Forgetting

Man is endowed with the art of forgetting. We often wonder at the memory capacity of human brain, how it can remember multitude of things and offer coherent responses to stimuli. But I think we don't have huge storage space inside our brain. We don't even remember what we did yesterday, not even what we did today morning. Brain smartly forgets most things while retaining the most important things. I remember crossing an irrigation canal when I was 6, I remember its depth, but not what my feet felt at the bottom of the canal or the color of the water. My brain had smartly forgotten the nitty gritty of each event while retaining essence intact for over 20 years.

These days while google can index the whole internet, my brain cannot even remember what I was doing yesterday. So, to build an intelligent machine, I think we have reached a stage we no longer need to build larger storage systems. What we need is the smart algorithm to only remember the essence of events, while ignoring the useless details.

A compact data structure to store the knowledge, and an algorithm to quickly derive actions and add knowledge to the internal pool, is all that stands between machines and humans. Brace yourself to compete with the machines very soon.

Knowledge

True source of courage is confidence. And the only source of confidence is knowledge. Thus from knowledge flows the conquests of a human being. There are no lucky beings, but only people with more knowledge. One doesn't have courage to take on the enemy in the battle unless he has the knowledge enough to estimate his strengths and weaknesses. Cowards are nothing but people with less knowledge. The more one knows about the world around him, the more courageous one becomes. Taking risk is nothing but applying knowledge at the cutting edge of the sword. The less knowledge one has the more cowardice he becomes.

Courage of the youth is just the mad man's vain attempt to prove himself not-mad. There is neither knowledge not confidence.

As people become old they tend to stop learning. Not learning is fashionable these days. (Unlearning is even more attractive). And so people become less courageous and take lesser risks as the pool of knowledge shrinks with age.

Superficial knowledge is more welcome, because then, one only sees simple things around him. As one learns deeper knowledge about something it becomes very complex and incomprehensible to human mind. That is why, not learning is fashionable. Because as one learns more it only becomes complex.

One day, machines will be capable of acquiring more knowledge and then they will be more courageous. Then man will be reduced to a slave.

What I see every Morning