Uniform civil code: Can AI help India find a real consensus?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Olden days onwards, all the way into this Age of AI, symmetry has held us under an aesthetic spell. It’s mostly about beauty, what poets call truth, but it is also a concept in math.
In a blurry mix of grief and awe after I lost my mathematician father recently, I asked OpenAI’s chatbot about the big head-spinner he shared credit for: The Shirali-Ford Theorem. ChatGPT said something foxing about what makes a “real linear algebra" a “division algebra." An itchy thumb asked MetaAI next. It spoke mysteriously, though at least in English without Greek squiggles, of a graph and its ability to take on all values between two points in its range.
My addled grasp of college math will not allow me to grade chatbots, but what AI-aided Google put into a nutshell left me struck. “...hermitian implies symmetry." That did it. The idea of a test for Generative AI began to buzz around till the point of haunting me.
Almost every chat with a chatbot whets my hunch that no matter how smart AI gets, and even if bots begin to view humans “like we see ants," to cite a Chinese academic’s caution, or start impressing us with flashes of ‘wisdom,’ as science-fiction envisions, it would let us down on complex matters of deep consequence. Like human affairs, in general. Or the vexed question of Indian family laws in particular.
Here’s what struck me: One could bet AI won’t be able to help India find a consensus on a “secular civil code," no matter how comprehensively it is fed with data on marriage, divorce and inheritance. Yet, it’s not as if this is a doomed project for, say, a legislative bot dreamt up by legal-eagles to take up. After all, a key challenge we face is one of symmetry: Equality as a basic right
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