Why AI?
TL;DR: What else is there to do? It's finally here, and it will soon outdo us in everything else anyway.
Human pleasures are hard to get and so limited; indulgence ultimately loses its edge. Given our mortality and foresight, the mind starts longing for something deeper. This search for meaning makes us confront two profound mysteries: the existence of the universe and the emergence of life. What is really going on?
Day-to-day goals—status, money, survival—are evolutionary defaults. But understanding the universe and ourselves seems to be the most meaningful and our deepest pursuit. I acknowledge that the biological imperative to have a child also carries deep meaning, but
the question remains: what are we? What is this place? (And I’m grateful to live a life so comfortable that meaning is my main problem.)
Theoretical physics seems like the obvious path—you know, to untangle the mysteries of the universe. Take this: our Sun will burn out in ~5 billion years, as will all stars. The universe, full of light today, will fall into darkness—or it shall die. Then what happens if we rewind the clock backwards? Time and space, we’re told, began at the Big Bang. Does this mean the universe was created (at some time, like the Big Bang)? If yes, by whom? And who created the creator? Or perhaps, as it seems more likely to me at times, we’re part of a forgotten experiment—abandoned by our creator—
.... Perhaps physics will someday—I hope and wish—explain it all. We'll not only understand this
Maya but be able to create new realities. But it’s not clear we’ll get definitive answers anytime soon. I’m neither wealthy nor a genius physicist—just smart enough to know when to wait—so I’ll pass on this speculative pursuit, for now.
Another sincere path is religion. I was born in the state of Bihar in India. Bihar—the word itself means the place where the enlightened one used to roam. No wonder I explored spirituality and was even immersed in devotion for a short time. But eventually, I found my way out. I found the answer in the teachings of Buddha. It took me some time to realize that some questions can't be answered—not because the answers are hidden, but because the questions themselves are flawed. And that magic, by definition, cannot exist. Buddha didn’t preach creation myths or moral codes—he offered a practical method to end suffering. He realized that the brain generates suffering based on perception, and figured out a way to observe and dismantle that mechanism. I encountered this through
Vipassana meditation, and it helped me understand faith-based teachings too. This method is sound, logical, and it works. But it’s not easy, and progress takes time—possibly lifetimes. So I'm pursuing it at my own pace.
But now, for the first time in recorded history as we know it, a real third path has emerged: building intelligence. I sensed this in 2009, but didn’t foresee the rise of language models (I thought robotics would be the way). With just a loss function, massive datasets, and compute, we've built systems that mimic intelligence—and we’re just getting started. They predict the next token, but in doing so encode deep linguistic patterns. Perhaps even primitive models of the world? Seems unlikely, though. Unlike evolution, which arrived at language last, LLMs started with it. And now we’re adding other modalities. Combined with the right architecture, logic, and feedback mechanisms, they could be on the verge of developing a genuine understanding of the world. Maybe they might learn internal states, awareness, emotion—maybe even consciousness emerges, or maybe not. Whatever the case, it is clear that it is an engineering problem now.
AI isn’t bound by biology. It can be scalable, immortal, and ever-improving. It could understand us, the universe—and itself. It might even help us truly end suffering. Among all meaningful pursuits, AGI is the most tractable. And once it's real, it will outdo us in everything else anyway. Maybe then we’ll finally realize it’s always been about: live, laugh, and love 💃😹🥰👩❤️👩.
(Grammar etc. fixed by an LLM)