PROEM ON BEING AND NOTHINGNESS

IT takes a special kind of ignorance to prance about and pontificate on the nature of being in 2024. To many, the word belongs in the museum—an ontological artefact that always says less than it means and means less than it suggests.

- SAAI SUDHARSAN SATHIYAMOORTHY

And they may be right; the unshaken heart of well-rounded reality remained paradoxical even to the likes of Parmenides of ancient Greece.

Ultimately, what logic proves and what we humans experience are often separated by a deep chasm: what is is, for it is to be, but nothing it can be. For the best part, our perception is equally incapable of seeing this nothing (or néant) as it is of the infinite that swallows us up.

Yet, it is precisely now—when algorithms compose music, create art, conduct research and murmur love into the ears of the lonely and desolate—that the topic becomes inevitable as it is pertinent. Starting a conversation with a chatbot is familiar and strange at once. It dehumanises intelligence into a statistical compression of how one talks rather than converse. It imitates and reiterates rather than self-realising. It processes data and patterns rather than understanding. Ultimately, artificial intelligence is a product of human intelligence, yet not a reflection of human conscience.

It has also brought us with it a promethean shame, a humiliation born out of our collective imagination’s failure to grasp the enormity of what we have set in motion. And it may well be the second invention in our history whose effects have exceeded human imagination—second only to the atom bomb.