The discipline conundrum

There is no doubt that one should lead a disciplined life. It is, after all, what we are taught to do right from birth. Eat at a specific time, shower at a specific time, hit the bed at a specific time, so on and so forth. There are of course, varying degrees of discipline. It’s about sticking to the schedule. Some people are very religious about their schedule and won’t deviate their set tasks even by 5 minutes while others deviate quite a bit, from minutes to hours to even days, thanks to procrastination. Well, this is all good — there is hardly any proven research material or researched facts that discipline in life can only make it better.

So this is all fantastic in the present world. Fast forward 20 to 30 years from now. The world is most likely going to be a very different place. AI will possibly have crept into several facets of life. Transport and physical labor primarily. The machines will eventually take over these sectors. Of course, still under human command. In an event that can possibly bring the machines closer to humans — they’ll master one thing that they are excellent at — learning from patterns. There in lies the conundrum. Discipline is a learnable pattern. Assuming that we all lead a disciplined life, it’s not hard to fathom a machine ( a simplified word for a very capable and sophisticated machine learning algorithm ) programmed for a certain task to ‘somehow’ discover this patten among human beings and start learning the disciplinary approach.

Perhaps unpredictability has its virtue.