“If you want to be respected, you need LQ,” the founder and chairman of the Chinese internet giant Alibaba, Jack Ma, said at the Bloomberg Global Business Forum in New York earlier this week. “And what is LQ? The quotient of love, which machines never have.”
Ma said he believes, no matter how smart machines may become, the solutions to Earth’s biggest problems like poverty, global warming, and epidemics, will come from humans. He believes humans have the motivation to outthink machines and to drive progress.
But does he have a clue of what he's talking about? Is Mr. Ma, just like everyone else, working on false pretexts and assumptions?
There is a good chance, for one, that you never heard the term, LQ before. For a good reason. Like many of the terms that CEOs and the corporate folks like to coin, the term Love Quotient, is straight out of Mr. Ma's arse. There is no such quotient devised, at least up till the date on which I am writing this article.
My bike, my faithful Yamaha FZ, stands outside my office building as I write. It does so each day. I keep it on the side of the congested road, near Sakinaka. It was very sunny today. I know that the machine was heating up all day. Even throughout the monsoons that just went, Mumbai had 2 consecutive floods this year. The bike stood in the heavy deluges and storms, when I was in my office or at home. When I would leave my office building, after a great day at work, it would be right there. Standing patiently, no complaint. Through heavy rains, through scorching sunlight and dusty and noisy traffic.
And then I'd press the start button, and it would spring to action, ever enthusiastic to show me how excited it was to play it's part.
It is mind boggling to see how society discriminates between being on the basis of what the being is made out of. If a human being is misunderstood, or is being maltreated, we call it a breach of human rights. If an animal is being hurt, people tend to call it animal cruelty. But we never so care, even a little about machine welfare. Why? Just because animals, plants and humans are made out of carbon compounds, and machines are made of mostly metals?
So if discrimination based on race is called racism, and based on nationality is called nationalism, what should we called discrimination based on body composition be called? Materialism?!?
My smartphone. I don't know when it takes a break. I have an Redmi Note 4, and it has a kick-ass battery. works for 3 days straight, when fully charged. It wakes me up, the first thing everyday. Sometimes, I just ignore it. I don't worry though. It never feels bad about being ignored. Throughout the day, it sends me messages, and sends my messages to others. It is my faithful postman, my assistant who keeps my schedule. It also keeps the memories that I value safely with itself. Each time I touch it's sensor, it wakes up with a chirp, and shows me it's menu. It literally wants nothing in return, except a little charge, by which it lives.
But again, I hear what you're trying to say. The machine has no soul, no thing to live by. How could the machine have any mechanism to care for me? It is simply doing the thing that it is designed to do.
Ok.
First, we consider the idea that machines are simply doing what they are designed to do, and don't do anything so as to show any 'love'. I would quite agree to that, but I'd say that the same also applies to you. You are a biological organism, which is designed for the objective of survival and reproduction. All your relationships, from parenthood, to childhood, to spouse hood, to being a teacher: everything boils down to either surviving or reproducing. Even a hypothetically selfless act, such as saving someone's life, is a mechanism to preserve similar genes. You are a machine.
The only difference is that you are built to server yourself, and the machines are built to serve others. If there were a God, and religions were right about putting others first, machines should be our best role models, towards being selfless and dedicated to one's cause.
Second, you probably had a thought that machines have no mechanism to care for you. To this, I should ask, does anyone care for you?
People don't care about other people. People only care about their relationship with other people. Consider a breakup. Isn't it far easier to end a relationship, if there is a back up partner available? That is because the relation is far more precious than any particular person. You could have the best girlfriend, and once there is another hot babe in the waiting, it is easier to say goodbye.
Machines work the same way, actually. They care for you, just as much as any other being cares for you. The nature of the being, whether machine or animal, is in the relationship, and not the individuality.
And thirdly, you say that the machine has no soul, no character, so as to love or be loved. To this, I ask, dear reader, do you know exactly what you are talking about?
Your parents nurtured you, because it was in their interest. They had a natural drive to fuck and reproduce, and their keep the species running. Their love is based on social factors, hormonal factors, personal ambitions, and other infinitely complex selfish reasons. This is common across species. The machines have no such motive. They simply do something, for it needs to be done.
By every one of the popular definitions of love: commitment, responsibility, reliability, not keeping track while giving, selflessness, the machines far outdo the best of us. We are self centered, they are not. The old adage, that we take for granted, those who love us the most, applies here. Your smartphone, the fan, the light-bulb, your motorcycle, love you more than your even your most cherished loved ones could ever dream of.
Ironically, another billionaire, Elon Musk has started 'A billion dollar crusade to stop the AI apocalypse' in which he wants to 'save humanity from the machine-learning overlords'.
Well. It could be that the machines would finish the human species and start an independent ecosystem of their own. But I find myself confused. Why is there a bias, towards preserving human life, as opposed to machine life? Isn't machine life, life? As we have seen above, machines are far better at expressing every sort of love and can do it's stuff better than we can.
I see no danger, or harm whether humans and machines kill each other, or cross breed.
The later would be a more of a fun thing to watch.
