A different prespective to Life

Every year, those of us who graduated from our medical school in a particular year set meet in different parts of the world for reunions, and occasionally we have an international reunion. This year's meeting was in Toronto, Canada, and I was asked to give a virtual presentation. I have given presentations at previous reunions and usually try to make them light, enjoyable and memorable. I intended to do the same this year, especially since I spoke about AI at a previous meeting. However, as I prepared this presentation, something had changed. The people developing AI — including senior executives and researchers in the technology industry — were increasingly warning about its potential risks. Some have even suggested that sufficiently advanced AI could pose an existential threat to humanity. I therefore had to reconsider the presentation. I began to feel rather like Cassandra, the prophetess of Greek mythology, who was condemned to predict the future but never to be believed. But p...

  Mike Judge wrote, produced, and directed Idiocracy , a 2006 science-fiction comedy that was meant to be an absurd satire of what America might look like 500 years in the future. The premise is deliberately outrageous. Natural selection, combined with changing reproductive patterns, supposedly causes intelligence to decline. Humans no longer have significant natural predators, while the more intelligent and highly educated increasingly have fewer children. Meanwhile, the less intelligent reproduce in enormous numbers. The film begins with  Joe Bauers,  played by Luke Wilson, an American soldier described as "remarkably average" in virtually every category; he works as a librarian in the USA Army. He is unmarried, has no children, is an only child, and both his parents are dead. As a result, he is considered an ideal candidate for the Human Hibernation Experiment. The Army cannot find a suitable female participant, so it turns to the private sector and recruits Rita,...

Some stories become family legends—not because they are true in every detail, but because they are too good not to be retold. Growing up in Bacita, near the River Niger, I saw my father travel constantly between our home and Lagos. As Chief Accountant and Company Secretary, he seemed to spend as much time on the road as he did in the office. Acquisitions, shareholder meetings, board meetings—you name it, he was there. In those days, despite the occasional danger, people routinely drove through the night. The journey took five or six hours, depending on the roads and how many relatives, friends, or roadside food stalls tempted him to stop. If I happened to be at secondary school in Offa, he might decide on a whim to branch off and see me. He never travelled alone. One of his favourite drivers was a cheerful fellow called Abiodun. Spend that many hours together on Nigeria's roads, and your driver soon becomes more than an employee. They became family—our unofficial uncles and older b...

One of the books I have read more times than I probably should have is 1984 by George Orwell. Orwell was deeply concerned about the dangers of authoritarian government, and that concern runs through much of his writings. An earlier novel, Animal Farm, explores the same theme through political allegory. The animals overthrow their owner, Mr Jones, and establish a society based on equality. Their vision is that every animal should be treated with dignity and that none should be exploited for labour or slaughter. At first, the new society is full of hope. However, the animals lack the knowledge and experience needed to manage the farm effectively. Over time, the pigs assume leadership, claiming they are best suited to make decisions. Through propaganda, slogans, and the gradual rewriting of history, they consolidate power while convincing the other animals that every sacrifice is for the common good. By the novel's conclusion, the revolution has come full circle. The pigs have become ...

Social media has fundamentally changed the nature of public debate. It is becoming increasingly difficult to have reasoned discussions on controversial topics because many users are exposed primarily to information that reinforces what they already believe. Recommendation algorithms, combined with AI-powered search and personalised content, create environments in which individuals repeatedly encounter viewpoints that confirm their existing opinions while filtering out or dismissing opposing evidence. Genuine dialogue becomes increasingly difficult when people are no longer sharing the same factual foundation. A further problem is that much of the most widely shared content is designed to evoke emotion rather than encourage understanding. Short videos, memes, headlines and clickbait often reduce complex political, scientific and historical issues to simplistic talking points. These are frequently produced by bloggers, influencers or commentators whose success depends on attracting atten...

A good example is how AI is affecting our daily lives every minute. Those at the forefront of highly specialised roles have found that more junior, repetitive tasks can be handled by AI and incorporated into their workflows. As a senior software developer, I need to review, refine, and develop complex algorithms. You will begin to notice that some of the simpler, easier tasks can be done by AI. This has been happening for years. Automated code generation in Microsoft Excel has been available for more than 10 years, and most of us have used it to generate baseline code for various features. Then we just refine and make alterations to make it more optimised, specific and refined. Now, a large part of the world has left Microsoft Excel behind and is using Google Sheets with C#, but that did serve as a baseline. The AI can help convert code from Excel/VBA to Google Sheets/C#. The Google Sheets/C# combination offers greater security, greater flexibility, and always keeps the documents up ...

Since I was a young boy, I've always loved early morning exercise. I have always loved the morning jog because of the rush of endorphins flowing through my bloodstream. It stimulates your brain and gives a sense of well-being. I love swimming so much that whenever I travel, whether in Nigeria or the UK, I always want to find a swimming pool where I can swim to my heart's desire.  Since a swimming pool consists of many parts and needs specialist expertise for maintenance, it could be very expensive. On the surface, it looks just like an ordinary body of water. But it's much more complex than that. The water has to be clean, which means a good, reliable, constant source of clean water; it has to be pumped, filtered, chlorinated, and replenished, which means reliable electricity and good plumbing services. Hence, few places in the developing world can meet all these criteria. Then there are the complexities of water chlorination and temperature regulation, which are sciences i...

From my early teenage years, I have been suffering from migraine headaches. I can recall it as far back as my second year of secondary school. Now, I know it was related to stress and the things I was going through then. At that time, the headaches were so severe and frequent that I would be in so much pain that I would be admitted to the hospital on some occasions. I remember my parents sleeping outside my hospital ward, and my brothers and cousins following me to the hospital. But not surprisingly, because of the frequency of the headaches, they decided to do further investigations. Still, from the limited tests they did, for one reason or another, they could never pick up that it was not malaria, and I was suffering from migraine headaches. Throughout the time I was in secondary school, the symptomatology (the study of what a patient complains of in various diseases) of the headaches was such that they would start with an aura (a sensation or feeling before an attack of epilepsy or...