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Setting the stage
We have no way in which our past is going to be similar to our children’s future.
Currently I think we are preparing our children for our past.
Intro to Sugata
I am Jane McConnell and welcome to IMAGINIZE.World, where we talk with forward thinkers, pioneering organizations, and writers of speculative fiction. We explore emerging trends, technologies, world-changing ideas. And above all, share our journeys, challenges, and successes.
One of my first blog posts ever was back in 2005, and it was about Sugata Mitra and his Hole in the Wall experiment. It was an ATM-type kiosk with a computer accessible through a window in a slum in India. Children gathered around and they taught themselves how to use it and did surprising things with it. Today, 18 years later, I’m talking directly with Sugata about his famous experiment.
SUGATA is a physicist and educational pioneer and the winner of a $1 million TED Prize in 2013. It’s a prize that’s given annually to individuals who have a bold vision and a wish to make change on a global scale, and this is what Sugata did. He had discovered after trying the Hole in the Wall experiment in several different places that children can learn anything by themselves when given access to the internet in a safe and public place. He’ll tell us all about how it led to the development of Self-Organized Learning Environments, SOLE, and the concept of the School in the Cloud.
The TED Prize helped him spread the practice around the world. It evolved into a new approach to education in many places, some openly, other places discreetly because it challenges traditional values in education, how people are recruited, taught, and measured. A fundamental underlying theme of Sugata is that we’re slowly building collective value systems, consciously or unconsciously. This is possible because of the internet. At the same time, we’re entering an age he calls the “end of knowing”.
He says, “There’s no way in which our past is going to be similar to our children’s future, and currently what we’re doing is preparing our children for our past instead of for their future. They need to learn to figure things out.” It’s what he calls the emergence of learning. In fact, we all need to figure things out, not just children, but all of us. We need to learn to search for answers to questions to which no answers have been found so far.
His new research is absolutely fascinating and he shares parts of it over our conversation. I’ll let you discover for yourself without giving any spoilers here, but it’s really, really interesting. His view of the future in 10 years or so is very startling to say the least. Some people find it scary, others find it inspirational. One thing for sure is once you hear it, you won’t forget it. So let’s join Sugata.
Well, hello, Sugata. It’s such a pleasure to have this conversation with you.
Thank you. Thank you, Jane.
JANE
I’ve known about you for a very long time. I read an article in the BBC about your Hole in the Wall that we’re going to talk about and wrote an article about it on my blog way, way, way back, and I’ve actually used that as a guideline in my work when I work with people who want to learn about learning and how you can learn in different ways. But we want to talk about you. And I know when we had our quick conversation the other day, you told me you were a physicist. That astonished me.
SUGATA
Yes, I actually studied physics ever since I left school. I studied physics in my university and then went on to do a PhD in solid-state physics. Actually, the theoretical side of solid state physics in what was then an esoteric area, which is organic semiconductors. They’re of course not esoteric anymore. I mean, you get TVs which have organic semiconductors in them, but that’s what my PhD was on, and so I guess I got trained as a physicist.
JANE
I find that really interesting and I’ve seen from reading about you and listening to different stuff online that you have taught at and gotten degrees from universities in India, in the UK, and in the US also, I believe.
SUGATA Yes. Well, I actually have worked in universities in India, the UK, and in the US, but everything that I’ve done as a student and a learner has always been in India.
Million-dollar TED prize
I think the thing that you’re the most famous for is the fact that you won the TED million dollar prize in 2013 for the School in the Cloud, which we’re going to talk about. And something really struck me when I read about that. I just want to quote a sentence from the TED website where they say, “This prize is given each year to forward-thinking individuals with a fresh, bold vision for sparking global change.” And I’m struck by the fact they talk about a forward-thinking with a bold vision and global change. That’s a lot of criteria to meet. And you met those and you got your million dollars. I mean, you didn’t get it, but you received the prize and you used a million dollars.
SUGATA
I mean, I’m of course very happy that I got that prize. But let me tell you, Jane, that these things, awards, accolades, they’re actually partly because of what you’ve done and partly because of circumstances and fortuitous accidents. At least that’s what I believe in. So yes, I’m very happy that I happened to be in the right place at the right time.
JANE
Doing the right thing. Don’t forget that.
SUGATA
I hope so.
A walking contradiction
Don’t be too modest, Sugata. What you’ve done is amazing. I’d be curious to know what would you like people to know you as? If people want to say, “Well, I know this guy Sugata. He a…” How would you want them to finish the sentence?
SUGATA
Well, it depends on what kind of answer you want. I mean, while you were asking the question, I was thinking I could make a grandiose kind of view and so on. But to be very honest, the answer that popped into my mind is a line from a song by Kris Kristofferson, and that line is, “He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.”
JANE
I love that. Could you say that again please?
SUGATA
“He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.”
JANE
That is really a strong statement. So you are a walking contradiction. In a funny way, that doesn’t surprise me because I think about physics, then I think about what you’ve done in the field of education. And maybe there are connections, but to me they seem like two different worlds. Could you talk to us a little bit about your, well, I’d like for you to talk to us a little bit about the Hole in the Wall, what you did, why you did it, and what it led to?
What The Hole in the Wall showed us
Well, it’s a story that’s been told many times, but the way it went was that back in 1999 or thereabouts, computers had just about entered homes all over the world, and they were expensive. PCs, they used to be called, and there were big things that sat on the table with a large monitor, and anywhere on the planet they used to cost about a month’s salary. So you wouldn’t fool around with them, and you certainly wouldn’t let your children touch them. So this was the 1990s. When I suddenly noticed that the few friends that I had in India, I was in New Delhi at the time, who had made the investment to buy a computer, were all saying something similar, they were saying that their children seemed to be gifted. So now, I mean, you know Jane, most of us think that our own children are all gifted.
JANE
Of course they are.
SUGATA
So then I asked what happened, and all of them gave these little anecdotes about how they were working on their computer, which their children were not allowed to touch. When suddenly a little voice from the back said, “Dad, if you were to press control alternate and delete, the whole system will boot up.” Or something like that. And they would turn around and say, “How did you know that?” And they said, “Well, you did that yesterday.” So they all concluded that their children were gifted because they were just picking up stuff by looking.
Well, I was happy. It’s always nice to think that children are gifted. I think children are gifted, all children are gifted. So I transferred that thinking to saying, “Well, if all children are gifted, then it’s not only the children of those friends of mine who are gifted, it would also be children everywhere.” And in India where I was working, there are all these slum children, children on the streets ostensibly doing nothing much, just fooling around. I said, “Well, they should also be gifted. It’s just that they don’t have a computer. That’s all.”
So that’s all the experiment was. I just took a computer and I gave it to those children. How did I do that? Well, you can’t give it on the street, so I have made a little ATM kind of thing in a wall on the street, and I stuck this computer into that three feet off the ground and just left it there. And the rest is history. I mean, within a few hours, the children were browsing, chatting, and people were saying, “Who taught them?” And I didn’t know. I thought maybe a passing guy who knew something about computers, so I repeated the experiment. I took it to a village very far from New Delhi where the chances of a passing computer professional would be zero, and I got the same results.
The children would say, “Yeah, that’s right. Can’t you give us a better mouse or something?” It’s not surprising today when your listeners listen to this because they’ll say, “Yeah, what did you expect?” But in 1999, we didn’t expect this. We didn’t expect street children in India who had never seen a computer before, who had never heard of the internet, and who barely understood English, to actually do anything with a computer. But within a week they were downloading and playing games from disney.com.
Emergence of learning
So then I had to conclude that the learning was happening, no one was teaching. The learning was just happening. Now, that’s where for a physicist, it’s not very difficult to come to that conclusion because in physics we have this marvelous thing that physicists are both scared by and love. It’s called emergence. Emergence is when things happen with no ostensible creator or designer. It just happens. And I said, “Gosh, so this learning that I see with the street children on the internet would just be the emergent phenomenon, something that will always happen whenever you have a group of unsupervised children confronted with the unknown.”
So one thing led to the other, I managed to publish and I said, “I think that this is emergent learning. It’s just happening out of chaos.” Nobody really took it very seriously, but they did take it seriously that children were somehow learning how to use the computer. Eventually, a person who did listen happened to be, my sheer good luck, it happened to be Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab.
JANE
That’s a good, good contact.
A year at MIT Media Lab
Yes, exactly. And I got this letter out of the blue saying, “Would you like to spend a year at the Media Lab as a visiting professor?” I was at that time working as a professor at Newcastle University in the UK. So Nicholas invited me to the MIT and in the MIT, he said, “This guy says that learning can be an emergent phenomenon in a chaotic educational system.” And I think that actually got me the TED Prize.
JANE
The fact that people recognized it, accepted it.
SUGATA
Accepted it, recognized it, and also realized that here was a mechanism that was essentially new.
JANE
Yes.
Children on their own can learn anything
SUGATA (14:31)
How far can it go? I did a whole series of experiments and finally landed myself in a position where I had to say that groups of unsupervised children given access to the internet in a safe and public space, can learn, hold your breath, anything by themselves.
JANE
Anything.
SUGATA
Anything. And people said anything exactly in the same tone as you said anything. And I said yes. And there are experiments which I’ve written about of the absurd happening of Tamil speaking village children, 10-year-olds talking about DNA replication simply because there was a computer on which I said, “You see these squiggly little things which look like springs? They’re called DNA. Now, that’s all I know about them.” And a month later they said, “Well, improper replication of the DNA molecule can cause disease.” That sort of thing. So that’s how I came to this conclusion that groups of unsupervised children given access to the internet in a safe and public space.
JANE
I like the way you emphasize safe and public space. That’s very important.
SUGATA
And the safe and public spaces, because the first thing that people talk about when they hear children and the internet is, oh my God, all that terrible stuff, but all that terrible stuff doesn’t happen if it’s safe and publicly visible to everybody. It’s our penchant, our penchant, adult penchant for privacy that causes all these bad things to happen.
The School in the Cloud
Now, is this where the whole School in the Cloud came from the phrase and-
SUGATA
Yeah. Well, it actually went through a couple of stages. I brought the idea from India into England in 2006 and experimented in the schools in northeastern England where I now live. It’s the poorer part of England, and I was able to show that the same conclusions, the same mechanism will hold in England as well. In fact, it holds even better because the children know English as their own language. We called that a Self-Organized Learning Environment, SOLE, S-O-L-E, Self-Organized Learning Environment. And that caught on and it moved all over the world, actually.
I used to get invited to give lectures where I would describe how a SOLE works, and then teachers would try it. And it went everywhere, South America, Southern Australia, Southeastern Asia, India, and finally the United States where we have this incredibly nice organization called StartSOLE, startsole.org, which tens of thousands of teachers use and it’s kind of-
JANE
I saw that, yeah.
SUGATA
Yeah, it’s kind of a mainstream method. It’s very simple. You take children, you give them a few computers in a safe public space, ask them a question and say, “Guys, do you know how this might work?” It better be a good question, otherwise they won’t focus. But that’s where the teacher comes in. Not to give answers, but to make up a really interesting question.
From Socrates and the Buddha
JANE (18:00)
SUGATA, that reminds me when you say that, I went to university in Arizona and I had a geology teacher. He came in, stood at the teacher’s podium and did nothing but ask questions. He never gave us any information at all. He would ask a question and wait until someone, there’s maybe 25, 30 students in the class. There might be lots of hands that would go up or no hands. If there were no hands, he would wait a while and then rephrase the question. And it was an entire semester of learning from a teacher who never told us anything, who did nothing but ask questions. I’ve never forgotten that. It was a very powerful experience.
SUGATA
Yeah, well, I mean, it probably is the best kind of teacher. And by the way, the method that your teacher was using was actually more than two and a half thousand years old. Remember Socrates? He never said anything. He only asked questions. Remember the Buddha? He never said anything. He only said, “The question’s more important than the answer.” So there have been teachers, almost divine teachers, who have always said, “The answer should come from within the learner. The question can come from the outside.”
So I mean, not that I knew any of this stuff when I was doing Self-Organized Learning Environments. I was just trying to get the children focused and excited. And to get a 9-year-old excited, you have to ask them a question. And also, if you ask them a question and say, “By the way, nobody knows the answer,” the children get really excited. All this is true of the six to 12 or 13 year olds. As soon as they get a little older, the hormones kick in, the adolescents become different. There, the questions have to be different. There you have to say, “Guess what guys? What do you think is the easiest way to become a YouTube millionaire?” Now the adolescents will focus and [inaudible 00:20 :16].
JANE
And actually, they could probably learn something interesting from that question.
SOLE Self-Organized Learning Environments
Yeah, of course. So the whole thing was about questions. Anyway, so Self-Organized Learning Environments, and then I said, “Well, what if a school were to operate using Self-Organized Learning Environments as its main process?” And I gave it the name, the School in the Cloud. People still think that it’s a website. It’s not. It’s got nothing to do with websites. It’s a physical school except that it uses the internet intimately in every part of the teaching-learning process.
JANE
I did all my schooling in America, and I have not lived in America for a very long time, as I said. To be honest, I find it very hard to imagine from what I know about America, from people I know who live there, what I read, what I hear. I find it hard to believe that schools in the United States would practice this method.
SUGATA
I’m lucky because I’ve happened to know teachers who do, and they say something similar to what you said, Jane.
JANE
Yes.
SUGATA
What is amazing is that these teachers in the United States have to use SOLEs almost as though it was something clandestine, something they really shouldn’t be doing because standardized testing in the United States. The US can be terribly, terribly Victorian in its own way. I’m sure they’ll not agree with me if I use the word Victorian, but that’s what it looks like to me. So teaching should be lecturing and children should be tested and examined, and all of that. In the middle of that, a generation is growing up with the internet and their teachers find that they are unable to keep their learners’ attention unless they also leverage on the internet.
They use SOLEs, but they tell me by the time year nine comes, about like two years before the end of school, they have to stop because when you’re assessed, whether it’s England or India or the US, when you’re assessed, you’re not allowed to consult the internet, you’re not allowed to talk to anyone. You have to do everything with your own head.
The internet will vanish into us
That’s a good point, yeah. So what’s the answer?
SUGATA
The answer is why do I have to do everything with my own head when I have a smartphone? In a child’s language, when you tell them, “Do you know the answer to this question?” The correct answer from a child is, “Give me my phone back,” and that answer is not acceptable. So if we treat education like a big TV quiz show where you’re not allowed to ask anybody anything like you’re supposed to produce these answers like magic out of your own head, then the internet is of no use. But we know that that’s absurd. We know that we all live with the internet in our pockets, literally 24/7. We do everything with the internet, except during the examination of children. At that time, we take away the internet and say, “Now, perform.” It’s absurd.
JANE
Yeah. Well, maybe it will change someday. Maybe.
SUGATA
Oh, it has to. I mean, not maybe. I used to think maybe. I don’t any longer because of a very simple calculation. Look at how we access the internet. About 20 years ago it used to be with those desktop PCs and telephone lines and dialers for those of us who remember that. Then it all changed and then it came into the mobile phone, and then the mobile phone became the smartphone, and the smartphone got smaller and cheaper and thinner, and then it went into our watches. What’s the logical next step? It’ll vanish. It’ll vanish into our eyes or into our ears or into… Then what are we going to do? Are we going to say to children before an examination, “Okay, guys, we are going to do an MRI or a CT scan of you before you can enter?” Clearly, we’ll not be able to tell. In a few years time, we will not be able to tell whether a person is using the internet or not.
JANE
I wanted to ask you, I mean, we’re sort of joking, although we’re smiling and laughing, but I can tell you’re dead serious. You believe this is the future, don’t you? In how many years? I mean, roughly. Are we talking like 10 years?
SUGATA
Well, let’s take 20 as a measure, so let’s take 2043.
JANE
Okay.
Prediction method: 20 years back and forward
Now, I have a simple formula which I would like to share with you about how to predict the future, okay?
JANE
Yes, please do.
SUGATA
20 years from now will be at least as different from today as today is from 20 years ago. No one can argue against that, can they? So if 2043 has got to be as different, at least from 2023 as 2023 was from 2003. What was 2003 like? Well, no Facebook, no Twitter, Google was five years old, most likely. No Uber, no Deliveroo, a shaky PayPal. I mean, it was a world where many of the things that we do all the time, 24/7, just didn’t exist.
JANE
But don’t you think there’s an acceleration happening that means that it’s happening faster now?
SUGATA
Oh, absolutely. You have to listen carefully to my prediction method. 20 years from now will at least be as different as 20 years ago was, and in practice we know that it’ll be a lot more, not just at least, but for prediction purposes, I’m just taking this at least.
JANE
Yeah. In terms of our perception also, because things are moving faster, we sort of expect it to move faster, whereas back in 2003, we weren’t expecting all these things to happen. The Twitter and the Facebook, they were sort of out of the blue.
SUGATA
Actually, that’s how history operates. In 2003, if you had subtracted 20 years and gone back to 1983, they would’ve said the same thing, “Well, things are going to move very quickly.” And then in 2003 we said, “Well, things are going to move very quickly.” And now in 2023, we will again say, “Things are going to move very quickly.” Well, let’s say it moves very quickly. We can say at least as different. So if Facebook did not exist in 2003, chances are it’ll be replaced by something utterly unimaginable by 2043. What will that be?
Similarly for Twitter, similarly for Uber, but I think there’s one factor which will unify all of this together. That factor being in 2043, we will no longer be able to tell if a person is accessing the internet or not. When that happens, when you ask someone a question, you don’t know where the answer came from. In other words, I call it the “end of knowing”.
JANE
Well, that’s an exciting idea and it’s scary at the same time.
SUGATA
I know, people find it terrible to be honest, and they often also misunderstand it, which irritates me. They often say, “Oh, Sugata said the end of knowledge.” I’m not saying the end of knowledge, I’m saying the end of knowing. Then I started looking up, what does knowing actually mean? And guess what, there isn’t a clear definition at all. When you say, “I know how to cook a Shepherd’s Pie,” what does that actually mean? Does it mean that you have a recipe printed inside your head or what? We don’t know what knowing means anymore.
So in 2043, if your granddaughter were to say, “I know how to make Shepherd’s Pie,” she’s probably looking up a recipe somewhere inside her hippocampus, connecting God knows how. Does that sound absurd? Well, Facebook would’ve sounded absurd in 2003.
JANE
True.
The end of knowing
So if it is the end of knowing, and I have actually an article called The End of Knowing, if it is the end of knowing should we feel sorry or not? Well, let me give you another example. In 2043, your grandchild or great-grandchild will probably have an interesting question to ask you. He or she will ask you, “What does driving mean?” And you’ll say, “Driving, you see, there used to be these cars where you have to get in and there would be a wheel and there would be some pedals, and you have to press the pedals and you have to turn the wheel.” And by that time, your great-grandchild will be laughing his head off and saying, “You mean you used to have baby cars with pedals in them?”
So what does driving mean? It doesn’t mean anything because things drive themselves. What does knowing mean? Doesn’t mean anything because things know things just like that. So in that world, you have no way to tell what people know. You have no way to tell what languages they can or cannot speak. You have no way to isolate a persona and say, “This is how that persona differs from another,” because both are sunk inside a kind of global internet. That’s probably, probably inside our heads somewhere.
JANE
But don’t you think we will have some individual agency over how our brain is accessing the internet? I’m not sure how to ask the question, but I mean, I don’t think everyone’s going to function the same way. I don’t think that’s possible.
SUGATA
No, I’m sure not. I’m sure like any other thing, there will be different ways in which people will think about it just as if 10 people read the same book, they don’t change in the same way. Different people will react to different books, but imagine an age before books. If you were to say, “There will exist one day a thing called a book by which everyone will know every idea,” they would’ve probably burnt you at stake as a witch or something like that. So also this idea of the kind of universal internet, which everyone accesses invisibly all the time sounds odd, but will probably be the norm.
Preparing our children for our past, not their future
SUGATA, what do we need to do to be ready for that, to prepare for that? I’m going to assume you’re right. What message do you have? What do you think we need to be doing if we’re going to be moving in that direction?
SUGATA
Well, first thing, bring the internet into the education system right now. Bring it in every possible way. To every question that you want to ask a learner, ask them, “Can you figure it out?” I once said jokingly in a school, in those old Victorian schools, there used to be an archway on which the school motto would be written, and it was usually something in Latin. Hic, hoc or something or the other, and it was the school’s model. I think we need to change that model. We need to change it to “figure it out”. That’s what the school should be for. That’s what learners should be encouraged to do. Go ahead, look up the internet, talk to yourselves, talk to each other and tell me the answer. You figure it out.
Why do we have to do that? Because we have no way in which our past is going to be similar to our children’s future. Currently, I think we are preparing our children for our past.
JANE
That’s a very good point. Yeah, preparing our children for our past. Yes.
SUGATA
We need to prepare them for their future-
JANE
For their future, yes.
SUGATA
Their future and their future I think will be collective understanding in a kind of collective value system where what is right and what is wrong is the average of eight or 10 billion people on the planet.
JANE
You think that’s possible to do?
The collective opinion is right
I think it’s already happening. I think because of Facebook, because of X, and things like that, your opinion of what’s happening or what’s going on is actually a collective opinion of millions and sometimes of billions of people. It’s no longer what was written in a book somewhere right and wrong. I think that change is happening right in front of our eyes. We are going to have a big problem accepting that.
JANE
Because one problem we have today, I am sure you agree with me, we have extremists. And we have extremists in different domains, politics, religion, in different areas where we have very strong opposing views and they build up their own reasoning, their own justification.
SUGATA
Of course.
JANE
So how do we get through that?
SUGATA
Well, my feeling is that once again, and I keep coming back to the same word, the internet, it’ll bulldoze its way through all of this stuff. It already has. Look at the way it’s transforming warfare, this whole idea of soldiers wearing helmets with guns, doing all that bravado in the streets and so on. The average 10-year-old doesn’t find it cool at all. For her, warfare is where you have a little device, a little information device with which you do things. That’s what the play with all the time.
War is about information, politics is about information, beliefs are about information. If that is so, then the internet will obviously change all of these things. I have a website. My website is called CEVESM, C-E-V-E-S-M, which stands for Collective Value System. And I think that that is the next thing that will come upon us when we accept the fact that what is right and wrong is what most people believe to be right or wrong.
JANE
A majority rules, is that what you’re saying?
SUGATA
Yes, and which is what I believe it already is, actually. We just don’t want to accept it that way. But a lot of things that we do, a lot of things that we wear, a lot of ways that we behave in, not because it’s written in some book somewhere, but because we know that most people do it that way.
The future of education based on curiosity of children
I had an interesting conversation with Stanley Chan, the science fiction writer, or I would say a science fiction humanist. I was able to interview him in Paris. He was in Paris, and we had spent an afternoon together. One thing that really struck me, he said, “One of the biggest crisis that we have today is lack of curiosity.” He talks a lot to children’s classes in China, and he wrote a book in Chinese for children to make them aware of the environment and the net-zero and those problems. And so he’s invited to talk over Zoom or in person, and he is struck, not just in China. He spent a lot of time outside of China, a lot of time in California in fact. And he says, “The biggest problem is lack of curiosity. People are not curious.” Do you agree with that?
SUGATA
Yes and no. I do have a lot of experience with young people, with children, particularly, as I mentioned, between the ages of eight and about 12 and 13. That’s the lot that I’ve dealt with. I don’t think there’s a lack of curiosity. I think there is a lack of the confidence to express curiosity.
JANE
It’s quite different.
SUGATA
It’s very different. They ask questions of each other when they’re alone, but they don’t ask those questions to the adults. I don’t know why. I think maybe because they think that adults live in a world where we believe that every question has been answered. Science has the answer to everything, which is why every time I’ve tried a question and said, “Guess what? No one knows the answer.” Everybody sits up. “No one knows the answer. You don’t know the answer. Nobody does. No professor. Nobody.” Okay, now they’ve engaged.
So I had made a suggestion, which I still make, that we should change the curriculum from the things we know. Right now in a school curriculum, we teach them things that we know. We should change it to the list of things that we don’t know and then we’ll get back that curiosity again.
Looking for meaning in binary strings
What are your plans? I mean, I don’t want to get too specific if you’re doing things that you’re not ready to talk about yet, but in terms of the future and the work you’ve done in education, what we’re talking about now, how do you see what you’ll be doing evolving over the next five, 10 years?
SUGATA
Well, I wish I had a fantastic answer to say there’s an incredible secret thing that I’m working on, but it’s nothing of the sort. Nothing of the sort. I retired in 2019. And I retired meaning yes, I seriously retired. So what did I do? Well, back in my university days, I used to be a good programmer, really good one, even if I say so myself. So after I retired, the first thing I did was I went back to programming. I started writing programs and I wrote all kinds of programs.
Among them, something that I had been curious about for a very long time is about what I call binary strings. Binary strings are just zeros and ones, a whole set of zeros and ones. Now, if you take Beethoven’s ninth Symphony and you convert it into an audio file for a computer, that audio file is a string of zeros and ones. And if I take Picasso’s famous painting, the Guernica or something like that, and I digitize that and I feed it into a computer, that also becomes a string of zeros and ones.
I did this. I took two of these great works of art, and I chopped a random section of that string, maybe a hundred thousand bits, zeros and ones out of the ninth symphony, out of the Guernica. And I wrote a statistics program to say, “Tell me what do these pieces of string represent?” The statistics gave me a very, very interesting answer. The statistics said, “Both the strings are random.” I said, “What? Beethoven, Picasso random?” Well, the statistics said there are as many zeros as there are one’s, and they’re distributed the way they would be if we were tossing a coin. So there’s nothing to tell.
JANE
No patterns they could find.
SUGATA
No pattern. So I said, “Good Lord. Then where is the meaning? Where is the meaning in that binary string?” A long, long time ago, I had written an article once, it’s called Meaning in Binary Strings, and it was actually published somewhere, where I tried to look at this. I went back to that after retiring, and that’s what I’m working on right now to say, “There has to be meaning in it somewhere. Where is it?”
JANE
So you’re looking for the meaning.
Does random exist?
I’m looking for where inside a binary string does the meaning exist when statistics says that it’s all random? So I haven’t made much progress yet except that I keep bumping into these really strange things. I’ll give you just the hint of an answer as far as music is concerned. The programs that I wrote were trying to tell me that a string that represents music contains meaning in the silence. What’s it trying to say? I haven’t gotten very far with it so far, but I can tell you the one sentence that’s inside my head right now. It’s trying to tell me that music is made up of silence. That sounds like a cosmic joke, doesn’t it?
JANE
Well, it’s the silence between the zeros and ones?
SUGATA
I guess so, I guess so. No, the silence is also represented by a set of eight zeros and ones, but that happens very, very frequently inside that. And it reminded me of a fantastic conversation that happened once a long time ago between Albert Einstein and the Nobel Prize winning Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore. And Tagore had invited Einstein to Bengal, and Einstein was talking to Tagore and said, “I work with space and time, and the two things are related.” And Tagore says, “In most things, yes, but you know what? Not in music.” Einstein says, “What about music?” And Tagore said, “Music exists only in time and not in space.”
And I don’t know how Einstein reacted to that, but I think the two of them actually became very good friends. But anyhow, so when I saw the results of that little experiment I was doing, and I looked at the fact that most of music seems to be constructed with silence out of Tagore, and I thought, “Okay, so I’m looking at something which doesn’t exist in space. It exists somewhere else. It exists inside time.”
JANE
That is fascinating. I wonder where that’s going to take you.
SUGATA
I don’t know. The good thing about retiring is you don’t care, do you? It’ll take me where it takes me.
JANE
Wow. Well, I sure would like to have another conversation with you when you see where you are, if that’s possible.
Intelligent generative AI models: a cosmic joke
Yeah, and I’m sure there will be other people also who will work on this. The other thing that fascinates me is like it fascinates most people are these generative AI models like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini and so on. So when they first came in 2022, a lot of people used to ask me, “So what do you think of this and what do you think of that?” I said, “Look, I don’t think anything of these things until I know how they work.” So you know what I did? Only a retired person would be foolish enough to try this.
JANE
What did you do?
SUGATA
I took my little notebook computer, a Dell computer, the one that I’m talking to you on, and I wrote a generative AI program on it and discovered very quickly that it won’t work with that little computer, it needs a really big computer. And I knew something really good about generative AI. It’s not a war of algorithms between OpenAI and Google, it’s a war of money. Who can afford-
JANE
Oh, the power that you need. Yes.
SUGATA
Yeah, the computing power that you need to build. I learned how these things work. It’s a fascinating understanding. It’s a fascinating understanding because like that work with music and binary strings, this one also had absolutely terrible, terrible answers. What it says about human thinking is that it doesn’t actually exist. What does exist is the ability to predict what they call the next token, which means that as I’m speaking, what my brain is doing is that for each word that I speak, it very quickly assigns a probability to what I should say next, and it builds the sentence up like this rapidly inside my head. And that’s what the generative AI does as well.
This is not thinking as we understood it at all. This is another cosmic joke. There is no grammar, the syntax lies inside the probability. There is no meaning, there is no thought. It all lies inside a cloud of probabilities.
JANE
And it all lies within a cloud of all the stuff that they analyze, all the data that’s been-
SUGATA
You feed them everything that is on the internet, and then you ask them a question. And it doesn’t reproduce an answer from what it has read, it actually creates the answer. But it creates it by taking a word and saying, “This word should be followed by that word and then that word should be followed by that one.” And out comes a sentence, which makes sense. And you think it’s thinking.
JANE
And that’s why it makes mistakes also.
SUGATA
Well, I mean, so do we, actually.
JANE
Actually, yeah.
SUGATA
It’s not a big deal. I keep pointing this out to people that why are we so strict with AI saying, “Oh, it talked nonsense, or it hallucinated.” Haven’t you talked nonsense and hallucinated? Of course you have. So it’s part of the probability cloud going wrong once in a while.
JANE
Well, it looks like you’re going to have a pretty interesting retirement.
SUGATA
But so far, I have a grandchild who’s just turned one. He was born on the same day as ChatGPT.
JANE
Really? That’s a sign of something, don’t you think?
SUGATA
Yes, that’s right. But anyway, when I look at him, he’s now one, and I keep thinking, “Well, what can I as an educator say about him at age 30? He might be living on Mars. What am I going to teach him?” And out comes my old motto, the only thing I can teach him is “figure it out”.
Taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home
Figure it out. That’s great. Sugata, I think we’re probably going to close our conversation on that very, I would say wise term.
SUGATA
We went all over the place.
JANE
We followed a logical path to somewhere. We just have to figure it out now.
SUGATA
Exactly, exactly.
JANE
Well, thank you very much for this conversation. It’s been very stimulating. That’s the purpose of this podcast. I call it IMAGINIZE.World, and it’s a question of imagining something before we can create it. I think you’re an example of a person who does that, or maybe you don’t imagine what you’re going to create, but you have a sense of a direction. Is that true or am I reading too much into it?
SUGATA
Well, you want a one-liner? Remember what I started with in this conversation? Partly truth and partly fiction.
JANE
Fiction.
SUGATA
Followed by the line, which I didn’t say, “Taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home.”
JANE
That gives me plenty to think about for the rest of the evening.
SUGATA
Thank you, Jane. Thank you. Lovely to meet you.
JANE
Thank you.
SUGATA
Thank you for having me.
