A Tale of Deferred Passion
I was just a teenager then. But instead of chasing girls or
giving in to peer pressure to join my classmates for a smoke, I was chasing the
future and everything it held for us. Sci-fi was my favorite genre, and despite
how rare those movies were, I spent way more time with a film than its actual
runtime. I would research its themes, learn from it, and explore the ideas it
presented.
The Early Days of the Internet
The internet had just arrived in the country, and cybercafés
were slowly starting to pop up. One café near my university became my favorite
hangout spot after the cinema. There, I would search and read about the
infinite possibilities of the future, and about scientific discoveries that we
once thought were pure fiction but had become reality.
I was fascinated by theoretical physics—teleportation
experiments, time travel, the concept of time, and the different applications
of Einstein's theories. But my biggest obsession was Artificial Intelligence.
To me, the most sci-fi concept of all was a human talking to
a piece of metal, and that metal answering back.
It was pure madness... yet science was proving it could be
possible!
Back then, time travel felt more realistic than talking to machines. But the more I learned about it, the more mind-blowing it seemed. My knowledge didn't come from scientific journals or rigid textbooks that turned the whole thing into a dull, narrow-minded technology that killed the imagination. Instead, I gathered everything I knew about AI from the novels of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, the stories of Nihad Sharif, and the dialogues of Mustafa Mahmoud.
A cinematic heartbreak
That's why, when I saw a trailer for the movie A.I.
Artificial Intelligence in the cinema one day, I got goosebumps from sheer
excitement. The trailer was mysterious, thrilling, and featured two names that
perfectly matched my youthful enthusiasm while carrying the ultimate seal of
quality: Steven Spielberg and Isaac Asimov.
I eagerly followed the cinema schedules, waiting for the
film to be released, letting my imagination run wild. I had read a lot of
Asimov, but I didn't know which of his novels the movie was adapting—maybe one
I hadn't read yet.
But the movie never made it to the theaters.
I asked at the box office but got no explanation. Time
passed. My frustration and sadness over missing the film only grew. It was the
early 2000s, and movie piracy wasn't booming like it would be years later. This
left an annoying void inside me, but it only fueled my interest in AI. I
started following the news. From time to time, claims of new scientific
breakthroughs in AI would pop up, and I would rush to read about them, only to
end up disappointed.
The Gap Between Machine and Thought
My vision of AI was its ability to think. To debate.
To answer a question without simply being programmed with a massive database of
pre-written questions and answers, acting as nothing more than a search engine
fetching a ready-made response.
I believed there was a massive difference between a machine
and actual thought. A machine is mechanical; you program it for specific tasks,
and it can't operate outside of them. Thinking, or true intelligence, means
creating something new. Doing something you weren't programmed to do.
That's why my disappointments piled up with every new
"breakthrough" in AI. For many years, I was convinced that this kind
of AI would never happen—at least not in my lifetime. And if it did, it would
be a century or two from now, and I would not be around then.
Reclaiming Lost Passions
After finishing my Master's in Comparative Literature in
2017, I felt like I had reclaimed a part of myself. I had always loved thought,
literature, and philosophy, and my studies immersed me in this world,
satisfying a good chunk of that passion. That's why I started chasing my old
dreams again. I thought about returning to my first love: studying mathematics,
which I had abandoned in the endless hustle to make a living.
I dug out statistics books and bought Calculus textbooks.
But once again, life got in the way. Work troubles, marital disputes, a
divorce... and then a hellish pandemic struck the world, the likes of which we
had only ever seen in movies.
So, I retreated to a quiet, lonely corner. I took out my
math books, grabbed my laptop, and started killing time by rediscovering the
pure mental joy of studying.
Then, out of nowhere, I decided to learn programming. The
world was locked down with illness, news of death surrounded us, and working
from home gave me an unprecedented amount of free time for self-reflection. I
took two or three courses, chuckling to myself as I remembered that teenage boy
whose passion I was finally feeding, albeit very late.
The world opened up again, the pandemic ended, and I stepped
back out into life with new, heartwarming companionship, having regained a
piece of what I had lost over the changing years.
The Spark Reignited
By early 2023, I was approaching forty. The fiery enthusiasm
and wild imagination of my youth had faded, replaced by a quiet calmness tinged
with frustration at the misery of the world. I had stopped following AI news
long ago, leaning instead toward fiction mixed with a dose of realism.
I had finally watched the movie A.I. years
later—around 2015, if memory serves—and I didn't even like it. It felt overly
philosophical, lacking imagination, and presented an illogical tragedy, in my
opinion. It spoke to my logic, but not to my imagination or my obsession.
I had studied comparative literature alongside my career in
finance. I satisfied an old craving by diving into the worlds of imagination,
writing novels after spending a lifetime writing poetry. I published short
novels (novellas) with some friends, then published three full novels: Al-Qannas
(The Sniper), Al-Awda mn al-Ganoub (Return from the South), and Hulm
Evenza (Evenza's Dream). I also had a bunch of unfinished manuscripts
sitting in my desk drawer. I leaned a bit into philosophy, loved studying
history, and drifted away from mathematics (my first passion), using it only as
much as my job required for logical and numerical reasoning.
As I neared forty in early 2023, I heard the news—among many
others—that a company had achieved a new breakthrough in artificial
intelligence. I smiled sarcastically.
Finding out the truth was just a button-click away on my
phone, but I didn't bother. I was utterly convinced it was no different from
the dozens of past headlines about pathetic, laughable baby steps falsely
labeled as "Artificial Intelligence."
I spent about three months in total denial, ignoring social
media trends and my friends' chatter, fully convinced it was just another fad
that would soon pass. Perhaps I just didn't want to stain an old dream with the
depressing, frustrating reality and its fake claims. I had finally made peace
with myself and didn't want to exhaust my spirit with unnecessary
disappointment.
But when the buzz didn't die down, I sighed heavily and
decided to give it a try. I pushed the button on my phone, and my eyes widened
in sheer shock.
Did it really happen?
A tiny chat box managed to stir up a complete storm inside
me.
A tiny chat box transported me back to being that young
teenager standing at the cinema doors, clutching novels on public transport
like a prized possession, promising himself a blissful evening far away in the
fictional world he traveled to every night.
A tiny chat box captivated me and brought me back to myself,
after all the disappointments the world had thrown my way.
Down the Rabbit Hole
The discovery was mind-blowing. After testing the tool
thousands of times, a burning desire grew inside me to know exactly how it
worked under the hood!
I started a new phase of reading, following up, and trying
to understand. The news and information were overwhelming and massive. I
resumed my learning, diving back into the programming I had started a few years
prior, and continued studying the math that had now become essential to grasp
what was happening.
I was truly drowning in it, and mastering everything was
impossible without structured, academic study. So, I embarked on a new journey:
a Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence. Within the first few months, I
experienced a cognitive and practical leap I had never imagined.
I immersed myself in research, projects, and various
applications. Yet, I felt like something was wrong... there were flawed
assumptions being made. A superficial understanding of what a
"machine" truly means, even a smart one, versus what it means to be
human.
My backgrounds in philosophy, literature, and mathematics
intertwined to form a grand vision of what machine intelligence should be. I
started pondering the gap between this vision and what was actually happening
in reality.
Perhaps my grasp of language, my capacity for philosophical
analysis, my skill with numbers and mathematical theories, and my lifelong
obsession with literature and sci-fi—all of this made me feel that things were
muddled and the standards were conflicting. I realized that they were going
about it all wrong.
Taking the Leap
That's when I decided to take a leap of faith. I submitted
one of my AI research papers to a conference in Japan. I sat back, fully
expecting a rejection, but in truth, I was just looking for a second opinion on
my thoughts and a critique of my vision of how things should be.
But reality had other surprises in store for the
forty-year-old trying to fulfill his teenage dreams so late in the game.
The paper was accepted.
I traveled to Kitakyushu to present it and discuss my ideas
about the flawed assumptions made by the AI community. I followed that up with
another paper accepted in Spain, and a third in America...
It was as if I were discovering a whole new world. I carried
a hidden vision within me, alongside a deep, gut feeling that they were doing
it all wrong. Stepping into these long debates with them was exhilarating,
pushing me to get even more involved, like an addict who doesn't know how to
stop.
This might just be the only frustration-free story of my
life. Or perhaps, it was all crafted by the imagination of that teenage boy
running from one cinema to another in the rain, hiding his novels so he could
escape far away into their pages.
And maybe, just maybe, the forty-year-old man had to chase
after the boy's dreams, running right behind him, in hopes of finally finding
himself after being lost for so long.
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