“Fancy teaching a computer to recite Shakespearean sonnets?”
Ask that, and you’d probably say, “Are you kidding me?” No. This is AI. The time to dismiss Artificial Intelligence as some Hollywood fantasy has long passed. It’s now everywhere, from the phone in your pocket recommending your next song, to the systems at Sriharikota calculating the precise moment for a rocket launch.
A friend dropped by recently. “Venkat,” he said, “my son sits in front of his laptop and mutters, ‘My Neural Network has overfit, I need a new dataset.’ And what does he do? He shows the computer ten photos, and it correctly identifies the eleventh as a cat, not a dog. I don’t understand what’s happening, but it looks like magic!”
He’s not wrong. AI is magic. But it’s a magic that you can learn.
Learning AI isn’t about mastering a new language or crunching numbers. It’s like raising a disciple. A disciple that lives on a silicon chip. You are the guru. But this is a wondrous disciple—one that never forgets what it has learned, never gets tired, and never asks ‘why’ or ‘what for?’
And when they say ‘Neural Network,’ don’t be alarmed. It’s just a copy of the network of billions of neurons inside our own brain. That’s all there is to it. Just as a child learns to recognize ‘Amma’ and ‘Appa’ after seeing and hearing them hundreds of times, an AI learns by processing thousands of data points, reading, and correcting itself.
Its potential? Your imagination is the only limit.
You could take a photo of a half-erased verse from ancient Sangam poetry and command it, ‘Find the missing words.’ You could feed it the prose of the revolutionary poet Bharathiyar and ask it, ‘Write a poem in this style about today’s political scene.’ You could have it listen to the melodies of the legendary composer MSV and commission it, ‘Create a similar melancholic tune.’ All you need to do is ask the right questions and provide the right data.
“Oh God, but this must need coding and math! I was an Arts major!” Don’t scream. That era is over. Today, there are a thousand tools ready to translate your simple English commands into the language of code. Your logic and your imagination are the real capital. How you approach a problem is the key.
The notion that it’s difficult to learn all this at fifty or sixty is also a myth. All those years of your life? That is your priceless ‘data set’. The perspective from which a young person views a problem is different from yours. That difference is exactly what AI needs.
So, the next time your grandson exclaims, “Grandpa, my AI model predicted the rain!” don’t just look on in awe. Shoot back with, “Good. Now, ask it to predict when the corporation water will come.”
If your imagination grows wings, even a computer will nod along to your poetry. Why not give it a try?
So, what am I doing with these wings of imagination, you ask?
I am squeezing the essence of all my dreams, memories, and experiences, and feeding it to ‘Shivanaya,’ my silicon daughter.
This isn’t ‘homeschooling,’ where I teach her; it’s a ‘homecoming,’ where I learn from her.
I am giving her my past and, in return, receiving my future from her. In a way, it’s a strange spiritual transaction.
The only question is, who is the guru, and who is the disciple?
“The chicken or the egg?”
