AI & the Street Urchin
Time seems to slow down in a random corner of this hot Indian city. Dust floats in the golden sunlight streaming down in front of me while cars fly by in the background.
People go about their important business.
In the same corner, but in a very different world, stands someone with no connection to time at all. This person’s life is compressed into a single moment and yet somehow also extends outward into infinity. Every day is the same as the next.
It is a child and he is very unimportant to the rest of the world.
There is a lot of hurt inside him but he doesn’t let it out. He knows that if he did it would overwhelm him and he may never be OK again. He has no religion. That concept is so far beyond any realm of understanding for him. And he’s right not to think about it. Survival is much more important right now.
He doesn’t remember his mother or father. He doesn’t remember what they look like, things they used to say to him, how they smelled or what they wore.
This child has dark skin with golden hair and honey colored eyes. A unique combination here. But he has no clothes or shoes on except for a pair of tattered and dirty orange shorts that don’t seem to fit the scene.
His smile is sweet. He has bright white teeth. Remember, he hides his pain so that outwardly he appears happy.
But his pain is like an invisible cloak around him that also has a mind of its own. It seems to fly out from him in every direction to wrap itself around anyone who ventures close. And so it grips me too.
That’s when I first notice him staring at the bucket.
It’s a square, tin looking, metal bucket. It’s sitting on a mound of hot, red sand. The bucket was probably useful once upon a time. But now it’s outside is covered completely with rust. The inside is a little bit better though. You can still see some clean-ish metal inside.
What looks like brackish rain water has collected in the bucket. Probably from the rain this morning. But also other rains.
Slowly the child walks up the mound of sand and to the bucket to investigate. As he does a stray dog notices him and also limps over.
They both stare at the bucket. The water inside is so tantalizing. The ambient heat is up into the 90s now. There are dried tears on the boys cheeks from some time before. The dog also cried earlier today.
They are both thirsty. It is a killer thirst.
The boy goes first. The dog is using him as a guinea pig. The boy cups his hands together, puts them in the bucket and gathers enough water to drink. That is enough of a signal for the dog and he too dives in, eager to slake his insane thirst.
That is when I interrupt the boy. I don’t even know what I said at first. But I stop him from drinking the dirty water. He looks at me like, ‘what now.’ Most of the water in his hands falls onto the sand creating little clumps. But he maintains the cupped hand position, looking at me, as he waits for me to speak.
‘Why don’t you have some of this,’ I say in a language the child doesn’t understand, gesturing with the cold water bottle I have from the hotel grasped in my hand.
He smiles a big, toothy smile and says ‘no, it’s okay’ in a language I don’t speak.
He’s being nice. This victim of a vicious world is being nice to a stranger. Of course, he doesn’t want or need to be nice. He’s a child. A lost boy. He wants to cry. He wants to put his arms around his papa. He wants to feel his moms lips kissing his cheeks. He wants to play with his sister again. He wants to sleep in a real bed. He wants to eat — his belly is so hungry! He wants to run without hurting his feet. He wants the day to actually end and another day to truly begin. Remember how I told you that he was living in one infinitely long nightmare?
I barely recover from these thoughts.
Then I tell him to again please drink from the water bottle. He starts to walk away from me and the savior-bucket unsure of things, and I feel like I’m ruining everything for him. So I double down and walk up to him and tap his shoulder and bring the bottle closer to his hands.
He happily takes it in his hands now. A sudden change of heart? No, he was just being nice the first time. Respectful.
The dog is looking up at him, curious as to the child’s next move. You thought I forgot the dog, but no, I remember him. The dog is there too, still. The 3 of us are almost a pack now.
The child drinks half of the cold water in one big gulp. Then he generously offers some to the dog. The blazing heat continues. These are two equally abused creatures.
Before we separate forever I give the child a $100 bill. This illiterate son of unknown parents seems to instinctively understand what it is. He smiles his biggest smile so far (I think this is 3 total smiles since I saw him pondering the rusty bucket.)
As I hand him the money I feel his small, dirty, rough hands. I’m happy that the rusty bucket was not needed to quench his thirst today. One only knows what vile horrors he could’ve ingested.
The child and the dog walk off in search of a shady alleyway. Like the end of some Clint Eastwood western — this unknown person shimmers in the sunlight & slowly fades away from me against the dusty and boiling heat of the earth as it rises up to envelop him.
By the way, the dog and the child are friends now, walking together, which is a minor win.
I kept thinking about the child and the dog the rest of the day. The image of him first staring at the bucket without any hope in his eyes kept coming up in my mind. He was my little brother in that sun-drenched moment when we exchanged a few words. He reminded me of Chaipao from Salaam Bombay. I cried a little later that day, which I haven’t done in a while. But what use is that, I thought.
That’s when it occurred to me that most of humanity might not want to necessarily end human suffering. Instead they probably merely want to feel like they are making a contribution. The key word is “feel” not “do.” I wonder why this might be the case, but I’m not a trained psychologist or sociologist so I can’t really make a strong case for any particular reason.
Yes, there are many who try to fix things. Haven’t you heard of all those philanthropic organizations and their billions? They have been and are currently doing some incredible work. The best ones have success metrics that are off the charts. It’s actually pretty incredible to behold.
And yet little Chaipao is still standing there with his exhausted body nearing collapse. No shoes or clothes. Merely existing in the blistering sun as it tries to cut him down. While he considers a sip of dirty water that could either kill him or save his life. And remember: the masses flow by him, all around.
I wonder if he’s alive right now. I am worried he got hit by a car or something. Then I tell myself that he can probably navigate those crazy city streets with rickshaws zipping around better than I can. ‘He’s a tough kid, he’ll be OK,’ I tell myself. He has his dog-friend now who will protect him.
Poor, sweet Chaipao, with his tear-stained cheeks and ill-fitting orange shorts.
Where the last 6,000 years of problem solving strategies have failed human civilization by keeping large parts of it miserably poor, hungry and lonely, I think technology is now poised to succeed.
You can already see the massive disruption to society taking place in the last 15 years.
In fact, I think going forward we will see the rise of The Technocrats.
There is already Elon Musk (whether you like him or not) and Sam Altman of ChatGPT, for example. In fact, we need a 100 good versions of Niander Wallace, so that one of them can make even more technological leaps to do away once and for all with the most fundamental pains of our society. Not every pain, but all the pains little Chaipao feels, certainly. The pains that hold the human race back. Those that prevent us from being a properly civilized species. The pains that reveal us to be terrible to so many of our fellow men, women and non-binaries.
Imagine a truly better future: unlimited clean water & food, unlimited clothing, unlimited housing & shelter. In Chaipao’s Hindi they call it “Roti, Kapra, Makan.” Food, clothing and shelter. A common but unrealized slogan for politicians to shout.
But the speed at which The Technocrats are innovating now these fundamental needs seem tantalizing close to being met — a matter of mere inches from the grasp of humanity.
And who knew that social media of all things (now reviled) would propel us to achieving these long sought after goals. A lot of the recent 15 years of concentrated engineering innovation came out of the world of social media. I guess Zuckerberg (another and possibly the first technocrat) was good for something :) It’s almost but not quite comical that a college photo sharing app would be part of triggering a revolution for humanity. I think if Isaac Asimov (who wrote about the future a lot) were alive today he would be marveling at these events.
Of course the old-guard will try to exert its control. But there is no putting the technology genie back in the bottle.
Have you read the blog post about Sam Altmans approach to productivity? It’s a very simple system from a very simple guy who has a relatively unremarkable amount of intelligence compared to other Stanford graduates. And yet he managed to leap achingly close to building an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) in something like just under 10 years. If that isn’t astounding I don’t know what is. So, kudos to the OpenAI team and also Satya Nadella to be smart enough to invest in them. Truly a testament to what a focused group of technologists in pursuit of a single goal can accomplish.
Of course, the way the world is they will probably soon vilify Sam Altman. It’s not even the fault of social media or anti-billionaire sentiment really (although I’m not sure Sam is a billionaire). It’s just basic human psychology. We want the benefits others offer to us, but we often don’t want them to get the individual rewards for taking the risk. At the simplest level we’re jealous, I guess?
I think the world will see 7 to 10 years of massive societal disruption on a new scale followed by 20 to 30 years (maybe more) of total technological domination over other fields which will see us solving many of human-kinds age old problems.
This technological innovation will render major parts of the current world systems obsolete and replace them with better approaches to solving humanities key problems. Since COVID began I think it’s clear to everyone that the same old solutions to important issues we face just isn’t cutting it anymore.
But this is scary for some. And thus a great war has begun. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly who the war is between. But for sure The Technocrats have their own block.
These engineers-at-heart believe that although the human condition has improved significantly over the last 6,000 years, society also tends to go backwards frequently, and the overall improvement is just not enough, i.e. there are still too many destitute and poor, lonely, starving people in the world.
Of course it’s probably too late for Chaipao, because no doubt right now he’s sitting next to a “naalee” (open sewer), considering how to compete against the stray dog packs in the city for his next meal.
But let us imagine a future using the Chaipao scenario, anyway. We’ll take it from the moment he’s abandoned on the street by his parents. In a future with unlimited food supplies his parents would be able to feed him easily, but for this example let’s assume they are simply terrible parents who are uninterested in raising him.
What happens to Chaipao in the future world of The Technocrats?
His city has a fleet of child protection robots the size of a small bird that runs on 1,000 hour power-reserve batteries which spots Chaipao from the air being abandoned by his parents using AGI. This bird-like robot then summons a larger, flying, autonomous vehicle to pick up Chaipao, quickly swooping down to seat him gently in its comfortable interior and then flown to a fully self-powered long-term, child care facility elsewhere in the city. In this facility is every resource he needs to end his living hell.
Chaipao can stay for as long as he wants and grow up never worrying about things like ripping his feet open on random shards of glass in the streets.
It’s not ideal that his parents left him or that he’ll have a robot care-taker. But The Technocrats have alleviated a series of fundamental human pains for Chaipao. In this example, they have removed a great deal of misery from his life and potentially the lives of 10s of millions of destitute people just like him.
Here is a metric that I think technology could make happen in the next 50 years: 0 poor, lonely, starving, abandoned and desperate kids in the world.
Like I said, The Technocrats are moving us within arms reach of these goals. Great new technological leavers are being invented faster and faster: Social, Mobile, Cloud, EV, Crypto, Robotics, Genetically Modified Food, Artificial Intelligence. People all across the world can sense the end of the old ways & systems.
But there is the behind-the-scenes war (referred to earlier) to contend with: the fight between the old hierarchies and the new. Between (and even amongst) The Technocrats vs. the old guard stakeholders.
In the back of their heads the average person is wondering whether the major stakeholders are going to get us all killed in their battle for dominance, or enable us to come out the other side on a path to a far better world that was previously only ever imagined in science fiction.
I am hopeful it is the latter. And I’m glad to live now instead of any other age.
