26/11 : Then and Now

I remember this same time a year back. 26/11 happened. We were all angry. Hell, a procrastinator like me even wrote a blog post about it :)
One year has passed.
And where are we right now vis-à-vis 2008?

I think this poem by Rakesh Jhunjhunwala captures the present state of limbo perfectly :

One year ago Hafiz Saeed was free,
One year later Hafiz Saeed is still free.

One year ago RR Patil was the Home Minister of Maharashtra,
One year later RR Patil is still the Home Minister of Maharashtra.

One year ago the News Channels were playing clips from the ...26/11 attacks,
One year later the News Channels are still playing clips from the 26/11 attacks.

One year ago Kasab was alive,
One year later Kasab is still alive.

Congratulations everybody!
We simply changed the date and time,
From 26/11/2008 to 26/11/2009!

Sad but painfully true.

Pirate Bay is dead, long live Pirate Bay!

I want to talk a little about a friend of mine. For privacy reasons let us just call him 'Anon'. Now Anon recently stumbled on some news that left him shocked and confused. Yeah, it's about the Pirate Bay [TPB] being sold for a paltry 7 million dollars to some unheard of gaming company. Well I guess it's not very hard to figure out why he was getting so worked up about if you take into account the fact that he is a student with little money to spare on DVDs and mp3 downloads. Yes, he is a stinking pirate (Arrr!).

To him Pirate Bay represented everything that was good about the internets (that's what he calls the Internet). His believes in freedom : from censorship, from outdated copyright laws and from snooping big brothers. He rejoiced when some weeks back "Anonymous" and TPB joined hands to support Iranian protesters. He laughed himself to tears reading TPB's irreverent one finger salute replies to the MPAA, RIAA and other trolls. But the party is over. And it was good while it lasted. He downloaded tons of hard to get mp3s, anime and obscure movies. He told me "I can't afford to buy all those records and dvds for these now, but I am going to do good on that one day [when I get a job]. I will be the first to go to their concerts and buy their merchandise". But the thick headed hill billies at the MPAA, IFPI etc never got this fact into their heads : that piracy is not the enemy. It is incompetence and indifference. If you are a 2 bit start like Madonna or Ashley Simpson you can be sure that you will never make much money from the pirate crowd. But if you are one of those really talented low profile artists who would never have gotten much publicity in the regular pop trash music charts , the pirates are the best friends they would ever get. Anon was happy that he part of the pirate crowd thinking he was part of a revolution in the way we deal with copyrights, closed and proprietary stuff. That is why the almost treacherous actions of brokep and others at TPB angered Anon. He said it felt like losing one of those many instruments in an aircraft, without which it would be very hard to get around. But he was cautiously optimistic. He told me how the everyone felt the same when Napster was taken down in 2001. But things got only better since then. Yeah, Bittorrent happened. The old has to die for the young to take their rightful place. Anon wondered whether this sounds the death knell for Bittorrent [most bittorrent files are tracked by TPB]. Maybe something better will take it's place.

Of course things have a way of working out in this weird wired world of ours. Within days, most of the Piratebay torrents were ported to openbittorent, Global Gaming Factory is being investigated by swedish authorities under suspicion of insider trading and it's CEO got his vehicles repossessed. Oh and what about Anon? Aye, I be doing mighty fine here! Arrr!! :)

MJ : In Memoriam

I wouldn't go far as to call Michael Jackson my favorite artist of all time, but he was not very far behind. Only you had to forget the last few albums of his. And so I was very sad when I came to know of MJ's passing away in LA a few hours back.
Most people these days remember him for all the nose jokes, his media antics, a child star who never really grew up, accused of child abuse and laughed at for his appearance. But for me, I will always remember MJ at his prime, the man he was in the 80's, with those slick moves and that superb voice of his. His manic energy filled "Just beat it" is one of my all time favorite songs [thanks to Van Halen's prodigious talent as well ] and his "Liberian Girl" is one of the most romantic that I have ever heard. And I shouldn't even start talking about "Thriller" which sold a still unbroken record of 100million copies. So here is my toast to MJ, for living an interesting life!! I hope he finally found his way to neverland in the end. I am going to listen some of his songs as we witness an era die before us. We will miss you MJ!

The Coming Technological Singularity

This article was originally written for my college magazine.

The age of humanity as we know it is coming to an end.
We all remember the scary monotone voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the Terminator series. And how does one forget the menacing “agents” from the Matrix? These are fictional artificial beings with superhuman abilities coming from a world where humans have been replaced by machines as the dominant race. This happens shortly after a technological singularity. While the possibility of machines dominating our planet one day is an entertaining notion for us, and an especially profitable one for filmmakers, it has over the years evolved into a very serious academic research area. The advances brought out on the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and nanotechnology bring the possibility of a technological singularity ever closer. And it might be sooner than you think. The creation of the first true artificial intelligence, which analysts put some time after 2040, will supposedly usher in an unprecedented age in human history. And this point in time will be known as "the singularity" or as critics derisively call it - "the rapture of the nerds".


One of the defining principles of the coming singularity is the law of accelerating returns, which states that technological progress happens not in a linear fashion, but in an exponential manner. Consider this thought experiment: Suppose you get two apples today and four apples tomorrow, then how many do you expect to get the day after? Six? Right, as long as you prefer thinking linearly. But there is another option: eight. How? Instead of adding two to the previous number, try multiplying two to it. Then you will get eight instead of six as the third number in the series. What you get here is an exponential series of the form 2^x which will give you a billion digit number within a few iterations! You can try this on your friends and get the “linear” response 90% of the time. So what does this show? The human mind is conditioned out of everyday experience to assume that all growth patterns are linear while in fact many like those seen in the technology industry are in fact exponential. Take for example Moore’s law, coined in 1965 which states that integrated circuits will double in performance every 18 months. This single accelerating principle, which still holds to this day, is the reason behind the proliferation of the Internet and mobile phones. Almost everything you can imagine in this world has been affected by this law. Similar patterns are seen in the Biotech industry with ever faster and cheaper sequencing of DNA and in the Nanotech industry with its super-small machines that are approaching the size of a molecule. The day when smarter than human intelligence is invented, may come sooner than you think as intelligence at its base is nothing but computation.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to the effects that the singularity will have on the human race. The negative singularity school with proponents like Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems believes that such an event would be catastrophic to humanity with the machines eventually dominating us with their superior mental ability just as much as we dominate chimpanzees and monkeys today. After all, would you listen to your dog or cat to decide what is best for you? The positive singularity school however is more optimistic. Its proponents like the inventor, Ray Kurzweil [pic above right] envision the emergence of AI that is truly beneficial to humanity. They hope for a world where human misery and suffering will be ended by the rapid technological and scientific advancement brought by super smart machines. They also advocate the gradual merging of humans and machines to ensure that humans after the singularity still stay relevant, albeit in a way that we simply cannot imagine right now.

Singularity used to be a fringe science and technology area had been entirely under the domain of science fiction writers until the past decade. Then the concept began to get closer academic scrutiny and today it is a legitimate field of research on its own. The Singularity University was started inside the NASA Ames research center last month by Kurzweil with help from Larry Page of Google, NASA and several Nobel Prize winners. Here graduate students and executives learn everything from nanotechnology, genetics to artificial intelligence, to prepare for a world that will see unprecedented economic growth just as the ushering in of the industrial age saw the total economic output of the world double every 15 years (60 times as fast as the previous agricultural era). The momentum has also built up over the last couple of years for the development of safe and beneficial artificial intelligence.
The age of the machines has dawned.