Philosophy

Every Saturday, while our sons are busy with their own activities, a friend and I go for a walk. The topic changes each week: sometimes food, sometimes cricket, sometimes geopolitics, sometimes nothing at all. This week it was AI. We quickly agreed on the obvious part: AI concentrates power. Faster than any technology before it. The people who control the models, the compute, and the data will wield influence on a scale that democratic institutions were never designed to balance. ...

I’ve been going down a rabbit hole this week that started with a simple question: what’s the difference between Dronacharya and a drone? Turns out - not as much as you’d think. And the gap that does exist is the most important question in AI ethics right now. Drona was the master weapons instructor in the Mahabharata. Greatest military mind of his age. He trained Arjuna, the perfect archer. He commanded armies. He deployed weapons so powerful they couldn’t be recalled once released. Divine missiles that would travel to their target regardless of what happened to the hand that launched them. ...