On dignity of labor

Is one form of work superior or inferior to other?

When the question is put this way, the answer is obviously no; but with qualifications. This blog is about discussion those qualifications.

Since all form work that is available needs to be done and someone has to do it, inferior or superior is incorrect. Instead, the right words to use are enjoyable work vs boring work.

Let me try to articulate it and then we can see what forms of work are more enjoyable then others. All forms of work that have scope of improvement even after you have been at it for more than 10 years are more enjoyable than those that stagnate. Note that this is two class categorization, there is no ranking of jobs in terms of enjoyment here. Though I have not used the term "love your job" here, but my definition is driven by the idea that the jobs that are challenging enough to have scope of improvement are the most loveable jobs.

Let's try a few examples .

Is entrepreneurship better than working at a big corporate? Not necessarily, you could be innovating and learning in a big company and you could be regurgitating old ideas in a thriving market. Conventionally, jobs in a big corporate are considered not-loveable because it is easy to loose sight of your impact to the company and the society.

Is farming any worse than a job of a scientist? No. A curious farmer is also a scientist who experiments on his land to maximize the ways of crop production. Given the knowledge, resources and training, both scientists and farmer can be good or bad at their work.

Is software engineering worse than doing research? I have worked in IT role for 3.5 years and I can say that software design is an art that you can keep improving even after 10 years. Why am I clarifying this? Because I just heard someone using the term "code monkeys" for software engineering at a computer vision conference in Boston. Then I realized, how we as researchers condemn engineering as something that we should stay away from. There is a rationale behind that: specialization of skill set; not that engineering is inferior than research. I guess, we should try to train ourself in research and focus our energy on research because we aren't trained to do engineering that well. And whenever we get a grant to do research, someone else is going to re-engineer the system that we built, perhaps in a better way.

I guess, each community of workers who love their job will find some or other reason to despise others but we should remind ourselves that even inferior jobs need to be done, at least till the time they are automated. And till that time, we need to be thankful to those who take up such jobs.

Apart from this distinction we should also realize that some forms of skills are more respected by the society than others because of no particular reason. Most skilful gymnast wins a gold medal in Olympics, but most no one tries to find out the most skilful carpenter, mason or potter. A painter having access to art galleries and one who understands and communicates the issues that concerns rich minds can be a millionaire while a street side painter with limited knowledge of rich circles and mindset may fight poverty all his life.

All honest forms of jobs command my respect as long as they contribute to the society.

Arguments against free will

This post has been inspired by the following video, where Noam Chomsky expresses his opinion on free will. He just despises the idea of absence of free will. He quotes William James "if you don't believe in the idea of free will why even bother presenting an argument."

My stand is that humans are state machines, they gobble up input from senses, saves a part of them as memory and takes predictable actions based on that memory. There may be uncertainty in the Heisenberg sense in prediction, but overall there is no external force that helps humans take the "free" decision, it is just your past memory along will your genes/body that completely determines your every "free" decision which again determines the input to your senses and recursively your "free" decision.

I may be wrong and experiments may suggest otherwise in future, but for now no experiments suggest otherwise and the theory of state machines fits perfectly to evolution and psychological evidences and theories.

Noam Chomsky asserts that we can't explain free will, but it is central to our beliefs. I agree it is central to our beliefs, but I don't agree that we can't explain it. The explanation is just that belief of free will is just an illusion. I agree it is a pretty provocative statement but why else explains psychological diseases, concussions and experiments that show people justifying independent decision taken by their left and right brain.

Let's get back to the question that was initially asked to Noam Chomsky, "How does morality fits in the idea of determinism and materialism?" The answer lies in accepting morality not as a personal concept but as a social concept which trains people to think on a social level rather than personal level. The common counter argument is that isn't it unfair to punish a person who is not responsible for his own crimes. I would say it is unfair but who said that life is meant to be fair. We need to punish criminals to discourage future criminals because knowledge that you will be punished for your crimes is part of the deterministic decision machine that we so lovingly want to call free will.

Arguments against AI apocalypse

AI apocalypse has been the favourite subject of many science fiction movies so far. However, when respected scientists and entrepreneurs vocalize similar concerns, we should be concerned. Being a student in fields close to "AI", I would like to believe that AI is going to be mostly harmless or at least claim that it depends on the user.

There are various reasons why I believe that robots with human like intelligence not going to be much much superior than the entire mankind and even if they are, why the apocalypse like situation is unlikely.

Inherent Compromises

Human like intelligence, or AI is inherently different from computers like intelligence. Humans learn by experience, i.e. by trial and error which is true for modern AI or machine learning algorithms. Hence, making mistakes is not only our weakness, but also our strength. Any algorithm that is not deterministic is bound make wrong or suboptimal choices at least some of the time.

Another thing to understand about the AI, that is relevant to the argument, is "overfitting". It is often believed that an AI machine can grow infinitely wiser because of the tremendous amount of data we can throw at it. However, the more data will mean that the machine grows wiser but more and more rigid in terms of adaptability. Think of how old people find it difficult to adjust to changing surroundings and find it difficult to learn new things. This is, in my understanding, equivalent to a machine learning term called "overfitting". In a way, I am claiming that experience and adaptability are mutually incompatible and each AI machine designed will have to strike a balance among the two. Making a machine that "understands" everything and is still open to learning new things is as challenging as designing a car that is both most powerful and has best fuel economy.

Evolution is better

Another things that makes me undermine AI is my respect towards evolution. Evolution is like a constant search for a better organism with sole aim of survival. The algorithm has been running constantly for 3.6 billion years now.  I am not saying that we are the optimal point in the search, but AI will have start all over again to make something as spontaneously survivable as human beings with entirely different ingredients.

Peace is better than war

This brings me to the second part of the argument that is even if AI becomes super intelligent than humans, it is not going to take over us by a war. There is evidence to support that world is becoming less and less violent. And I believe that this is not because we have increased sense of morality but because we understand that war is suboptimal for both sides. If we accidentally build an AI machine, that is far more intelligent than us, probably it is going to understand the importance of peace better than us.

Also, I believe that the difference between human like robots and robots assisted humans is going to decrease over time. By the time we will have intelligent robots, we will have implants and assistive devices that will make human decisions far more logical, fast and data driven. This will also make it difficult for the evil AI machine to decide who is a machine and who is a human.

Super intelligent will become Politicians or CEOs

We should ask ourselves, do the super intelligent rule the world as it is now? Yes they do. Most intelligent people in the world realize that morality is for show off, not for practice. Hence they become politicians or CEOs. I would like to speculate that super intelligent AI machines that can lie better than humans will indeed take over the world, but the transition will be too smooth to be noticed. It is more likely that we will be fighting for their "human like" rights.

In the end, I would just add my political advice to a sci-fi article: our best bets against the current intelligent and future super intelligent are in keeping the power over natural resources decentralized.

Why is AAP still a ray of hope?

This mid-March 2014 and in my opinion AAP has done nothing that counts as betrayal of the people's trust and that is why I continue to support AAP.

Various valid points have been raised against AAP and I won't hesitate to admit my reservation against some of their decisions; the most disheartening being relaxation in candidate selection procedure. Also, I agree that Arvind is a liar (Edit: After clarification by Arvind, I think otherwise) and shrewd politician, but I am willing to excuse him for political compulsions.

However, this blog is about addressing concerns of some of my friends about AAP. First of them being about personal wealth of Arvind Kejriwal. Arvind Kejriwal's wealth is more than that of Narendra Modi and is around 1.5 crore according to his election affidavit. But all that is reasonably explained in the affidavit itself. Arvind's wife is earning around 9 lacs annually, he is drawing a salary of 2 lacs annually, he inherited a property worth 37 lacs, he bought a property worth 55 lacs in 1998 for 3.5 lacs. It is arguable, whether a property worth 3.5 lacs can appreciate to 55 lacs (16 fold) in 15 years. Such kind of increase in property rates is not rare in satellite towns of Delhi.

Another question asked by a friend of mine was "Why Arvind has never questioned Sonia Gandhi?" My answer is "I don't know." But I also don't understand what it proves. Arvind has not also question Rajnath Singh probably (I may have missed it, if he has). The point is that not targeting a particular person doesn't mean anything.

Recently Arvind visited Mumbai which caused inconvenience to a lot of people because of his travel by local train and auto which was exaggerated by our unbiased media. A friend of mine asked "How is AAP different?" I apologize to my friend for the inconvenience. But is "inconvenience" caused to the masses the only criteria by which you judge the differences between parties.

How about transparency in funding?

How about supporting RTI for political parties?

How about supporting independent CBI?

How about clarifying stand on gas pricing issue?

How about fielding candidates with pending criminal cases?

These are one of the few reasons why I continue to support AAP. I see AAP as a small party which is likely to provide a corruption free democratic, if not a capitalist India.

In favor of wealth tax

I am not an economist, I am an engineer.I have never understood taxation.

Income tax applies on individual incomes, however Co-orporate tax applies only on profits. If you are travelling on business purpose it would be counted as business expenses and would not be taxed as it is not part of profit. But if you are travelling as a salaried individual; your income has already been taxed. A usual technique taken by businesses to avoid taxes is take minimum salary and show most of your expenditures as business expense, including your house, your car and your servants.

The difficulty here is how to define profits? Let's start with an example. As an individual, if I work in Hyderabad and visit my family twice an year to Panchkula; is my travel expense due to business or personal reasons? The idea behind HRA (House Rent Allowance) is to consider house renting as a business expense. If I can have a small company registered at my name, I can easily show off these expenses as not part of my profits and avoid taxes. However, as a full time employee, I cannot do so.

Sales tax targets consumption of goods. The more a person consumes luxurious goods, the more he must be taxed. However, we don't want to create unnecessary friction for business purposes. If I am buying steel to make buildings I am not consuming steel and we don't want taxation to be unnecessary burden on capital generation. Moreover, we want food, water and clothing to be affordable and not be taxed. This causes a dilemma again. For example, diesel can be used by cars, but is also used by things that transport food, water and clothing. Should we really tax diesel less?

Having established it is difficult to tax based on income/profits or consumption I would like to explore something different.

No it is not transaction tax.

It is wealth tax.

A society is made up of people, land, water, air and other resources. If the child birth was a social concept instead of personal, each child at its birth would have deserved equal right on the resources just as  child deserves equal right on his parental property. However, we have all learned that this rat race of resource acquisition (getting richer) is a necessary part of keeping people motivated. Having said that we all must agree that we want a healthy competition where every child enters this race with almost equal opportunity. Hence there is a need to transfer some funds from have to have nots.

The idea is to tax based on asset ownership. Heavy wealth tax-- the only tax. If you own an asset, you will be taxed. The more natural resource you own, the more you will be taxed. I mean a land with iron mine or high fertility should be taxed more than a dessert land. The more you own a natural resource, the more you will be taxed. If business owns a car; it will pay the tax for the car. The idea is that if a business is making losses even after owning a lot of assets (cars, land, chairs, computers) it must be taxed as it is its own failure to utilize those assets to produce an income. Of course, if he/she rents that asset the owner will pass on the property tax to the renter. Proposed taxation model decides the taxes based on the market value of the company rather than the profits it makes.

But how does this create social buffer or equality. In this taxation system, we have not seen so far any incentive to keep food, water and clothing low cost. The solution to that in my humble opinion is not subsidies, but direct cash transfer.

The question is how much to transfer and to whom?

Second part of the question is easier to answer. To everyone. Why to everyone? Why not just the poor? Because I think it is lot easier to collect higher taxes and give a small amount (just for food and water) to everyone than to determine who is poor reliably. Even if we provide Rs. 100 (3 times the poverty line) to every citizen of India, the cost will be just Rs 12,000 crores. However, with this taxation system the price of food will increase so Rs. 100 may not be sufficient. That is why I said that first part of the question is a little more difficult.

Basically, I don't know how much to transfer. I just know that it must be just enough for minimalistic healthy survival for a recommended family size (2+2 ?). To buy enough food and water, through a minimum cost channel.


But wealth tax is not new. It is has been tried and tested; leading to capital flight in countries like France and others. What can be done to stop the capital flight? Do we want to tax the retirement savings of a salaried person? Do we want to discourage savings because savings is wealth and wealth is tax? In my humble opinion, if we tax just the immovable assets like land, buildings etc the problem of capital flight can be addressed. In fact, all the immovable assets don't have to be immovable. Even things like cars, furniture, computers, equipment, machines can be taxed as it is difficult to move them outside the country. The only things that should be avoided to be taxed are savings, debt investments and investment tools like gold, silver etc. Does this solution fixes all the evils of wealth tax?

Let me know how I am wrong.