Meltdown

One can expect that with respect to LLM, Artificial intelligence and ever expanding chat-bots the initial round of reactions are over. Its emergence -  the ability to process and generate language and perform human tasks -- was greeted with surprise tinged with shock. The anxieties and fears it triggered chiefly hovered around how they may re-configure work and labour and risks and harms of deploying AI. They won't be allayed anytime soon. A promise, a lurking possibility to a nearby future for enhancing creativity and scaling productivity has ticked off anxieties and fears.  Project LLM At its core AI is the replication by software to match( surpass?) an unique ability humans have -- to learn, use and communicate with language. A decade back, tech enthusiasts would consider modelling and scaling language by software  as an insurmountable and impossible task? In terms of audacity and ambition, it is indeed a big project. Humans learn, use and communicate with language t...

From the western lens , Bangladesh runn ing with a two party system (BNP and Awami League with Jamat as a third player) may appear as a textbook case of functioning democracy. Fair and free election is key, here , but this is not the end. Neither the end of the story nor the ends which this movement aspires to . In the absence of impartial, independent, credible and capable institutions that can ensure fair elections and accountability of governments, the idea of interim government makes sense. There was a pr ovision for an interim government in Bangladesh during the elections , but it was scrapped by Awami League. Now they have an interim government and this bit is to explain (to myself a non-Bangladeshi ) why they were demanding an interim government . A government for the mean times. This interim government would navigate Bangladesh from the oscillation between elected governments and military rule that has been the fate of many south Asian nations? The cleaning of the ...

64 countries and 49% of people in the world are going to vote this year. The oldest, most powerful and the biggest democracy is among these  64 countries. This year was presented as not an election year, but as the year of elections. This expectation was alongside the unfolding of events in Gaza and Palestine. At the end of this year will we continue to associate democracy with regular elections and what it ensures or look more at the state of relations within and among states and societies? It is May, and at the middle of Indian elections( with 283 seats out of 543 already voted) instead of stabilized expectations worries, fears and uncertainty have taken center-stage. Most people including the ruling party in India are unsure, as of today, what the outcome of elections would be? The dominant and successful electoral  campaign of  MODI vs who( you cannot name your leader, you have no leader!) is muted. In the last two elections a single party won a mandate on its own, a...

The year was 2006-7 and twitter appeared on the tech horizon and through tech-savvy people, the news reached my ears. Users and audience for twitter was about to emerge. Gurcharan Das  extolled the virtues of brevity and instantaneous reach of twitter, in an unpaid promo in a mainstream newspaper column. This ‘liking’ and new found love for 140 characters was contagious. A pending invite was lying in my mail and one evening I clicked join. Before and a few years after Indian sports-star and celebrities joined( suspect they were paid to do so) there was not much to see on the timeline of twitter; one could scroll through all the content from India posted over weeks in less than 3 minutes. Facebook was growing in bursts and at times exponentially and yes WhatsApp came a few years after. To the young readers this may sound as tinged with nostalgia and less to do with how things were back then. Those were the days of SMS packs and Blackberry( Imported IPhone needed a fix to work). Pe...

History is an enterprise, to deny the dead their own stories. Obviously, it is an exercise; we are supposed to believe to ‘recover’ their story and life-worlds. The scientific fact of their ‘death’ is a problematic historians must overcome somehow. This is supposed to be achieved by an alliance with the core scientific value-objectivity. In this interpretation objectivity comes across as an ensemble of episteme and practices geared to (re)-cover the subjectivity of the dead past. No wonder, history is replete with the professional qualifier—history is objective, it is an account of ‘as it was’—in an attempt to suppress the role played by its authors. In this historical process, the dead come alive, as they are (re)-covered with an objective account, in the present. This fresh coating and layering of past is a cumulative exercise, under the aegis of history. Notwithstanding, the existence of established institutions, their norms and regulative practices combined with material and ideolo...