Ali Minai is Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and a member of the Neuroscience Graduate Faculty at the University of Cincinnati. His research focuses on complex adaptive systems, computational neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. He has co-edited several books, including Conflict and Complexity: Countering Terrorism, Insurgency, Ethnic and Regional Violence (Springer, 2015). He is a former President of the International Neural Network Society. He is interested in history, science, art, poetry, politics, cricket, photography, and science fiction - not necessarily in that order. Two collections of his Urdu poetry have been published in 2005 and 2017. Email: minaiaa [at] gmail.com
by Ali Minai Among all the fascinating mythical creatures that populate the folklore of various cultures, one that stands out is the golem – an artificial, half-formed human-like creature that comes to us from Jewish folklore. Though the idea goes back much further, the most famous golem is the one said to have been created…
by Ali Minai “Sadequain!” The very name is like a magic word that triggers a tumult of images in the mind. Arguably, no Pakistani artist has elicited more admiration, evoked more passion, and received more adulation than Saiyid Sadquain Ahmad Naqvi, the subject – and really, the hero – of the book “Sadequain: Artist and…
by Ali Minai One of the most interesting and memorable characters in sci-fi films is the T-1000, the shape-shifting, nearly indestructible robot from the classic film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. There are other, less prominent examples of shape-shifting intelligent beings in sci-fi – for example Odo, the chief of security on Star…
by Ali Minai Given where we find ourselves in this late November of 2020, it is hard to think of a book more relevant or timely than The Hype Machine by Sinan Aral. The author is the David Austin Professor of Management and Professor of Information Technology and Marketing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.…
by Ali Minai But Och! I backward cast my e’e, On prospects drear! An’ forward tho’ I canna see, I guess an’ fear! —Robert Burns, “To a Mouse” On January 24, 2017 – four days after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States – I sat down at my…
by Ali Minai I came to Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon by Lesley Adkins (Thomas Dunne Books, 2003) because I was looking to read about Henry Rawlinson – someone I had wondered about and admired for a long time. Copying the immense and inaccessible trilingual cuneiform inscription of…
by Ali Minai “I’ll just google it again”, said my daughter when I asked her to remember something. It was a very reasonable suggestion, but it led me down an interesting line of thought about the nature of knowing and its recent transformation. Much has been said and written about how the Internet has changed…
by Ali Minai Like most people who have time to think in these stressful days, I have been thinking about life after the COVID-19 pandemic has passed – mostly at a personal level, but also a little about the world at large. This essay is an attempt to put some of these thoughts down as…
by Ali Minai I must admit that when I first flipped through Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia by Albena Azmanova, it did not look too inviting. The blurbs on the jacket did nothing to reassure me, suggesting that this was yet another post-Marxist critique of greedy…
by Ali Minai For the last three years, I have struggled with a dilemma: As a reasonable, quite liberal person, what should I think of my 60 million fellow Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2016, and the vast majority of whom continue to support him today? Normally, a personal dilemma is a private…
by Ali Minai Your love stirs the ocean into reckless storms. At your feet, the clouds drop their pearls. Dark smoke rises in the sky, a fire burns Where your love’s lightning strikes the earth. These energetic lines open Moon and Sun: Rumi’s Rubaiyat, Zara Houshmand’s brilliant translation of selected ruba’iyat – quatrains – by…
by Ali Minai Sometimes, history moves faster than thought. Something like that is happening in the United States in these early days of fall. Though the season is taking longer than normal to turn, the political season has changed more quickly than anyone expected. The opinions of last week – such as the long article…
by Ali Minai Most people see understanding as a fundamental characteristic of intelligence. One of the main critiques directed at AI is that, well, computers may be able to “calculate” and “compute”, but they don’t really “understand”. What, then, is understanding? And is this critique of AI justified? Broadly speaking, there are two overlapping approaches…
by Ali Minai Note: Translations in italics are literal translations by the reviewer, whereas those in bold italics are by the M. Shahid Alam in the book under review. In reviewing “Intimations of Ghalib”, a new translation of selected ghazals of the Urdu poet Ghalib by M. Shahid Alam, let it be said at the…
by Ali Minai April 2018: ‘Tis the Season of Giddiness in Democratlandia. Republicans are saddled with a widely despised President and riven by internal dissension. The Republican leadership in Congress is lurching from fiasco to fiasco – interrupted briefly by one great “success” on tax cuts. The zombie candidates of the Tea Party are still…
by Ali Minai A light went out in the world yesterday. Asma Jahangir — Pakistan’s icon of human rights and liberal values — passed away. In her short 66 years, she lived the length — and made the impact — of many lifetimes. If a person’s character is known by the enemies they make, her…
by Ali Minai A few years ago, while introducing my class of electrical engineering students to information theory, I said that we lived today in a world created by Faraday, Maxwell, and Shannon. Even as I said this, I was aware that, in my zeal for effect, I was omitting the names of many who…
by Ali Minai Following the shock of Brexit in Britain and the cataclysmic election of Donald Trump in the United States, there is much soul-searching, head-scratching and gnashing of teeth in liberal circles. Some see the end of democracy, others predict the collapse of liberalism, or at least of the liberal world order. The more…
by Ali Minai "My colleagues, they study artificial intelligence; me, I study natural stupidity." —Amos Tversky, (quoted in “The Undoing Project” by Michael Lewis). Not only is this quote by Tversky amusing, it also offers profound insight into the nature of intelligence – real and artificial. Most of us working on artificial intelligence (AI) take…
by Ali Minai It is the worst of times. Period! The presidential election of 2016 possibly represents a hinge-point in American like no other since the beginning of the Cold War, though perhaps an argument can be made for 9-11. Indeed, September 11, 2001 and November 8, 2016 may be seen as two ends of…