After having spent millions and millions of rupees through the once-revered-now-condemned Higher Education Commission (HEC) in the last decade or so on promoting education along scientific lines, all we are left with today is a vacuum in which the universities don’t know how to continue whatever research projects that had started in the first part of HEC’s existence. Forget the research projects, my friends, the universities don’t know who will pay the next month’s salaries … in some cases even ‘this’ month’s salary!

If you think the ‘opening’ is disjointed in the context of what we had been discussing last week, rest assured, you are not wrong. It is, indeed, disjointed … and seriously so. Let’s do some damage control by connecting the two dots: Artificial Intelligence and the ‘opening’. While science has continued to move forward, the philosophers have continued to raise questions; critical questions that challenge the direction of scientific progress. And, the questions, like the scientific progress, are coming from the West itself. The Muslims are just not in the picture. They — the Muslims and, indeed, Pakistanis — have nothing to do with either of them.

It may not be a wonderful thought on its own, but it will indeed help lessen the amount of animosity that the pseudo-scientific minds in our own midst feel and express every time they hear an argument that challenges the approach adopted by scientists elsewhere. ‘Science’ and ‘scientists’ are two different entities. While the former is objective in its approach, the latter is not necessarily so. Raising doubts over a scientist’s approach, as such, shall not be equated with a criticism of science itself. But many among us struggle to draw the line between the two which is not surprising in view of the system that produces such pseudo-scientists.

The two dots having thus been connected (hopefully), let us now get back to the realm of Artificial Intelligence which has always had a two-dimensional existence: philosophical and scientific. Philosophers and intellectuals have been busy for long and around the world, mostly in the West, in brainstorming over basic issues like whether or not machines can actually think, what is the concept of intelligence or thought and the many religious, moral, ethical and even legal offshoots of such questions. The scientists, on the other hand, have kept themselves away from such debates and concentrated on the task of making machines think even if, philosophically speaking, they can’t (‘they’ refers to machines, not the scientists, by the way!).

As has been the case with numerous inventions and developments, wars have tended to provide impetus to scientists and the case with AI was not much different. Guided missiles, infrared track-and-hit devices, torpedoes and a whole lot of such deadly weaponry owe their existence in one way or the other to the advances in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency even tried producing ‘smart trucks’ which were basically robots that were expected to perform a number of battlefield tasks. It would have cut down human casualties in armed conflict, but setbacks led to, first, reduction and then suspension of the project. This was in 1989. Just three years later, the Americans, however, were using AI-based hardware in Operation Desert Storm.

With the colour of global politics getting more and more militarised with every passing day, it is only understandable that the interest of military commanders is increasing in Artificial Intelligence. This is especially so because more wars are being fought against what is often called the ‘invisible enemy’.

In everyday life as well, we see AI at work even if not everyone realises that. Computers armed with voice and character recognition are there. The ‘fuzzy logic’ — pioneered in the United States, perfected in Japan — that has made it easier to have steady camcorders is another example. Interactive games as well as still cameras making automatic adjustments, independent of the user, against light and background are also a result of advances in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

As we saw last week, the rather grandiose early hopes of the pioneers — Alan Turing being the most prominent of them all — have failed to materialise. They hoped that by the turn of the century computers would be able to match human-like traits; may, in fact, even surpass them. Such beliefs stemmed from the discovery that even crude ‘electric brains’ could perform impressive feats.

Enter into the frame American neurologists Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts who stunned fellow researchers back in the 1940s by showing that it was possible to understand the action of nerves using the laws of mathematical logic which lies at the very heart of the process of reasoning in the brain.

There was more to follow. They also showed that nerves could be mimicked using electric circuits after having them wired up in a certain manner. This opened up the prospect of creating artificial brains that could ‘reason’ and, yes, ‘think’.

So far, so good. The theoretical part was all very well, but the proof of the pudding was still to be had. A few nerves had, indeed, been wired up, but the human brain — even when encased in a head that prefers not to make use of it — contains billions of nerve cells. It would have taken a few centuries to do all the relevant permutations, if at all.

McCulloh and Pitts continued to experiment with the zeal and patience that are the hallmarks of scientists and soon came up with the discovery that the relatively simple ‘neural networks’ could be trained to do tricky tasks. Neural Computing based on these networks has led, through various ups and downs, to developments in Japan where they developed a way to read patterns of electric currents on a person’s scalp as well as changes in cerebral blood flow when a person thinks about four simple movements — moving the right hand, moving the left hand, running and eating. The manufacturers succeeded in analysing these four thought patterns, and then relaying them as wireless commands for Asimo, the human-shaped robot.

The philosophers have not been sitting on the fence in the meantime. They have been raising questions all along about the possible consequences of these advancements. We — the Muslims and Pakistanis — have nothing to do with any part of this debate as our universities continue to be governed by lopsided priorities and myopia. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, said Albert Einstein, is nothing but insanity. Does this apply to the manner in which Pakistan has (mis)managed its education system? You bet!

humair.ishtiaq@gmail.com