they will insult Allah spitefully out of ignorance. This is how We have made each people’s deeds appealing to them. Then to their Lord is their return, and He will inform them of what they used to do.

— Dr. Mustafa Khattab, The Clear Quran (https://quran.com/6/108)

I think the ridiculing also happen in less sensitive areas; often we giggled at the fantastic parts of Kollywood films that seem to defy physics. Then my other half reminded me, the same can be said of some Hollywood films, where we don't giggle that much.

Anyway, here is how I felt after reading social media postings in the past week or so.

My youngest son just send me this photo where he had his Friday prayers. May Allah helphim with his studies and I hope he is eating well (have just topped up his pocket money this morning).

Birthday & More Brooding

Yesterday was my eldest son's birthday. Given 'the special day', we had our meals mostly 'outside' and in a way we ate more than we used to. We bought him a cake.

For dinner, however, we just had kebab, thinking we had enough for the day.

Now in a previous post, I mentioned about a blogpost I've made about 'AI hype'. Have I been bought in regarding AI? Not really. It is just my style to learn 'new' things. Am I convinced that AI will change our lives in the future. I don't know. Certainly, it will be good for us to be prepared. We have seen ourselves how internet has changed our lives, both positively and negatively. Will I be doing research in AI? Most probably no, at least in the conventional sense. I would be interested how quantum science may intersect with the progress in AI. More generally, how 'new' mathematical structures (including linguistics) will help S&T progress. Again, I have a wide interest even before the AI boom.

Back to the blogpost, still contemplating on a follow-up or even a polished version of the article since I do believe there is some value in the post (it is not simply a summary of Mostaque's book). Too bad, it did not quite generate too much interest probably drowned by all the political commentaries in the past week or so. In a way, the national goals have some weight in shaping our interest and focus, particularly the way that we are perceived as small players (what more if some look down on us). With people like Terence Tao and Tim Gowers expressing interest in AI, I guess in a way, it would be silly just to ignore this 'AI hype'. Another point, is that scientific problems are getting more complex by the day. the AI tool may just help. In a different way, the more complex scientific problems are, the more necessary for us to work together (whatever that means). I have always suggested this fact even before this 'AI hype', in part justifying why we need more organizations (or institutes) for us to collaborate with.