The biggest challenge of AI is freeing and nourishing natural intelligence

Israel has bombed 365 sq km of Gaza into death, devastation and rubble. It is reasonable to think, on seeing such destruction, of 'a heap of broken images, where the sun beats,/ And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,/ And the dry stone no sound of water.' Donald Trump, however, saw the possibility of building a Riviera of West Asia.

It was characteristic that he saw real estate possibilities rather than the reconstruction of Gazan life to the extent possible. However, Trump is superior to those who see only destruction and terrifying loss caused by AI. AI will probably not just enhance the productivity of existing jobs but also make several jobs redundant, such as simple coding and spotting and fixing bugs in legacy software.

When AI gets a physical body to inhabit - that is, when robots become intelligent - many manual jobs could also disappear. Polishing diamonds, cutting fabric, stitching garments and shelling cashew nuts could all be automated.


How would we be able to survive and find jobs for those displaced from their traditional occupations? Should we tax the companies that deploy AI/robots at additional rates to compensate for the loss of personal income-tax from employees who have been displaced, and distribute the proceeds to the displaced? Or should we prepare for Gen Z uprisings every now and then as the loss of jobs and incomes spreads discontent?

We do have one shield against such a fallout from the rise of AI: NI, or Natural Intelligence (the term 'organic intelligence' is often conflated with 'organoid intelligence', which derives from computing done by brain cells developed in a Petri dish).

It is NI that came to humanity's rescue when previous waves of paradigm- shifting technology emerged: when the steam engine displaced animal power, when electricity replaced steam power, when the printing press made scribes redundant, and when computer-driven word processors stripped stenographers of function.

The human brain and its capacity for creativity, innovation and imagination will come up with new things to do with AI, and new ways to spend the time freed up by AI agents.

• AI has created AlphaFold, the family of programs currently in its third iteration, which can predict the shapes of proteins, including, with AlphaFold 3, how proteins interact with DNA and RNA, making drug discovery easier. Discovering new drugs would be a new line of activity opened by AI.
• Coffee connoisseurs pay fancy prices for coffee beans that have been eaten, digested and excreted by different creatures: the palm civet in Indonesia, the elephant in Thailand, and the Jacu bird in Brazil (up to $2,000 per kg). What if AI could innovate chemistry that performs in the factory the function these diverse digestive juices perform on the coffee bean inside the intestine? Coffee earnings would go up.
• Heroin and cocaine might be stripped of addictive properties, and an LSD high rendered no more harmful than the suspension of belief entailed in watching a superhero movie.
• AI might enable the infinitesimal recalibrations of the magnetic field required to contain the raging plasma in which hydrogen atoms fuse to produce helium and massive energy. Limitless, cheap energy might enable re-greening Thar Desert and growing saffron on tailor-made soil at tailor-made temperatures in tailor-made weather.
• Climate change might be reversed by removing CO₂ from the air and converting captured CO₂ into gritty particles of carbon that would put an end to sand mining from riverbeds, apart from its conversion into that allotrope of carbon which, when synthesised on a large enough scale, would put De Beers out of business.

AI could open new avenues in entertainment, allowing audiences to become active participants in what they see.

All this, of course, is conjecture, at least for now. The point is that many things the White Queen believed before breakfast could turn into practical options through the advance of tech with the help of AI deployed in different streams of knowledge.

AI has to be deployed; it will not deploy itself - not unless the dystopia of artificial superintelligence materialises. NI is the agent that will deploy AI in this area or that task, to this end or another.

The biggest challenge of AI is the cultivation of NI. Schooling, as practised in India, smothers NI. A culture that holds all knowledge to be finite and pre-existing, as contained in the Vedas, kills critical thinking. Changing that culture without uprooting the civilisational ethos that defines the subcontinent beyond geography - that is, rejecting what is toxic in the tradition and embracing what is wholesome - is a major challenge not just of democracy but of freeing and nourishing NI.

Teaching the mind to be free, and to roam outside narrow domestic walls without getting bogged down in the dreary desert sand of dead habit, on a population-wide scale, so that every man, woman and child can be a master of AI rather than its victim - that is the challenge presented by AI.