Data as a Form of Energy
It is said that energy can neither be created nor be destroyed, it just passes from one form to another. So the sunlight which gets trapped in leaves of a plant translates into heart-beats of a newborn baby, the energy which is spent while clapping hands gets translated into the spirit which fuels determination of a soul to never give-up in life. The list goes long and becomes very interesting.
However, if one looks from a non-pure-physics perspective, there are many processes where energy changes its forms in a magical way. For example, when a teacher teaches a concept in class, some just listens to it, some understand it, some builds on it and extends it while some preserve it to tell it to others (friends, parents, cousins, etc.). However, all make notes from the lecture. From a pure physics perspective, its just a translation of sound energy to mechanical energy — students using their hands to make notes. But from another perspective, the lecture has formed new connections in the brain of some students which will be used by them in return in educating others and will stay in their brain till they exist.
This kind of translation of energy doesn’t look linear. Its amplified at every interaction. It looks like a chain reaction. Does this mean that this old law of thermodynamics has been proven wrong?
Not really. Till date, most of us have been ignoring a form of energy which is very significant in the evolution of life on earth and nature has created mysterious methods (DNA, RNA, etc.) of storing this energy.
Data is a form of energy which has shaped life on the blue planet. Whenever two bodies interact, Data is created. Data is everywhere on this planet. It’s raining from all the direction and all of it hardly gets absorbed. For example, an infinite number of eyes can see a juggler playing with balls — however only a few see it and it gets registered in their sub-conscious brain in the form of some neural connections.
Data is a type of energy that can itself be converted into two forms — analog and digital. The size of just digital data is so much that we need an infinite capacity to store it. Around 90% of data which is stored today is generated in last 2 years. Just imagine the volume of this form of energy which is getting generated every second, every minute with every interaction.
And what are we doing with this? Humans, with the current percentage of active brain area, is not capable of parsing and processing such volume of information. Hence, we have come up with a field which combines Statistics, Computer Science and Anthropology into one — Artificial Intelligence(AI).
All the parsing and processing is being outsourced to bots, computer batch programs, and other representatives of AI. New smart adaptive algorithms are written every day to process the data and find patterns in it and draw crisp inferences.
But wait! What are humans doing? Are they planning to kill themselves? Or are they trying to duplicate of themselves? In fact, they are feeding data to AI which was never fed to Human brain till date. What’s in the womb of future then?
Alan Turing once said, a true AI is an AI with which interaction sounds normal. The person interacting with AI should not feel that he/she is dealing with a non-human being.
In the movie, “Ex-Machina” by Alex Garland shows an experiment where a scientist easily cracks Turing Test. It also shows, how the AI evolves and develops feelings like love, sense of freedom, lust, etc.
To summarize, data is a form of energy which looks very promising. And the fate of our species will be decided by how wisely we use this source of energy.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
