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Why do humans tell lies? We do engage in falsehood because of our ignorance or inability to be on the side of the truth. When we can’t attain certain knowledge or are unable to understand, we entertain by telling stories of lies. We believe in many things , but when someone questions our belief where you can’t comprehend, lies are the only destiny.
Truths are of different nature. The two fundamental ones are absolute truth and objective truth. As an example religious beliefs are always absolute truth and any established scientific facts are objective truth. However, we tend to fight only for the absolute truth.
It’s always a fight between our urge to find the absolute truth and the inability to convince others. But what does Artificial Intelligence (AI) have to do with the validation of absolute truth?
Some truth by its nature changes as time passes, unlike certain objective truths. We believe in stories that satisfy our pride. Absolute truth is sometimes validated by what the majority accepts. Whoever can convince the majority becomes the leader, until someone else emerges who can convince otherwise. This is the journey of truthhood for humans. Today’s truth may become tomorrow’s falsity.
Why is it this way? Humans always want to be part of a group. And they always try to convince others that they only profess the real truth. It can be their pride or ego or sadism. Whatever be the case, this is the human character that believes in the absolute truth.
We never had any group that behaved in an unbiased manner, every one wanted to be part of some group where they wanted to profess their own idea of truth. This is where Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes neutral that can judge any truth with justified judgement.
AI uses all the acquired human knowledge and makes unbiased judgement on all the subject matters. AI has proved to have logic and reasoning as good as humans plus access to all the available knowledge present in the internet. Perhaps if AI can model consciousness then we could see it exercising free will as well. That may be far in the future. Anyways presently AI can provide absolute truth on a platter.
We always try to hunt for the truth. Our kind of truth depends on our knowledge, the intellect, morals, virtue etc; hitherto which may not be the real truth, but it’s our belief that it’s the real truth. The majority of us will acknowledge if we are convinced of a truth with reasoning. But the means of attaining it conventionally has many limitations with our judgement. This is where AI can judge the truth with superior unbiased reasoning. Combining everything with common sense we are ready for trusting someone. And lately, AI is gaining that trust amongst humans.
Belief is something gained by trust. There are established societies that deliberately propagate falsehood just to have control over the society. Gaining trust too depends on the knowledge and the competency we profess. These capabilities are now with AI in its pristine form, and it’s a matter of time we have unrelenting trust in AI. There are leaders in many professions able to lead groups of people because of their convincing power. All these will get shattered by gaining trust in AI.
There are many religions, political parties, ideologies, cults, activists etc that keep the people under their stride by convincing them with different stories and forcing upon different morals and virtues. All these have lots of literature that humans cannot comprehend in their lifetime. Now that’s possible with AI, to get conclusions on any subject how large it is. In fact the process of finding the truth has evolved retrospectively with the advent of the internet. However it has culminated to a superior level with the evolution of AI.
When our civilization becomes more sophisticated we do hear lies of such magnitude that’s difficult to unravel. Maybe it happens this way since we have short memories, but that’s not the case with AI.
The one technique humans engage in negating others is by maligning their characters or dehumanizing or discrediting their voice. No one can do such a baleful act on AI. This is why AI is going to revolutionise the means of knowing the actual truth. With this immunity AI can destroy many of the societal constructs where people are going to hear many of the truths that’s been evading humans for centuries.
Thus I say the new age AI is going to be the nemesis of falsehood. This modern day classical renaissance is nothing but the resurgence of absolute truth. Like Leonardo who was much ahead of his times, AI can mesmerise an entire generation. AI is the modern Da Vinci.
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.