Congress reinvention
With reference to the Chinese whisper titled “Jumping to a conclusion?” (December 6), for the Congress regional satraps, the dynasty came in handy to end perennial infighting to willingly share mutual denial of the top chair. And the arrangement functioned till its president produced results. The tide turned with the loss of the tall Y S Rajasekhara Reddy of Andhra Pradesh and the weakening of the Congress had begun. It is the turn of Rahul Gandhi to redeem the lost shine of a premier national party that ruled the postIndependence decades and in the process prove his own mettle. In the current run of politics, much more than its president the party needs to reinvent itself.
The rapid rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) could give it the much needed fillip to re-consolidate. How quickly this gets done depends on how eager are the Congressmen to explore ways to sink their differences and be back to winning ways. Maybe Gandhi would yet prove to be the right choice. The strength of the Congress lies in its experience and good bench strength, a major weakness thus far of the BJP.
R Narayanan Navi Mumbai battlefield management system, our forces will be severely handicapped. The government must therefore review this as suggested by Ajai Shukla.
Shekhar Gupta’s brilliant article brought home the other point. We need to ask ourselves who benefits from the continual delays/cancellations/scams in the modernisation plans for our armed forces. The prime beneficiaries are China, Pakistan and the forces (internal and external) that benefit from a reduced capability of the Indian state. Nothing more needs to be said. The government must put in place a system to differentiate between a) punishment for corruption in a defence acquisition deal and b) the benefit of the equipment ordered. It is little short of ridiculous that no one goes to jail and excellent equipment is refused to the armed forces. Colonel A K Ram Singh (Retd) Indore (AI) systems are certainly not a “one-trick pony” as Bershidsky would have us believe! AI is a tool — admittedly still a “work in progress” and likely to remain so for a very long time as it is based on the concept of “constant learning” — that has the potential to go way ahead of “human capabilities”. Even though one would wish for “machines” never to become our masters, I’m afraid AI might well make that scenario a reality.
Elon Musk — while publicly expressing his fears of AI — wasn’t imagining things. He sees a real danger when machines become smarter than those creating them. AI works on the principle of “seeing, sifting, analysing and learning from big data” which machines can indeed perform much faster than the human brain. Already robots are learning to “understand emotions of the elderly whom they are meant to assist” and responding to these. A machine can certainly see/read millions of pictures/pieces of information in a fraction of a second (which is not humanly possible) and pick from the same the most appropriate one for responding to the question raised by a human being.
John Searle’s “Chinese Room” example, mentioned by the author himself, is a case in point. AI could — and probably would — transform our lives way more than just “one-trick ponies”.
Krishan Kalra Gurugram