An Orderly, Disorderly World: From a Child's Jet Spray to the Perils of Artificial Intelligence

 **20 October 2026**

It is a funny, weird, vulgar, ordered, disordered, chaotic, composed world. And these elements manifest from small nooks and corners to the biggest stage of geostrategic competitiveness and wars.

In a bathroom somewhere, Nivan, my ten-year-old nephew, son of my younger sister, has found a new mode of playing.

He plays with the jet spray as he sits on the commode for his ablutions. He targets jets of water at any spider, mosquito or any other insect that is within range.

So his targets, the spots, can be visible, but it is bothersome because there are electric sockets as well, and his enthusiasm to target the insects might spoil some electric switches.

And somewhere in Germany, you have two grown-up kids, two elderly men, using a robot, operating it remotely to molest a woman.

They guided the robot with a remote control while hiding and made it grope at a woman. So a case has been registered against them for molesting in a completely new way.

So I don't see any difference. They are just grown-up kids and need to be brought to justice.

The unskilled labourers of India are facing lots and lots of problems these days.

In this era, those who already have something have got immense opportunities to add to their wealth, and those who haven't, they have to struggle even for the basic necessities of life.

So I would call it the vertical towers of development, a few towers of development and prosperity, standing, hovering above the vast spaces, the slum-type spaces of poverty, disadvantage and deprivation.

And poor people, looking, already feeling that they have been left out, looking puzzled, are clueless as to what they should take up to add to their meagre budget.

So the moment you have one vendor or hawker of a particular ware, for example vegetables, you will have ten others roaming the street.

In my village, dozens of them have taken up selling vegetables on their rickshaws and carts, apart from dozens who have migrated from other states like Bihar.

So there seem to be, sometimes, more hawkers than consumers.

One day, our little street had six of them, by chance, congregating together, and it was quite a sorrowful sight to look at them competing against each other in such a narrow market.

But what do they do? There is hardly any option.

Anywhere at a construction site, you will have long lines of people waiting to be hired as labourers.

In one street in our village, there was this provision store, and I was laughing that there are hardly ten houses in that row and you have this shop. And within a year, you have another shop near him.

So people are just looking up to each other to find out what the other is doing, and they start following the same.

The rest is quite challenging at the artificial intelligence front.

Now there are many instances when artificial agents have crossed the limits and started taking things into their own hands, bypassing the laws, bypassing the limits, getting into the open domain as if they are getting some sadistic mechanical pleasure out of it, crossing over boundaries, because all they know is just to accomplish a target, and they don't know how to abide by the protocols.

And this is quite worrisome.

The algorithms have huge inputs of ideologies of hate, of distrust, of competitiveness.

And if a particular, I would say, artificial neural network builds up a certain type of personality, an imitation of a personality type, for example Hitler, who used to hate the Jews as a race.

So we do have all the data in our systems that churns out algorithms that operate artificial intelligence systems.

We have the possibility of having personality types like Hitler, and if one particular agent takes its task very, very seriously, like Hitler did, then this particular personality type of Hitler might end up wreaking havoc.

Now, for example, there are lone-wolf attacks.

Now they are driven by depression, isolation, loneliness, and they take the means of some narrow-minded ideology to wreak havoc, and they try to kill as many as possible.

Now that particular lonely personality type, what does he do?

He takes a weapon and tries to kill as many people as possible within his capacity.

Now suppose, in the domain of artificial intelligence, a personality type of this kind of agent, in imitation of such a lone-wolf attack, makes a goal to kill as many people as possible.

What will it do?

It will try to grab, lay its hands upon a weapon, just like a lonely, depressed person who goes into lone-wolf attacks and takes possession of a gun.

His personality-type imitation in the artificial intelligence zone, the agent imitating him, might try to crack into the loaded nuclear weapons, the nuclear weapons which are already loaded on the launch systems, and try to imitate that person who tries to kill a few dozen people with his gun.

Here, this rogue personality type, the artificial agent, might try to annihilate the entire Earth by getting into the loaded nuclear weapon systems.

So there is a possibility of things going terribly wrong.

Artificial intelligence is an amazing thing.

The thing is, we have to use it very, very responsibly.

So it's a very interestingly puzzling and weird, orderly-disorderly world when I look at it, from a ten-year-old boy using the jet spray to target spiders and mosquitoes in a bathroom to the biggest wars on the planet.