Karma, Free Lunches– Lessons from the world of LLM

If you do not believe in Karma, you got to think again. If you think there are free lunches, then you must be living under a rock.

Remember when Gmail offered 1 GB of MailBox at no cost.

It was not just mails, it was a slew of utility in the form of tech, tools and apps that made our lives seemingly easier.

We mailed, we messaged, we reviewed, we blogged, we vlogged, we trolled, we bought, we sold, we shared, we shamed, we lapped up the free internet with both hands and drank from the hose and as we kept drinking the ocean of soda-pop (internet) from one end, we were filling up the ocean with more fizz with every time drop of information that we put into it.

This ocean of information is the super intelligence which manifests itself today as Gen AI- Open AI, Gemini, Grok… Simplistically, this is nothing but the sum total of all our collective Karma on the web. The Web that fed the AI, has the Ying and the Yang and everything in between.

We are not far away from a day where we switch our native intelligence with this super intelligence for all our decision making. The answers we will get out of this intelligence is likely to be shared karma with manipulations of it as best suited for the pockets that sponsored the creation of this super intelligence in the first place. Grok might summarise the answer a question with a trace of what its owner might think is the best for his universe, Gemini will do so as will open AI. The super intelligence will provide us guidance and not only based on all the good and genuine stuff we put into it, but it will also consist of all the stuff we made up along the way to look good (read marketing- fake it till you make it. But get so caught up in faking it that you never move to making it), all the misinformation, all the obfuscation, all the hate, all the greed.

China got wind of this (User data and user created data being the Next Oil) early and they created this ocean of information within their land. The narrative we were told was that of suppression, control and human right violation. Of course China did not care.

Remember when Gmail offered 1 GB of MailBox at no cost. Likewise a bunch of all other tech toys that we could endlessly play with at no cost. Well, it was not free at the point, but we paid with a post-dated check. While we are busy scrolling through countless reels and watching the exciting season of Trump and his Tariffs being played out on smoke screens, the once free internet is turning into a ticket to a paid show. If you pay more, you get to see better, you get to see more. Today, ChatGPT, Gemini , Gork, Perplexity have monthly subscription that costs more than what we pay for electricity and water together (in some parts of the world I am familiar with). And then there are pricier options.

This situation now can play out in many ways and I want to talk about the two extreme ways.

First, how could this go wrong for us.

The promise of pay more, do more with your AI Genie is lucrative and will be hard to resist. Increasingly as we get more habituated with the so-called simplicity of AI and its Agents, we would have offloaded our responsibilities and our faculties to this intelligence. Humanity will have no control or clue about our Genies, the responses we get from it, its motives or other options that exists (options of services via individual apps may cease to exist if all we interact is only with our AI Agent- Alexa play me this song, ok Google, buy me my lunch, Siri book a ticket ) for our problems. We will do what it asks us to do and we would still be paying for it. The role reversal of master-slave is complete, and the genie is truly out of the bottle and there is no going back.

Second and my more favoured unrealistic, utopian option.

I would rather fantasize a world where the super intelligence, instead of being the same thing for everyone or being differentiated based on what you pay, instead actually uses the law of karma to give each one of us the response we deserve. Can a technology like Blockchain enable such a thing. Can it be a watch dog of the Big Tech Super powers. If you have shared less, you get less, you have shared junk you get junk. If you helped before, you get help now. The response is not the sum total of what the humanity fed it but is personalized at real time. If someone desperately needs good karma to use the super intelligence well, maybe others could donate. The under-privileged and the once suppressed ones gets some Karma credit. With the dollar showing signs of fading away, Good Karma becomes the currency of the new world. 

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