Newsletter 15: Welcome to the Machine

AI, Altered Reality, and the Battle for Perception in Varanasi

My regular readers will have noticed that I skipped an edition last week; newsletter 14 came out on the 24th of January and the next one should have come out on the 7th. 

I was traveling and despite my best intentions, I couldn't focus and write the next edition. Part of my travel was for work but I added a little side trip to it.

I made a trip to Varanasi, India. And this place blew my mind!

Varanasi is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. It was one of the first major urban settlements in the middle Ganges valley. By the 2nd millennium BCE (2000 to 1000 BC) Varanasi was a seat of Vedic religion and philosophy and was also a commercial and industrial center. There is some work being done by the Indian Institute of Technology that theorizes possible existence of settlements here from as early as 6000 BCE making it contemporaneous with the Indus Valley Civilization. This place is as old as time, and one can feel it. 

Varanasi remained a center of religious, educational, and artistic activities as attested by the celebrated Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang, who visited it about 635 CE and said that the city extended for about 3 miles (5 km) along the western bank of the Ganges. It was already a few thousand years old and the capital of the kingdom of Kashi during the time of the Buddha (6th century BCE), who gave his first sermon nearby at Sarnath. As was their tradition, the British anglicized its name to “Benaras” during the period of colonization but that name only stuck for a couple of centuries, a mere blip for this ancient settlement. Mark Twain, who had traveled around the world visited and wrote, “Benaras is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend and looks twice as old as all of them put together.” 

Varanasi is considered the spiritual capital of the Hindu faith and is home to many ancient and sacred temples dedicated to Lord Shiva. The city's legends are thick and complex and reputedly go back some 10,000 years to the oldest epics of Hindu literature.

As I said, it blew my mind.

This trip got me thinking about ancient South Asian philosophy. My original subscribers will recall that last summer I had the chance to pick up my reading habit once again. One of the books I re-read as I mentioned in newsletters 1 & 2 was the old classic from Fritzof Capra, "The Tao Of Physics" and its attempt to correlate modern physics to some of these schools of philosophy.

Knowing how my mind operates, and given the complexity of the subject matter, I first needed to establish the meta structure for the philosophies emanating out of the Indian Sub Continent from as early as the third (or earlier?) millennium BCE to the present.

I started with the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a “scholarly, peer-reviewed” source of information on all things Philosophy.  Then to organize my learning I drew an entity-relationship diagram to get oriented!! I discovered the well established six schools of Vedic philosophy (Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Sankhya, Yoga, Purva Mimamsa, Vedanta) and their connection to the Buddhist schools. This led to a profound self discovery as I read more material, books and absorbed myself into a few podcasts.

It was with this context that I arrived in Varanasi. It was overwhelming, humbling, an assault on the senses, and a place burgeoning with perspective. I can easily say that no one who visits leaves unchanged. It is a place where some of the most ancient texts are preserved and legend has it that it is here that the greatest thinkers of these various schools came and debated their perspectives. This contributed richly to the corpus of human knowledge. Concepts such as Karma, established epistemology and its tools, origin of the universe, the nature of existence and the purpose of life; all discussed and debated here.

Given recent work, I was especially enamored by the concept of "Maya".  No, not the MesoAmerican civilization which emerged much later than Varanasi. No, not even the Autodesk software! By the way, I am betting that with GenAI that class of software is going to fundamentally get disrupted within the next 18 to 24 months. 

Maya is a nuanced and complex concept originally from texts called The Upanishads, dating back to the later Vedic period (around the 7th century BCE).  I previously mentioned the six core schools of philosophy, one amongst them is called Vedanta. It is the school of philosophy that focuses on concepts dealing with the ultimate nature of reality.  It explains Maya as the divine illusion or cosmic ignorance that veils the true nature of the ultimate reality. The five senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch) which can be easily co-opted are the means by which we perceive the physical universe, which according to Vedanta, is a manifestation of Maya. This process is routinely exploited by marketers, propagandists and con artists. Cialdini literally wrote a book on how to influence people.

So how does this bring me to our world as catalyzed by GenAI? GenAI is modifying our sensory perception or subverting the processing of our sensory stimuli to change the nature of perceived reality aka Maya. And we are responding to this altered reality.

In my predictions for 2024  I had expected (prediction #7) the use of GenAI in intense political activity that is expected this year. As mentioned earlier, the largest group of people ever will vote this year in elections across the world. I wrote in a recent LinkedIn post about “widespread robocalling by a voice which purportedly sounded like President Biden”. In my prediction I speculated that “ this technology’s potential will be too irresistible for it not to be exploited”. Given the nature of LinkedIn, I didn't make any explicit connection. However, Pindrop, a security company and Hany Farid, a digital forensics specialist at the UC Berkeley School of Information claim that it is highly likely that the deepfake robocall of President Biden was created with technology from Silicon Valley’s favorite voice-cloning startup, ElevenLabs. 

Artificially creating what we see and what we hear alters our conception of reality, it is a form of Maya. 

This previous incident disengages this essay from the theoretical and the dogmatic to urgent pragmatism and kinetic consequences very quickly. I had surmised in that article that “I especially think about elections in parts of the world which have historically been connected to acts of violence.”  In Pakistan last week, in a notably flawed election process, a popular leader was imprisoned and his political party obstructed from campaigning. In a complete turnabout on GenAI use, they resorted to campaigning and later broadcasting a victory speech using an AI voice, ostensibly using the leader’s notes. The election was violent with over 50 attacks on Election Day that killed 12 and injured 39 in various parts of the country. In response to “recent incidents of terrorism” in the country, cellular networks had been cut off “to maintain the law and order situation and deal with possible threats.”

Maya isn't just a concept, it is perceived reality and it provokes behavior and action from all of us. When our senses are co-opted we respond to non-reality; ropes become snakes and smoke patterns appear as demons. Humans are now using GenAI to hack in and influence paradigms to further their agendas.

Let's go further. What if the processing of our senses gets directly modified by GenAI? What if our brain perceives sensory input but it isn't being provided by our biological senses? Remember Vanilla Sky, the cult classic psychological science fiction thriller? It appears we are now close to making that real by connecting brain activity to experience. I don't even mean the work being done by Elon Musk’s Neuralink which is concerning in itself. There are now better, cheaper advancements. Take  Prophetic AI which has built Morpheus 1. According to their website, it is “the world’s first multi-modal generative ultrasonic transformer designed to induce and stabilize lucid dreams. Unlike LLMs, Morpheus-1 is not prompted with words and sentences but rather brain states. And instead of generating words, Morpheus-1 generates ultrasonic holograms for neurostimulation to bring one to a lucid state. Morpheus-1 is a 103 million parameter transformer model trained on 8 GPUs for 2 days.” To interface between the brain and computer there are already open source rigs such as the ones developed by OpenBCI. One can conclude that it is now imminent that there will be tech platforms that will allow our perception to be co-opted; we are on the cusp of being able to generate and perceive brand new unreal worlds. 

We are surrounded by faustian bargains. What is reality? And what is Maya?

Like I said, Varanasi blew my mind.

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Sources and References:

• Varanasi | History, Map, Population, River, Pilgrimage, & Facts | Britannica - https://www.britannica.com/place/Varanasi

• Varanasi: The Eternal flow. https://www.iitkgpsandhi.org/varanasi.html

• Hindu Philosophy: https://iep.utm.edu/hindu-ph/ 

• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition: Robert B. Cialdini: 9780061241895: Amazon.com: Books - https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/006124189X

• Researchers Say the Deepfake Biden Robocall Was Likely Made With Tools From AI Startup ElevenLabs | WIRED - https://www.wired.com/story/biden-robocall-deepfake-elevenlabs/?utm_campaign=behind-the-biden-deepfakes&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=ai.theintelligenceage.xy

• Scientists have trained an AI through the eyes of a baby - https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/02/07/scientists-have-trained-an-ai-through-the-eyes-of-a-baby

• Imran Khan deploys AI clone to campaign from behind bars in Pakistan - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/18/imran-khan-deploys-ai-clone-to-campaign-from-behind-bars-in-pakistan

• Pakistan Suspends Mobile Phone Services on Election Day | TIME - https://time.com/6692687/pakistan-election-day-voting-violence-phone-service-disturbances/

• Pakistan election: Ex-Pakistani PM Sharif strikes confident note in vote marred by controversy | AP News - https://apnews.com/article/pakistan-election-new-parliament-bebb49b2ef9df79e491b7cbe2221b0da