Hello, let’s meet !

Is saying a hello to someone a loss of breath, or does it really mean anything?

As humans are we related to each other by way of emotion and obligation, or we are just individuals battling to survive? Business warriors.

Is emotion a weakness of character, and is belonging finally a waste of time? Is everything to be measured in terms of how much material benefit it accrues, or human relations go beyond this calculus of loss and profit? Is human relationship a value in itself, or an asset harnessed for a non-human end – a business consideration, actually? Is human a resource, fuelling an institutional engine, or are institutions collective safeguards just in case an individual loses his property as resource – falls sick, faces disability, grows old, or dies?

If business is all, and human is as good a resource as petroleum, why be afraid of an Artificial Super Intelligence that gives super immense power to a corporate few? Then it is just another level of competition; why raise ethical questions about a machine that would eat into our resource, and take control of the planet? After all, as humans we too aim for the same – have everything for us, and have power over everyone else. We are already behaving like a machine. How would it be, if an AI machine raises questions about our ethical design?

Michio Kaku begins his book The God Equation – The quest for a theory of everything, with the perennial question about the purpose of the cosmos. Is there a purpose to it or is it all pointless? Before taking the hardcore scientific discourse forward, Kaku quotes some wonderful lines form Stephen Crane:

A man said to the universe;

“Sir, I exist”

“However,” replied the universe,

“the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.”

Is a conversation between two of the humankind similar?

“Sir, I exist”

“However,” replied the man,

“the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.”

What will AI finally do, is still some yards away. But what has already happened, is for us all to experience. We relate to each other in a truly mechanical way – to make things work.

The state and the government fashions policies to enhance control, doesn’t matter if individual suffers or family withers. Our private institutions suck everything out of individuals against a bare sustenance.

Our charitable, and faith based organisations, are no different; only as long as an individual walks on his limbs, he walks with the group. If he stops, no one looks back. Just like a defunct part of a machine to be replaced by another.

The notions of camaraderie, brotherhood, neighbourhood, friendship, fellowship seem to be misleading, that reveal the shock sooner or later. We exploit all the ethical, emotional and human constructs to the hilt, practically serving some end. We are faithfully practical. We mean business!

Long back a philosophical mind gave us the slogan for the modern age – God is dead. Decades later there is another existence perished on the timeline – Man is dead.

Our relationships are a function of work and workplace. If we are connected by work, we are connected. If we share the proximity of workplace, we see each other. If the two change, we don’t know each other.

Closer home, our own poet-philospher, Iqbal, raised a lament long back.

Hai dil kai liyai mout machino ki hukoomat

Ehsas e murawwat ko kuchal daitai hain aalat

Death to the heart, machines stand sovereign

Engines that crush all sense of human kindness

But if hearts are already dead, and man finds his worth in a machine like efficiency, it is foolhardy to raise a lament – Iqbal, the emotional fool! What we call a good conduct is a social skill, at best, or a corporate requirement, at worst. Robust, efficient machines with a pleasing outlooking. Emotion is nothing but an emoji.

A society where individuals see others as potential resource, or potential competitor, is engaged in a sort of fratricide without spilling blood. And then a state that looks at people as a potential nuisance, takes it to another level.

When it comes to ward off a threat, such a state doesn’t even desist from a massacre. It conveniently does it in the name of order – the business of state. And for the sake of global order Atom Bomb only means pressing the Button.

So when you don’t have time to say a hello, it’s not just not saying a hello, it breeds apathy. And a society where these human sounds go missing, in case it gets power, brutalises. And in case someone else gets power over it, is brutalised.

In the world created by prophets, it finally comes to the relationship with God, and through that conduit, relationship with human. Do I have time for God, and do I have time for the creation of the God. Do I cry before God, and do I cry for a human. Do I say a hello – human universe in a soundbite.

So, Hello, hope you are all well.

Assalamu Alikum.

Author is Opinion Editor, Greater Kashmir