“Jungle mein mor nacha, kisne dekha?’ (A peacock danced in the jungle, who saw it?)
The question of the dancing
peacock has quietly lived in every Hindi-speaking household. It sounds dismissive.
But beneath it sits a discomforting thought - if no one saw it, did it even
happen?
The same thought is posed in
the English counterpart – “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around
to hear it, does it make a sound?”
I ran into this question recently
at work. I said that I’m writing, but my blog doesn’t have much reach. In the
age of Gen-AI and an explosion of online content, mine was neither famous nor
relatable to most people. In fact, I still used a Blogspot domain which has
grown redundant in view of the newer platforms like Medium and SubStack. So
that question hit me, was I the peacock in the forest that no one was watching?
Why does a peacock dance? Does
it dance to show the visiting audience its beautiful feathers? Is it even aware
of its own beauty? Or does it dance simply because it is a peacock and that’s
what peacocks do. Other birds might dance as well. Other birds might try to
paint themselves as peacocks and copy its moves. And might fly on high masts to
make themselves more visible to the public eye. But no matter how hard it
tries, a crow does not become a peacock. Perhaps because a peacock isn’t trying
to be a peacock – it simply is a peacock.
But what happens when the
peacock starts measuring its worth by the number of eyeballs it reaches? What
happens when the peacock laments that it can’t fly as high as the eagle or swim
like the duck. Would it try to fly higher, become more visible? That seems to
be a futile question. A peacock doesn’t measure its worth by the likes,
comments, and subscriptions of strangers it doesn’t know. The peacock dances
for itself. Maybe, it dances for the Creator that has endowed it with feathers.
But no more. The world tries to judge the peacock by its views and likes. The
peacock simply continues to dance, away from such debates.
In the age of abundance,
knowledge is not a scarce resource anymore; it is abundant, almost aggressively
so. Neither is meaning or synthesis or any of the traditional indicators of intelligence.
With LLMs, one can understand any topic at any level desirable. For example,
just the other day I asked ChatGPT to explain thermodynamic entropy using
Diogenes’ philosophy; and ChatGPT complied. Knowledge and understanding is
available on demand – high in supply. Everyone can learn anything. Everyone can
say something. Everyone can publish. Everyone can dance.
The need for public validation
runs high and attention has become the commodity that is short in supply. What
happens when an explosion of information vies for attention? Attention spans
grow shorter. What earlier used to be dopamine rewards have now converted into
constant unending streams of dopamine, flushing the mind into overload. That is
why you feel exhaustion after scrolling through reels. Not because the
information quality is bad – it is in fact the richest humanity has ever had to
offer. The human mind has lost the ability to absorb information because it is
unable to appreciate anything in depth.
The universe put a lot of
effort into creating the potato. First of all, it had to undergo the Big Bang.
Then it had to create the Earth. Conditions had to be right for life to emerge
underwater. That life had to find a way to breathe air on land. Still clinging
to roots, life evolved, adapted, struggled, and survived through possibilities
and probabilities – finally to give rise to the potato!
The potato chip is different.
First of all, frying the potato alters its chemical composition. It makes for a
tastier snack, but does not contain the nutrients built by the efforts of the
universe. That is what consumption of information through LLMs and reels is
like. It is not food – it is a snack. Getting used to such quick snacks takes
away the joy of learning the real thing. The brain is a muscle and like any muscle,
it can’t be blown up into strength. It needs to be taught to struggle. To sit
with an idea and to think. The age of AI is robbing human brains of the ability
to think. Because we do not practice thinking any more. If an AI can do it, why
use our own brains?
I remember visiting the Sunderbans.
Most people take a river safari in hopes of seeing the Royal Bengal Tiger. I
have undertaken many such safaris in my life. There is always that lofty goal
of spotting a rare wild beast. Sometimes you’re able to spot it, most times you
come back having seen only the marks of it. As I had come back after that trip
after seeing the large paw-prints of the tiger on the coasts of islands. I
missed seeing the elusive tiger. But the tiger, I suspect, did not feel the
same. People came from around the world to watch the Royal Bengal Tiger of the
Sunderbans. If only the tiger knew… perhaps he would have been a better host.
But I guess that’s the fun of it. You could always see a tiger in your local
zoo. But what you want to see is the good fortune of spotting a real
tiger in its natural habitat. You wouldn’t want to see a person dressed up in a
tiger’s costume running wild in the jungle for your show.
In the age of abundance, we
have confused visibility with value. We measure what can be measured – views, likes,
reach, engagement. But there are things that resist measurement – thought, stillness,
depth, meaning. It is now rare to find the ability to sit with an idea and not
rush to resolve it - the ability to not act. The ability to feel something
without needing to articulate it. These are things that do not go viral. But
they remain, quietly, at the core of what it means to be human.
Our parents grew up in the age
of scarcity, where resources were things to be preserved for a rainy day. We
grew up in the age of information, where data was gold and knowledge was the
real currency. This is the age of abundance, where knowledge is not currency
anymore. There is an explosion of content, and we do not know what to do with
it. Connection perhaps? Psychologists are repeatedly warning that while
we remain infinitely more connected to the world through the internet, humans
are lonelier than ever. We don’t relate to others, we don’t relate to
ourselves, and we don’t relate to God. The potato has finally abandoned the
ground and is now struggling for roots.
So what is the peacock supposed
to do – it dances. Because that’s what peacocks do. Perhaps the question was
never “who saw it?”, but “would it still dance if no one did?”
