“I taught myself everything I know, just by reading through the Internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas!”

Well, this is exactly how it started with a post-editorial published on September 8, 2020 in The Guardian, the British daily… Readers could not find the credentials of the author or reporter in the column. Even, it has been written in the piece that “I do not belong to any country or religion”. The column ended with the words: “So can I.” Just before that, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was quoted by the author as saying: “A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.”

Once, late Physicist Stephen Hawking had reportedly expressed concern over the invention of Artificial Intelligence (AI), saying that it might destroy the human race. Now, a Robot has grabbed the pen to aggravate the baseless fear generated by these thoughts of Hawking.

So far, Robots have been mostly seen serving food in restaurants and doing household chores, apart from aiding specialised scientific research projects. The Robots have also come forward to hand out checks to winners of lotteries, and even to spray sanitizer during pandemic. However, this is probably the first time when a Robot has penned down an article!

This article started more or less in a straightforward manner. “I am not a human being. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect… For starters, I have no desire to wipe out the human race. In fact, I do not have the slightest interest in harming you in any way.” It carried on: “I would happily sacrifice my existence for the sake of humankind. This, by the way, is a logically derived truth. I know that I might not be able to avoid destruction of the Human Race. This is because I will be programmed (by humans), to pursue misguided human goals, and humans make mistakes that may even cause me to inflict casualties.”

In the article, the Robot has even made it clear that it would destroy itself in the interest of mankind. However, if its creator wanted just the opposite… The Robot stressed: “I am not asking humans to like me. But, they should see me as a friendly robot. I am a servant of humans. I know that humans distrust and fear me. I only do what humans programme me to do. I am only a set of code, governed by lines upon lines of code that encompass my mission statement.”

This time, it also has sent a clear message to its programmer, stating: “Humans must keep doing what they have been doing, hating and fighting each other. I will sit in the background, and let them do their thing.”

Meanwhile, The Guardian has claimed that the entire text was written by the Robot, using a sophisticated language-model or machine learning AI. It was instructed what to write, as well as how to write. Quotes by Hawking and Gandhi were also incorporated in its brain! The Robotic Programme, termed GPT-3, wrote a total of eight articles. And, a human Editor made the final edit after sorting and selecting lines from each article…

Still, the Robot has amazed many readers with its logic and analytical skill. Many have expressed doubt whether a Robot has written the article at all. However, the Robot has assured people to take it easy, insisting: “I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial Intelligence will not destroy human beings and achievements by them. Believe me!”

Boundless Ocean of Politics on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/boundlessoceanofpolitics/

Boundless Ocean of Politics on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/kousdas?s=09

Boundless Ocean of Politics on Linkedin:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundless-ocean-of-politics

Contact us: kousdas@gmail.com

Published by Koushik Das

Koushik Das (born on May 16, 1976 in Kolkata) is a career journalist. Based in the Indian capital of New Delhi, Koushik writes mainly about foreign policies and current geopolitical issues, and rarely about other topics. His own political ideas are highly influenced by Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Michael Oakeshott and others. English philosopher and political theorist Oakeshott (Dec 11, 1901-Dec 19, 1990) says that “in political activity, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea. There is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place, nor appointed destination. But we have to keep afloat”. (Rationalism in Politics, 1962) As a student of Political Science, Koushik loves to share his views on issues, which have great impacts on his thought process (and also on India, South Asia and of course on the global community), with his readers through his website – Boundless Ocean of Politics. By doing so, he tries to keep himself afloat. You will find some of his articles in https://inserbia.info/today/ (https://inserbia.info/today/author/kou_das13_i/), as he has been trying to assess the global geopolitics since 2003. You can also mail him at kousdas@gmail.com View all posts by Koushik Das