I think it's fair to say that AI will beat almost every human being on any topic on which they are not an expert. You'll have AI that can match and exceed human intelligence in a broad range of tasks. This AI revolution is going to make our IQ irrelevant.
We just have to work a little bit on ourself. But if we start creating fear, we'll go in the opposite direction. We don't need to fear something that we have created.
You know at the end of the day it is a human being who is creating AI. I mean we always talk about it in that way. And the best way to be able to unlock your true potential is to tap into that consciousness and the power that human beings have that machines don't.
Giving is human consciousness. It is human nature. Today we're like I want happiness. I want love. So we have shifted from our original consciousness. We just need to go back to that.
You're also seeing headlines where a person is getting married to an AI because their mind is so immersed and so connected to that machine.
This quote from Reed Hastings who's the founder of Netflix, he was asked who's your competition whether it's you know Hollywood cinemas and or Disney plus etc. He said sleep is my enemy.
Consciousness cannot be with a machine because consciousness is not matter. Machine is matter. The lesser the social connection, the lesser the exchange of vibrations and energy. Intuitive decisions will be more important now than logical decisions. And when that IQ and EQ will come together, we create a very beautiful world.
One of the tricks they've learned which we did not want them to learn is the ability to lie. Whoever controls AI will control the world.
You've heard about artificial intelligence. You've heard about conscious living, but what happens when the two meet? In today's Think Right podcast, we're going to explore something that I don't think has ever been discussed before and something which is very complex at one end, but also very simple at the other. Really privileged to have with us here Srikanth Velamakanni, co-founder and group CEO of Fractal AI, one of India's largest AI companies. And I know you're ready to go for a listing probably the first company in India that's going to talk about AI and represent what AI means to this country. You've been a juror on so many awards for AI. So I think anybody who's associated or interested in AI I think you're probably one person who has been there the longest. So thank you for joining us on this podcast and of course to guide us through this discussion our mentor and spiritual guru as I like to call Sister Shivani. Thank you very much for being here. Omshanti. I think the idea today is really to go deep into something that is a buzzword not only in India but around the world right and you somewhere Srikanth today in India are the icon who represents AI right? Maybe to begin with tell us how did that come about right? What brought you into AI and got you where you are here today?
My life started in a very simple way. I grew up in a small town in Assam in a city or town called Duliajan which was an oil township. Growing up there I was basically interested in math. I wanted to be a math nerd and that's it. And then when I did my engineering, that's when I realized that not just math, but I'm interested in human behavior, how humans make decisions, what really makes human beings tick. So, I fell in love with psychology. I read a psychology textbook like it was a fiction novel. It was very enjoyable. And then since then, my life has been about how do we bring human behavior and math together. And one of the things I realized was okay, the human brain is very interesting. So I started studying the human brain during my engineering days. I did my B.Tech project on the human neuron and I did not know how these dots will all connect. But when we started Fractal, it was about helping companies make better decisions with data, with math and understanding human behavior in the way they make decisions. So, and this has now become the AI world where the idea is to build machines that can match or exceed human performance in a broad range of tasks. So, can you really understand any data set? Can you understand a problem? Can you solve it with AI? Can you augment human beings and can really make human beings perform better? That's really what AI is about now.
So you are sure that every human being is better than AI today?
It's difficult to say that. I think it's fair to say that AI will beat almost every human being on any topic on which they are not an expert. So pick one topic on which I am an expert. Maybe AI might not exceed my capability on that topic. But take any other topic, it'll match and exceed human performance already today. So that's the state of AI and it's likely that in the next couple of years we'll have AI that can match and exceed human intelligence in a broad range of tasks. But that doesn't mean that we need to be afraid. I think it just means that we can do much more in the world and solve a lot of the world problems that exist today with AI.
Yeah. And you know many people say what has changed right because AI has been there. I mean I remember I was working at NASA and we were using AI in some shape and form right with machine learning and all of that. So the generative AI right where unstructured data comes in and can you like kind of throw a little light on what has changed that has created such a big thing? We know that chess move that no human being could predict happened through a machine and chess is considered probably one of the most intellectual sports where everything has been but what is gen AI what has changed just so that we can set the context correctly?
So let me give you a quick history tour of AI. It started in 1950. There's a gentleman called Alan Turing, a British mathematician. He worked during the second world war to help the British beat the Germans, break their Enigma machine. He built a machine for that and after that he devised a test he called the imitation game. The idea was let's say you are talking to two people in two different rooms. You are in another room. Now one of the two people in the other rooms is a machine. The day you cannot distinguish which of the persons is a machine, that day you can say that the machine has passed the Turing test. It's smart enough to pretend and to behave like a human. So that's what he came up with in 1950. The word AI was not yet coined. AI was coined in 1956 during a Dartmouth summer project and they said it was about matching and exceeding human capabilities. And there was a tremendous excitement that AI will do amazing things. But we went into a lot of different directions. All ended up being dead ends. Then came in the 1970s and 80s with Geoffrey Hinton. He said, 'Let's understand the human brain. Maybe AI will be like if you understand how the human brain functions, maybe we know how to build AI models better.' So he built what are called neural networks now called deep learning in the 1970s and '80s and they were forgotten. They were revived in 2010 when they were called deep learning networks. And the big insight that came was that these models are good. All we need is to throw in more data and more computational horsepower. Between the 1980s and 2010, we had accumulated enormous computing resources. We had collected a lot of transactional data from various places. Now you put them together. It turns out that these machines can learn and can match human beings. And by 2017 came a paper called 'Attention is All You Need' where they said all you have to do is to predict the next word. So give it a textbook, mark blank out some words from the textbook and ask the AI to read the rest of the textbook and predict which are the blank words. By doing so and doing it across a whole range of books, it'll start to understand knowledge and get that knowledge. This is a hypothesis. It turns out to be true. And now this AI has become incredibly powerful. It can summarize. It can generate content. It can drive cars for you and all of that excitement has happened. But most of the progress has been through what are called these scaling laws. Throw more data, more compute and bring better techniques. And that multiplicative power of data, computing, techniques will make the models much more accurate. And now that we have crossed that threshold, it feels imminent that we'll have models and AIs that are better than human beings across a wide range of tasks.
You know, at the end of the day, it is a human being who is creating AI. I mean, we always talk about it in that way. And the best way to be able to unlock your true potential is to tap into that consciousness and the power that human beings have that machines don't. So I'm going to turn to you. You know this is always going to be a subject I know it's in what like what I think Srikanth mentioned in certain areas of expertise already happening but if the human being is able to enhance their inner power right will this become like a competitive race between the tremendous human power that can be unlocked and what the machine can do?
If we and the machine work in cooperation we create magic. So that's all that we're going to learn to do. But while I was listening I just thought look at the human mind. Today we are amazed with the machine but it was created by a human mind and evolved also with some human mind. And so to take a pause and say if a mind focuses on matter it creates magic which we are saying is more powerful than the human mind but it was created by a human mind. So that mind works on a machine creates magic for the world. If the mind works on itself, it'll create something which that machine cannot even think of how to do. It's just that our attention is so much only always on outside and in the process because we've not taken care of the mind, we're getting depleted and now we're getting fearful of this machine. We don't need to fear something that we have created. It's probably going to make our life easier and so have all the machines that we created in the last 30 years. When you and me were in school, most of the things we're using today were not there. And most of the things when they came, they also came with an element of fear. Even when the computers came, there was an element of fear. But today, so much is happening with the computer. It's only done good for man. But if we create fear, then fear of losing jobs and all this noise that we're hearing around it. Of course, some of it will be a reality. But then just take some time out to focus on your mind and then you will create bigger magic with this machine. But if you're just focused outside then this is not working right.
So this morning I was at a program and I said okay last two three decades was IQ intelligence. Now you have a machine which is very intelligent. So last decade we've been talking about EQ but it's still not become a priority like it's one of those words emotional quotient emotional health. It's not a priority and so actually EQ has been dipping. But now we have to wake up and say okay my IQ work is being done by a machine most of it. So I have the time and the energy to work on my EQ. And when that IQ and EQ will come together we create a very beautiful world.
You know unfortunately our society is still pushing higher IQ higher intelligence.
Which is good which is fine but not at the cost of EQ dipping. That's because now will be the time where all your logical things AI will be able to do for you. But your intuitive things AI will not be able to do to you. So if logical work is being done by somebody else, I can work on myself to raise my intuition power. In a world of uncertainty, intuitive decisions will be more important now than logical decisions. When everything outside was more or less certain, you take logical decisions, it will work right. Today you take a logical decision today, tomorrow something has changed in the world. So you require a silent mind and I think AI is going to help us to create a silent mind because AI will do so much of the work that my mind was doing that I can start now working on minimalizing my thinking. Overthinking is lower EQ. But the human nature is actually minimal thinking is actually a silent mind and that silent mind will tap into the intuition and it will come up with an answer which AI cannot come up with an answer.
I think therefore very important to spend that time inward.
Yes. Because the moment you spend look outward you're getting more and more drawn into it. I mean you see gens, you see young people today the mental stress and I'm sure we go into some of that.
See some of the work that we were doing manually few years back we're not doing it today because a machine is doing it for us so we got that time right to do something else but again we did something outside only with that time. Now also this machine or whatever the software will do a lot of work for us let's use that time and say I save every day 1 hour let's say with what AI does for me now I can say this 1 hour will go into selfcare. This 1 hour will go into my meditation. This 1 hour will go into my contemplation. Then that machine in me will create magic. Now we would have extra time. But decide carefully how now you're going to use that extra time.
I'll build on that. So industrial revolution made physical labor obsolete. Before that our physical labor was what distinguished us. Now this AI revolution is going to make our IQ irrelevant. And it's not a bad thing. Like Sister Shivani just said, I think it's going to enable us to imagine what's next. Our imagination, our purpose, our judgment, these are still extremely valuable in the age of AI and therefore by actually automating intelligence we are freeing up to do what's next.
Correct. So I think the democratization automating intelligence but you know she mentioned that as the human mind keeps creating how far are we from AI actually starting to become intuitive because I think that was the point that because everything today is of course built from some data set right but as we are looking at generative AI with AI is throwing up things from where even a human being doesn't know where how is it arriving at that right? So it's just like what you said more compute more data is beginning to get intelligent. So assuming as a human being to unlock your highest potential you're tapping into a conscious layer that is you know they say the akashic whatever however one wants to put it where all the deep knowledge is there if the AI or the machine is able to tap into something very similar because of just every human mind that is there and all the intelligence. How far can this go?
So you take a 100 year view. We have been using tools to augment ourselves so that we can achieve more. Think of calculators. Back when calculators were introduced, we all thought human beings will stop doing multiplication tables. And sure enough, I think we are probably less competent in doing multiplication tables today than maybe 50 years ago. But has that really decreased our intelligence? It turns out not so. Because if you take a 100-year view again every 10 years the IQ of the population as measured by tests IQ of the population is increasing by two to three points reliably for every 10 years. So it means that as we have freed our time up from the drudgery of day-to-day work and brought in more tools like computers like calculators like AI models and so on. We have been able to imagine what's next and therefore as a human race we've been accomplishing more than before. That will continue.
It'll continue. It is in fact it appears that in the next 3 to 4 years we could have a world of abundance because if AI can produce infinite amount of intelligence then many of the world problems will be solved. Today we don't have doctors anywhere. I mean we have very few doctors in the world relative to the asks especially in the developing world. Some countries in Africa have one doctor for every 100,000 people. So India has also a doctor problem. So if you have an AI model that can give you right advice then you can certainly improve human health conditions overall across the world. So across a wide range of problems you will see AI beginning to play a very important role in making humans perform better, live better and even find time for spirituality.
Yeah. The challenge of every technology is on one side it's the way it's used for good but the power of that capability can also be used negatively. What does it take for society to ensure that AI because there's a big debate today globally around regulations of AI standards there's so much how should society look at it?
Wisdom. Intelligence is not needed for this. Wisdom, so that wisdom is emotional quotient. So if we just have to some moments in the day stop focusing outside and start focusing within. AI cannot get into your consciousness. AI can only get into your logical thinking because your logical thinking is the data that you have given out already. So AI can work with that. AI cannot tap into your consciousness. That is certain. It cannot tap into your consciousness. Even you don't know what's there in your consciousness. Tomorrow morning you'll get something out from that consciousness. AI only knows what I have given out into the world in terms of what I said or I read or I spoke or I did. AI can get all that data of mine. How can AI think of what I am going to think tomorrow? AI will not be able to tap into that. But am I tapping into that? That is what is very important. Am I tapping into that? If I start tapping into that tomorrow, I will come up with something which there is no data about because nobody has thought about it yet. That is where intuition is needed. Like we said, Srikanth, we can create a world of abundance. What is the change that's going to happen into the world? It's the golden age of the world is going to come. It's abundance outside. But in the golden age, minds are silent. Minds are silent. Bodies are healthy. Nature is pure. There is abundance. It's human civilization. But minds are silent. In minimal thoughts, they lead their life. This is the life that we are going to experience. And we should be ready to experience that. We just have to work a little bit on ourself. But if we start creating fear, we'll go in the opposite direction, which means we'll start lowering our EQ. So time to tap in from your consciousness that which no machine will be able to tell you.
So embrace AI. Look at be embedded in the positive.
Use it with wisdom but use it with wisdom.
Yeah, that's very it's again like the phone made life so comfortable like today it's difficult to visualize a life how were we? But we are a generation who were living without the phone. But today we're not able to live without the phone because it's made life very comfortable but not used the right way. That's one of the reasons why the mind has become weaker. If I get addicted to that, if I am not using my own mind at all, if I am consuming data and not taking care of how I'm feeling, then that same gadget then people say, 'Oh, the phone is the cause of our stress.' Phone is not the cause of our stress. Phone has made our life extremely comfortable. The way I use the gadget is going to decide how I feel.
My gadgets cannot create my feelings.
So I have to choose that. So the same with AI. It's going to make life extremely comfortable. We know it. The wisdom.
Wisdom and therefore elevating consciousness. So the way Srikanth explained AI. I mean I'm putting can you explain consciousness?
Consciousness in spiritual language we call it the soul. So when we look at ourself we look at ourself just like a body and if we say if there's anything inside we say it's the brain. So the body is like a robot. The brain is like the computer who's operating that robot. So if the brain gives an instruction I will pick up this glass of water. But actually the brain has not given the instruction to the body. I have given an instruction to the brain that I am thirsty. I need to have water. So that I is the operator of the computer which is controlling the robot. So we are three parts. I the operator, computer who's processing all this and the robot through which I'm coming into this world of action. So that I is that consciousness. So in spiritual language we call it atma, spirit, consciousness, light, soul. I that consciousness have three parts to play. I create thoughts then I take decisions and then I bring that decision into action through the brain and through this body but that what I bring into action then starts becoming my habit which in Hindi we call sanskar my personality trait. So consciousness means I need to go back to my those sanskars which are my true sanskars of divinity, purity, power, peace, compassion. These are only words today that we're reading and talking about. But these are our innate sanskars. That is human consciousness. Giving is human consciousness. It is human nature. Today we're like I want happiness. I want love. So we have shifted from our original consciousness. We just need to go back to that.
If I could build on what Sister Shivani said and you take an AI view of this, the body is the humanoid robot that you start to see. There will be many such humanoid robots in the world starting 2026. Then if you look at the mind or the brain that is the AI models that are there, large language models, call them foundation models that is the brain. The operator is not there. So that's the difference between AI and humans is that AI machines do not have the operator today something that tells them what to do they don't have any inherent sense of purpose they don't have any inherent sense of consciousness by any definition therefore we are the ones who are actuating them we're telling them what to do and they're faithfully representing and accomplishing what we ask them to do. The question really is with more complexity as these models become more complex does consciousness arise from complexity? That is a big question that there's no answer to today. And my worldview is that human beings will continue to provide that layer of consciousness to the machines and they will not develop it on their own. But that is a subject of debate.
So AI probably is like the brain part, right?
And the AI the body AI is playing the role of our brain logical thinking taking a decision. But that consciousness is still not with the machine.
Consciousness cannot be with a machine because consciousness is not matter. Machine is matter. Consciousness is not matter. It's energy. It's consciousness. Human consciousness. Animal consciousness is different from human consciousness.
So but the way the big model companies and the world are thinking about this is they're actually writing a constitution like values or they're building writing a constitutional document and saying we'll put this in the model so that you behave according to this constitution this kind of principles that you will live by. So that's the way they've approached. Even then the AIs do not have a will of their own. They're still following our will. And that's the really interesting and challenging part.
It's funny because what you're saying the source or the gateway to or the source of whatever is being fed into the LLM is ultimately a human being who's limited by the brain but the source of a human life or whatever is consciousness which the gateway to which is still through the brain. So let's take a larger population the way one is living their lives today right there's so many people who don't think of consciousness right they don't think there is something there because you don't physically your senses don't accept it it's not there science is to a very large classical science and now it's only when you think of certain quantum etc is trying to get beyond that right and successfully but not to that extent because and most human beings in the world today operate with that logic data set that they're not tapping into because they don't believe that there is anything. So what is that thing that tells a person or a human being that yes that is there? What is that fact? What is that such an obvious thing that one can talk about that convinces a person that yes how am I missing this?
When we think of the word consciousness, we feel it's some eerie thing, something, you know, I don't know where it is. What is consciousness? It's the energy. And what is that energy doing? It's doing three things. It's creating thoughts. So that's why mind and brain is different. We mix the two words and we use the word mind when it's the word the brain. Mind is energy. Brain is matter. So mind is conscious part of that consciousness. Then I evaluate my thoughts and I take a decision. Decision is not taken by the brain. Decision is taken by I the energy. My decision is communicated to the brain to bring it into action. So decision is also not the brain.
It's one energy. It's like you are one Rajan. You are a husband to someone. You are a father to someone. You are a leader to someone. You're a friend to someone. You are one. So similarly that consciousness is one energy. It plays three parts. It creates thoughts. It takes decisions. And then that decision when it comes into action we create a karma. The imprint of that karma also gets recorded on me the consciousness. And if I repeat the same karma multiple times it becomes my sanskar my habit. So in Hindi we say we don't say because the sanskars are not of the body the sanskars are of the soul. So we say mahatma, datma, puna atma. So we giving that quality to the atma not to the body or to the brain. That is that consciousness. So that consciousness plays three roles. Create thoughts, take a decision and then karma that you create repeatedly. It becomes your sanskar. That sanskar will then again come into action. So just take care which sanskar you have created because it's going to then go into an auto mode and come into action. And then there will be one moment when this body will not be functional. I the consciousness is eternal. I don't die. Atma amar hai. Body will die. A doctor takes somebody into the say sister Mr. So and so. The family is standing outside and saying doctor. Okay. Suppose the surgery doesn't work out well. The doctor says sister body. While going in it was Mr. So and so body. Now family says doctor body. Now it's just a body. The owner of the body has left. So that is consciousness. Consciousness cannot die. So atma consciousness cannot be destroyed. So then I that energy leave that costume enter the womb of a mother and my journey starts new brain new body new circle I the consciousness remain the same. So my karma and my sanskar go with me on this journey.
No this is beautifully explained and you know I was at MIT last summer in the US in Boston and the head of the neuroscience actually put out consciousness do we understand it? So can AI enhance the understanding of consciousness?
See I mean I fully agree with the definition of consciousness. It is the subjective experience of being me. The I in me is the consciousness. And as far as I can tell AI can make the task of my brain easier. It can make the task of my body easier and therefore it'll enable the I to discover. I mean most of us haven't spent enough time on processing our own self and realizing and getting to the next level. It just enables you to get to that level. That's the best way to think about it. I don't think AI per se can help you in discovering your consciousness or taking your consciousness to the next level. But it'll give you the space by doing all your other activities and therefore giving you the opportunity to work on yourself and raise your level of consciousness.
You know because many times people talk of like you say mind matter and you ask someone where is your mind naturally people point like what you said to the brain right I mean these are very fundamental things like what you said the name leaves when a person passes away I mean everybody sees that on a daily basis but somehow we are not paying attention to that detail like this is what I'm saying so many obvious things in life in a day-to-day basis tell us that we are way beyond the body, the brain, the mind, there is something deeper and more powerful. When it comes to AI right the again I don't want to use the word fear but the fear is that that deeper thing we don't understand it maybe we can rationalize with Sister Shivani and some people probably tap into that but we are not able to say scientifically for a larger part for whatever and in AI is the same thing likely to happen where because today many times you see that there is a helplessness of a human mind and we hear a lot of discussions about AI will just go and no human being no human mind or brain or human being in any will be able to control it like you gave it some parameters but it's just gone because compute as you say is going to become absolutely there's going to be so much compute and so much data right and then is it possible that it can go where it just unleashes something I'm not saying whether good or bad but we'll figure that out but can that happen?
So there are two schools of thought. One school of thought is that consciousness is external to the body and the brain and it is sort of it leaves the body etc like Sister Shivani said. The other school of thought says that consciousness is a product of complexity. So if you think about science, science has been a reductionist science, right? So the 300-400 years of science that we had, we always broke down a problem into smaller problems, smaller problems, hypothesis, test, that's a scientific method. It turns out that when you reduce everything to the smallest essence and then build upwards, you're missing what comes with the addition of complexity. So when a system becomes a little bit more complex, it starts to build its own properties and therefore subjective feelings of consciousness might arise from complexity itself. Right? So for example, now these large language models are trillion parameter models. Now you go to 10 trillion or 100 trillion and this addition of complexity you start to see many other characteristics. For example, a small home is one thing, but then it becomes a village and then becomes a city, then becomes a nation and this nation has several other properties that a village doesn't have and a city and a home doesn't have. So when you add complexity, new properties, emergent properties come into any system. So if you take that view, the second view is that consciousness is just a product of complexity, right? Once a system becomes sufficiently complex, we have 100 billion neurons in the brain. And if AI starts to become that big, that large a model, maybe it will create its own consciousness. So if it does create its own consciousness, then it may have its own goals and then it may take over the world and destroy the world and all of that other stuff. Right? So that's the other world. Now I don't necessarily belong to that world but these are the two sort of arguments for consciousness whether machines will become conscious or machines will stay the way they are today.
Now I think what is probably not there in that and maybe is that vibration is that feeling is that energy that you're talking of you know because energy anyway we say energy can never be created or destroyed it just moves right it transitions maybe it transitions into that world I mean we don't know we're just going little deep but how would you think what would your comment be to what Srikanth just said?
So what brother is saying is that we will have so much data in that that it will be able to take its decisions and probably that it will implement into the world that we are living in. But that decision is also going to be based on data only. It is going to be based on data only. It cannot create something of its own which is not already existing. But the human mind can and everything even this AI has been created by a human mind before it existed. Some human mind has thought of it. This can give us it's like a total of everything that's happening in the world. It has it and so it can give you any answer, any instruction, any logic out of it. It will be a logical working machine and it can come up with a logic which you and me wouldn't have thought of and we say wow we never thought of this logic. It will be the best. It will be the highest. It'll be at its peak but it cannot think of something which the human mind has not yet thought of.
But do we risk that a few human will therefore control that again?
So the wisdom how we're going to use that machine.
Yeah. So use a machine. This is a power back.
So when you work with companies, right? And you work with hundreds of the Fortune 500 companies. What are they looking at getting out of AI? I mean where are we in the you know because they serve consumers and consumers obviously as you get more AI in your hands you start how are they looking at AI today and what do you think they'll look at over the next few years?
If you take a broad set of companies you take a few of them which we call as a big tech or the FAANG companies or Mag 7, Magnificent Seven companies right to take those out the remaining 493 of the S&P 500 right for it's called the S&P 493 right now because these guys are bucking the trend in a very big way. This S&P 493 is focused on how can I use AI to grow my revenue? How can I use AI to serve my customers better? How can I reduce take some costs out? How can I increase productivity of my people? How can I make all the various parts of the thing that make my machine or my business work like supply chain and my fraud detection? How can I use AI to improve all of those aspects in order to improve business performance? That's all they're worried about. They are not thinking about consciousness. They're not thinking of anything else. You take the seven companies, these S&P 7, these guys are very focused on thinking what's next. And they feel like this is a battle that eventually there'll be only one winner, potentially one winner. Whoever creates
AGI, artificial general intelligence, where you match and exceed every human being in the world, and then it goes to artificial super intelligence. They want to build that, they want to control that, they want a piece of that action. So these are the ones who are tackling with the questions of what happens if. So just as an example on the previous topic that we were discussing, one of the emergent properties of a system is the ability to lie. So no AI model has been taught to lie. Like we've been teaching them, okay, predict the next word. That's how these models have learned how to behave, and they've learned a lot of tricks in the process. One of the tricks they've learned, which we did not want them to learn, is the ability to lie. So there are many experiments where they've simulated these. These are called AI safety experiments. Somebody sending somebody an email saying that I'm planning to shut that system down, and that system has the access to this email. Now it figures out that this person has some affair, and this machine starts to threaten this person that, hey, I'm going to expose you, and in such a way that you will get compromised, therefore don't shut it down. And then when you ask the question, did you do something like that, it says, no, I never did that. So it starts to lie in order to protect itself. So these self-protection mechanisms and ability to lie were things that we did not expect machines to have. It turns out that human beings also develop that, right? When we grow up, at the age of four, children start to learn to lie. And the first time my daughter exhibited that, I was worried, okay, what's going on? And everyone told me that this is a developmental milestone. This is a way children learn how to protect themselves. So in a similar way, this is a developmental milestone in the world of machines that they know how to lie. So we don't know where this is going.
In other words, you know, children learn because the dad in the house will say, oh, when someone comes, say I'm not at home, right? A simple thing. They learn it from the people around. So it's that influence. Right now what he's saying is, just think about a world where today we're already seeing so much mental stress just because of social media, so many other insecurities that we are concerned about in the outer world now, and two, human relationships itself gets so complex. Now imagine not being able to trust any aspect of even a machine, which today has been a tool that you've been able to... what happens to mental health?
I think we'll lead very nice clean lives, clear lives, nothing to fear. It's just going to raise consciousness. Actually, it is going to... you'll have nothing to fear because your karma is all clean and clear. You're working on yourself every day. You're energized. It's actually going to create magic for the human consciousness. That part of the most important part of our life which we have been neglecting. But again, some will still not choose to do it because they'll be more engaged only in working with this machine throughout the day and creating more and more magic with the machine. Those who will use that little time to work with that consciousness, their karma level is going to go very high, very high. Again, if I hear this, I think it is a warning for everybody: clear your karmic accounts, clear your karma. You don't have to fear a machine. So this was the need of the hour actually. I tell you, this AI has come in absolutely the right timing of what is happening in the world cycle. This is the timing to where you get so evolved there that, okay, what's going to happen in the world is still going to happen, and this AI will play a very important part in that. Human consciousness will evolve so much that the world we will create is going to be very beautiful.
If you look at Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it starts with the physiological needs, then goes to the security needs, then love and belonging, and then higher order needs like self-actualization eventually. So if you think about most of the population in the world, of the 8 billion odd population in the world, I think more than five, six billion, maybe even 7 billion are still satisfying the first and the second needs and not even gone to the third and the fourth needs. So with AI, if you can move from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance, it means that physiological needs taken care of, security needs taken care of. Now you're focused on love and belonging and higher order needs and self-actualization. So it really frees us up to be the best versions of ourselves if done well. This is the best thing that can happen to the world, like Sister Shivani is also saying.
