Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad is a Research Scientist at University of Washington’s Harborview Medical Center and an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Washington Bothell. He has had academic appointments at University of Washington, Center for Cognitive Science at University of Minnesota, Minnesota Population Center, and the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota. He also spent a year studying Christian Theology at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was part of the Sinai & Synapses Fellowship (2019-2020) incubated by The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. Muhammad also has worked in applied AI in industry for several startups and large corporations. He has also served as an advisor to various startups and governmental bodies on practical aspects of AI implementation. His current focus areas of research are algorithmic nudging at scale, simulation modeling, artificial intelligence, and personality emulation. His research on grief tech, especially the use of AI to simulate the deceased, has been widely acclaimed and covered in multiple documentaries. He is currently working on technical and ethical issues around the use of AI surrogates in end-of-life decision making. Email: [email protected]
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad In the previous article of this series I started with the exploration of the concept that every civilization eventually arrives at the edge of its own knowing. It was not meant to be exhaustive or a critique but rather exploration of certain themes in Western thinking. Based on the feedback I…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad Every civilization eventually reaches the edge of its own understanding. The Enlightenment, which was basically a grand project of faith in reason, sought to replace the mysteries of revelation with the lucidity of thought. It promised that disciplined rationality could illuminate every corner of existence. It was thought that that through…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad Artificial intelligence is generally conceptualized as a new technology which goes back only decades. In the popular imagination, at best we stretch it back to the Dartmouth Conference in 1956 or perhaps the birth of the Artificial Neurons a decade prior. Yet the impulse to imagine, build, and even worry over…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad In recent years chatbots powered by large language models have been slowing moving to the pulpit. Tools like QuranGPT, Gita GPT, Buddhabot, MagisteriumAI, and AI Jesus have sparked contentious debates about whether machines should mediate spiritual counsel or religious interpretation: Can a chatbot offer genuine pastoral care? What happens when we…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad When the internet first entered homes in the 1990s, parents worried about their children stumbling onto inappropriate websites, being targeted in online chatrooms, or spending endless hours glued to screens. Schools held workshops about “stranger danger” online, and families installed early filters to keep kids safe. Those concerns were real, but…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad The first part of the series highlighted the historical moment that we are currently living in, how bots are invading the most intimate parts of human relationships. If it was digital transformation of society that enabled loneliness as a mass-phenomenon, then AI is now in a position to monetize loneliness. AI…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad In the early 2000s, a curious phenomenon emerged in Japan: some grown men began forming intimate relationships with inanimate pillows bearing images of anime girls, a phenomenon known as “2-D love.” When I first encountered this phenomenon, I wondered if people could grow emotionally attached to two-dimensional printed images, how much…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad You are scrolling through photos from your childhood and come across one where you are playing on a beach with your grandfather. You do not remember ever visiting a beach but chalk it up to the unreliability of childhood memories. Over the next few months, you revisit the image several times.…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad Around 2005 when Facebook was an emerging platform and Twitter had not yet appeared on the horizon, the problem of false information spreading on the internet was starting to be recognized. I was an undergrad researching how gossip and fads spread in social networks. I imagined a thought experiment where there…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad The arrival of DeepSeek’s large language model sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley, signaling that—for the first time—a Chinese AI company might rival its American counterparts in technological sophistication. Some researchers even suggest that the loosening of AI regulation in the West is, in part, a response to the competitive pressure DeepSeek…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad Everyone grieves in their own way. For me, it meant sifting through the tangible remnants of my father’s life—everything he had written or signed. I endeavored to collect every fragment of his writing, no matter profound or mundane – be it verses from the Quran or a simple grocery list. I…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad A cultural shift in our understanding of the arbitration of the truth is afoot. The shift is subtle but it has been creeping up in the collective unconscious for the last decade or so. Discourse on alternative facts and fake news has come to prominence since the last US presidential election…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad For those of us who work in the Sciences, the last decade or so has been a boon to research and new discoveries. This has been facilitated by the massive data collection and data analysis which would have been inconceivable just a few decades ago. The rapid change in the Sciences…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad Much has already been written about the failure of data science in predicting the outcome of the 2016 US election but it is always good to revisit cautionary tales. The overwhelming majority of the folks who work in election prediction including big names like New York Times' Upshot, Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad In Islamic theology it is stated that for each human being God has appointed two angels (Kiraman Katibin) that record the good and the bad deeds that a person commits over the course of lifetime. Regardless of one’s belief or disbelief in this theology, a world where our deeds are recorded…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad Science Fiction literature is fraught with examples of what-ifs of history which speculate on how the would have looked like if certain events had happened a different way e.g., if the Confederates had won the American Civil War, if the Western Roman Empire had not fallen, if Islam had made inroads…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad In the late 17th century Gottfried Leibniz conceived of a machine that could be used to settle arguments so that instead of arguing people will just settle dispute by saying “let us calculate.” On closer inspection this idea has an uncanny resemblance to deciding disputes by delegating the decisions to algorithms.…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad “Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.” ― George Orwell, 1984 These days every other person seems to be concerned about the future of Islamic Civilization. From the Islamists, the traditionalists, the Liberals, the Conservatives etc. almost everyone seems to have…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad The television series Person of Interest posits the existence of a machine that can monitor every person’s daily activities and can then use this information to predict crimes before they happen. While such a system may be way off in the future, a system that can at least identify the identity…