By Sonal Srivastava

Jensen Huang is a smart man, one of the smartest out there. As CEO of the world’s largest company by market capitalisation, he has to be. In a podcast last month, replying to a question on who was the smartest person he ever met, Huang defined ‘smart’ as ‘somebody who’s intelligent, solves problems, technical’, a definition he finds to be a ‘commodity’.

He elaborated on his personal definition of smart: ‘someone who sits at that intersection of being technically astute but human empathy and having the ability to infer the unspoken, the around the corners, the unknowables’. But by tying ‘smartness’ too tightly to the technical side, making ‘smart’ an algorithm, Huang got it wrong.

Who is smarter: someone who reduces the connotation of smartness to mechanical processes for material gains? Or someone who intuits workings of natural order, and understands that much of what we see today will not last forever – quite like the Guns N’ Roses song ‘November Rain’?

Nothin’ lasts forever/And we both know hearts can change

While the song is about unrequited love and heartbreak, it’s also a reminder of the temporality of life, and by extension, of technology that makes our lives easier. So, Huang’s notion of ‘smart’ is reductionist – reducing and conflating words like ‘technically astute’, ‘empathy’ and ‘ability to infer the unspoken’.

Smartness can’t be reduced to number-crunching, programming, or predictive analysis. The term ‘technology’ ,in its dictionary sense, refers to methods, systems, and devices that are the result of scientific knowledge being used for practical purposes. Connotations of ‘technology’ cannot be limited to wires, motherboards, LED screens, and Wi-Fi routers. Technical systems – and methods used to arrive at them – can help us better understand both knowledge within our reach and systems beyond our ken.

Take ‘algorithm’. It comes from the Latinisation of 9th-c Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi’s name. An algorithm was – and still is – a system. But somewhere along the way, the word was reduced to mean a computational system, a ‘computer algorithm’, a narrow description of a term that can expand to mean a flawless system – a sequence that must work so perfectly that if you alter even a single step, the whole collapses in the material realm.
And then there is the Great Beyond, which can be known only through the algorithm of bliss, the outcome of which is the realisation of Sat-Chit-Anand, Truth Consciousness-Bliss. The term ‘technology’ does not belong merely to the material realm. Technological systems, a spiritual Wi-Fi of sorts, can apply to consciousness, too. In that sense, Vedanta is an algorithm of consciousness. It is foundational BlissTech that carries us to the Great Beyond. The Upanishads and Gita are, in fact, manuals of this BlissTech, detailing methods that can enable Self-realisation.

The modern world equates intelligence with information density and analysis. Vedanta equates intelligence with moksh, liberation and eventual attainment of Brahmn. The unity of jivatman and Paramatman. Gita speaks of Kshetra and Kshetrajna. Krishna says, ‘This body, Arjun, is termed as the Field (kshetra) and he who knows it is called the knower of the Field (kshetrajna) by sages.’

The algorithm of awareness bridges kshetra and kshetrajna, just as a circuit board connects all the hardware inside a computer. And while mechanical devices come and go, algorithm of bliss will remain unchanged. This is a reminder that technology is any precise system that transforms input into output. BlissTech transforms ignorance into clarity and individual self into the realised Self. That’s what smart is, Jensen.

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