I have been thinking about a way to practice creative writing while on spring break. As per usual, I found inspiration in my work - specifically, a question many ask me to which I cannot always come to a straight answer. With those who participate in the current AI-movement climate being viewed as selfish and unreasonable, I think it’s important for me now more than ever to verbalize exactly why I choose to be in this space.

For me, choosing what I want to do for the rest of my life is finding something that is both fulfilling and altruistic. I want to help a greater good, and I don’t want to burn myself out in doing it. There is little else that matters to me in this process. Through some carefully selected anecdotes, I hope to clarify what the greater good represents for me and what I find fulfilling. Today, I find pride in what I do because I can always shelve an aspect of it into those two buckets. If I do something, I do it because it makes me happy and it helps someone, and I keep those things in mind as I conduct what I do.

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge. — Plato, Greek philosopher

evolution, simplified#

If the first cyanobacterium did not evolve, it would die.

While this thought is quite primitive, I think we overlook the importance of biological selection in helping us formulate who we have become - as a species, we are dedicated to survival to prolong the sweet periods of life. While it is true that there is a difference between biological evolution and conscious tendency, in my opinion, these differences are purely mechanism-oriented. The chances of harnessing fire, building the wheel, forming the first inter-organism community are all empirically slim. The probability of humans to leave the freaking atmosphere are statistically zero. There has to be a fundamental mechanism there, which allows us to run into these pivotal innovations over and over again.

My theory is that humans are not just emotionally curious, we are biologically curious. We live for as long as possible so we can experience all life has to offer - love, victory, progress, as well as loss, failure, and setback. We take these facts into account, we pass them on to each other, and together, we move forward.

It is this forward-moving that I know I want to center my career around. I think of humanity as one large narrative, an intertwining of hero’s journeys all culminating into checkpoints along the way - fire, the wheel, civilization, going to space, and now achieving levels of performance beyond anything we’ve achieved prior. It is so unbelievably COOL that in just 2000 years, we are on our way to redefine much of what we thought was normal. To me, the greater good is to make sure that this story continues to be written - not only should humanity continue to survive, but we should also experience all there is to be experienced, as a story where everyone does the same thing forever is boring. If we never progressed past the wheel, I’d look back at millennia of evolution and be sorely disappointed.

For me, this is the fulfillment piece - I’m doing what I’m doing to progress humanity’s narrative in the most interesting way.

curiosity killed the cat, but it saved it from a life of boredom#

Now, along which avenue do I choose to help this narrative progress? There are a couple options. At a young age, I was fascinated by the idea that there was this narrative, and so I thought my career was to harness this pride in being a part of the narrative through art - becoming a storyteller, either through writing or directing. By retelling the narrative in my eyes, I preserved it for future generations to learn from it.

As I grew older, I realized that it was not enough to simply preserve the narrative at its current stage. As humanity innovates more and more, we incur more and more risks upon ourselves, and to keep the current population stable and thriving while continuing to discover, we must all become active participants in writing this narrative.

I am sure you have heard the phrase “Curiosity killed the cat.” Few know that the original phrase is actually “Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back” - a reference to how the nine lives of cats will maintain their experiences of curiosity as they make mistakes. Fewer still know that before the phrase was “Curiosity killed the cat,” the original phrase was “Care killed the cat,” and it is this phrase that resonates deepest with me. People are made better by hardship, by change, by complacency, and it is this friction which I personally seek. Curiosity is more than a desire: it is a necessity.

While humans don’t have nine lives and admittedly much more to risk, we have a scheme of communication unlike any other organism on this planet. We learn from each other’s mistakes rapidly, allowing one person’s curiosity to be experienced by the broader population. And this curiosity is positively reinforced as a part of the evolution process. If we existed in a void, curiosity would always kill the cat, but today, we learn from each other, and complacency is what drives death.

So for me, the greater good piece comes from expanding humanity’s knowledge base, giving my generation and future generations the tools to keep this narrative alive. We must be curious because curiosity is the biological mechanism that has enabled our narrative to support more than two human beings, for as long as 2000 years.

you could do anything, and you chose this?#

So, in summary, I want to do something that furthers the narrative of humanity in the most interesting way possible without ending it. I hope to use this section to explain why this necessitates AI.

Life has a lot of holes in it. Math is incomplete, science is incomplete, and even our own understanding of ourselves changes every single week. There are problems with our working understanding of concepts everywhere, and it makes the most sense to revisit the origins of these concepts in an effort to fix them. By “origins,” I mean the worlds more primitive than math and science. We need to understand truth, intelligence, problems and solutions, and explain new templates over which we can reason the truth we observe. For this, I believe artificial intelligence is necessary - not as a replacement to human intelligence, but as a way to uncover new forms of intelligence for humans to leave their mark. The way to become MORE curious is to unravel why we are curious at all. It’s almost like doing a guided search on the vibes of humanity, to see what tendencies and desires end up creating things like the first rocket, the theory of gravity, and yes, even modern LLMs. We must use AI to understand ourselves.

I used to want to be on a frontier anywhere, and turned to ML because it was accessible. When ChatGPT was unveiled in 2023, I knew I had to be more involved in this field to make sure we didn’t fall into the trap of complacency, making sure our narrative did not grow boring or end. I am not a traditional AI developer - at my core, I am committed to developing intelligence along any frontiers which necessitate it. In being in this field, aligning myself with the movements I am involved in, I hope to convince the world that we aree in the right field with the wrong ideology. We should be using AI to rewrite our understanding of thought, logic, and truth, not using it to accelerate Google Docs and email summarization. The tip of the iceberg has only just been reached, and more is around the corner. Movements in the world of neuroscience and cognitive science and psychology continue to ground behaviors of new innovations in human rationale, and by using AI to further these understandings, we start to expand the amount of pages we have in our narrative.

q.e.d.#

Plato’s quote, which I highlight at the beginning, is one of my longtime favorite quotes, in its way of encapsulating the fundamental rationale for all I do. I am a strong believer in purpose. Though not religious, I believe that finding your reason for existing on this planet is one of the most worthwhile things you can do, and I hope that this discussion inspires you to go and put a sentence (or quote) to your why.

This piece may not have the most strong writing, but I chose to write it mostly to organize my thoughts. I can’t promise I’ll return to revise this, but I’ll certainly be a lot more eloquent over conversation :)

- Karthik