ISLAMABAD: Federal Minister for Planning, Development and Reform Ahsan Iqbal said on Wednesday that Pakistan possessed the attributes of an advancing nation, and was well-positioned to rank among the world’s top25economies by 2025.
“The signs of a failing country cannot be attributed to Pakistan now that there is a clear vision, an independent judiciary, free media, and a growing civil society with a strategic economic roadmap standing on strong, democratic foundations,” he said, while addressing a national conference titled ‘Building Knowledge Based Economy in Pakistan’.
He said that his optimism was supported by the improving law and order situation, sustainable economic growth, and a favourable investment environment.
“At least the direction is right,” Iqbal said.😏
The conference was organised by the Islamabad Policy Research Institute (IPRI) alongside the Hanns Seidal Foundation.
Iqbal said that the ministry’s ‘Vision 2025’ emphasizes human resource development, regional connectivity, knowledge economy, inclusive growth, and shared prosperity.
He said that human resource development is at the top of the government’s priorities, and that education is being targeted through increased funding for higher education.
Iqbal also proposed a United States (US)-Pakistan knowledge corridor, which would allow Pakistan to benefit from the high quality science and technology education available in US universities.
“It is unfortunate that despite being a strategic partner, Pakistan was not given preferential treatment in terms of its students availing higher education opportunities in US universities,” he said.
Speakers at a subsequent panel at the conference discussed the reasons behind the stable economic growth enjoyed by countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Germany, despite the countries’ devastation due to war.
The panel highlighted how, in the 1950s when the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of South Korea was less than Pakistan’s, their literacy rate was 62 per cent – something Pakistan has yet to achieve.
Senator Farhatullah Babar said that one major issue in Pakistan was the inconsistent policymaking by successive governments.
Dr. Usman Mustafa, from the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), said that the economy revolves around agriculture in its first phase, however, after the industrial revolution wealth became associated with manufacturing and commerce. He said that in the current era, wealth is linked with the ‘ownership of knowledge’ needed to produce goods and services.
“Not only are we talking about producing at low costs with better quality, there is now an increased demand for information,” Mustafa said.
The speakers, most of whom were economists, called for higher investments in research and development (R&D).
However, Dr. Tariq Bashir, from the Pakistan Council of Science and Technology, blamed both the government and stakeholders for not investing in knowledge generation, and said that the private sector should establish R&D centres for specific sectors to improve the competitive standing of exports.
Azhar Majeed, from the Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FPCCI) said that the textile sector is facing severe challenges, and has remained stagnant for five year.
“But one of the most severe issues we face, apart from the energy crisis, is $1.5billion stuck with the Federal Board of Revue for refunds,” he said, adding, “Which industry would be willing to invest in R&D in such conditions?”
Published in 31 DEC 2022.
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Pakistan, in its short history, and the land and its people in its longer colonial history, has seen its share of violence. As a country that has been subject to intermittent oppressive military regimes and a political arena based on ethnic and religious divisions, the state has been both victim and perpetrator of violence — ranging from the blatant and outright, to the more sinister oppressive practices, at times hidden in plain sight as completely legitimate policies.
The city of Karachi, especially,becomes microcosmic of the long bloody history of violence that the citizens of Pakistan have been subjected to, from street crime to extortion rackets by militant wings of religious and political parties. Its citizens, especially those in the lower income areas and the poor indigenous people on the peripheries of the city, live in a constant state of fear of the political elite, and even the authorities that are often either involved or turn the other cheek.
In the book Art, Violence and the State in the Killing Fields of Karachi, art critic Quddus Mirza aptly likens the relationship between art and the state to an abusive marriage. The book, conceived by Adeela Suleman and Mariam Ali Baig, delves deep into the 444 extrajudicial killings carried out in 192 alleged fake encounters by former SSP Rao Anwar Ahmed Khan between 2011-2018, the art installation by Adeela Suleman titled ‘The Killing Fields of Karachi’ (2019) for the Karachi Biennale 2019 (KB19), and the subsequent destruction of this artwork by the authorities in an act of blatant, violent censorship and suppression.
Fahim Zaman Khan and Naziha Syed Ali detailed Anwar’s criminal operations in a Dawn report that is included in the book, stating, “The former SSP was the head of a vicious cabal, including cops and local thugs… anyone who crossed them or refused to pay was picked up, detained and tortured, sometimes even killed IN FAKE encounters.”
Adeela Suleman pictured in her workshop, surrounded by her team of metal workers | Stephan ANDREW
According to this report, Anwar was running multiple rackets, including extortion of protection money, land grabbing and a land mafia mining and selling sand and gravel from public land.
Anwar was able to evade all inquiries into his extrajudicial killings as he is thought to have been protected by powerful figures in the government and even the establishment, who not only allowed him to continue his business, but actually nurtured him as an asset.
A recent book helps explore the relationship between art and the state through the lens of violence and censorship
Right up until he perhaps started to become a liability. That might be one of the reasons the case of Naqeebullah Mehsud, the 27-year-oldPakhtun father of two abducted and murdered by Anwar in 2018 at an abandoned poultry farm in the outskirts of Karachi, became his undoing.
Claims of Naqeebullah’s ties to the terrorist group Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) contradicted images of his going viral in the media, showing a handsome young man with beautiful long hair and dreams of becoming a model.
It was this image that caught the imagination of the nation, which quickly rallied behind his father, Muhammad Khan’s protests in pursuit of justice. Naqeebullah became the face of the countless victims of encounter killings which propelled the mobilisation of a nation.
“One of Anwar’s victims had been humanised, and no one could look away,” says Human Rights activist Jibran Nasir in ‘A Death Foretold’.
However, even as the case against Anwar gained strength in what lawyer Faisal Siddiqi describes as “lightning speed and unexpected directions” in his essay ‘The Art of Justice’, where he identifies the chain of events as they happened, nothing became of it.
Rao Anwar SSP District Malir, Karachi — the ‘encounter specialist’ | Dawn Archives....><><>><><><><><><><><><>
Once public interest and outcry faded, the case started losing strength, as Anwar was granted bail, witnesses retracted statements and evidence began to disappear, and he ran free.
“The state knows that a guilty verdict on Naqeebullah’s murder would give social, political and, to a great extent, legal legitimacy to claims regarding the state’s abetment of unconstitutional abductions and extrajudicial killings,” says Nasir.
Violence and Art
In a country where most people have become desensitised by the routine violence, it is the artists who return our focus to what is important. Art has had a longstanding fascination with human suffering and misery, almost to the extent of fetishism in certain cases.
Throughout art history, artists have focused on violent imagery, horror, pain and grief, from elements of violence found in the Lascaux caves of wild beast hunts to 15th-16th century art rife with violent imagery from myths, legends and religious scripture alike.
The painting “Judith Beheading Holofernes” (1598–1599 or 1602) by Caravaggio, for instance, turns the graphic depiction of blood and gore into a thing of beauty, at once repulsive and enticing.
In recent years, artists have sought to question and comment on this proclivity, such as in many of the works by Rashid Rana, most potently with his series ‘Flesh and Blood’ (2009), which explores the link between sex and violence.
Adeela Suleman’s entire practice focuses on the ways in which violence is an everyday part of our lived experience and visual landscape, and by aesthetising it, she comments on our desensitisation and apathy towards — and at times even a dark enjoyment of __it................................................
She Delves deeper into this phenomenon in her essay ‘Towards Mayhem’, declaring that, “The more odious the act, the more compelling it becomes for actors and observers alike… the more heinous the crime, the more captivating and beautiful the monument to it.”
A major critique of this is the perpetration of the very concept being critiqued, the act of combining beauty and violence resulting in its palatability, and a further normalisation of the horrors in society. Victims are dehumanised and there is a dissociation from the crime, as it almost becomes a source of entertainment, packaged as an object, rather than a violent act or mournful event, undercutting the gravity of such incidents.
Adeela Suleman, ‘Untitled VI’
Most recently, Netflix crime dramas, specifically Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (2022) was criticised for exactly this reason. In this way, art becomes complicit in the crime, the indirect perpetrator of violence.
In some works, the violence becomes even more direct and performative, such as in Ai Wei Wei’s “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn” (1995), where the destructive act is the art. Paradoxically, the destroyed object acquires a new meaning and significance as it transforms into another form and work of art, enduring even as it loses its physical presence. In this way, the act of destruction is also an act of creation.
What makes pain and violence so compelling to the artist? Why do they find beauty in it? Is it that it is such a universal part of the human experience, or that in the reminder of death we are most alive? Is it a twisted sense of sadistic pleasure, or a sense of power, derived from instigating an emotive response from others? Or perhaps it is the belief that only through suffering can we truly understand and appreciate the meaning of life, a problematic view held by many proponents of war.
All these elements came together in Adeela Suleman’s installation at the Karachi Biennale 2019 (KB19), ‘The Killing Fields of Karachi’ (2019), which memorialised the victims of extrajudicial killings carried out by Anwar.
With Naqeebullah and his father as the prime focus, Suleman’s work aimed to remind us of these injustices, with 444 pillars standing almost as tombstones outside and inside the Frere Hall, one of the KB19 venues. The wilted metal roses atop these pillars again linked beauty and death.
However, the work did not look at the tragedy with an outsider’s patronising gaze, but gave voice to the victim and his family, almost in a collaborative capacity through the video and photographic components, and perhaps even a sense of closure, by honouring the victims through remembrance. At the same time, it is a point of awareness for the audience. In this sense, the recreated violence was not purposeless and, in fact, served the victims; rather than being complicit, it countered the perpetrators.
However, the work stirred controversy within two hours of its opening, as it was forcefully shut down by the authorities and, in the next two days, it was destroyed, hauled into Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) trucks and carried away. This violence inflicted upon the artwork was meant to silence these 444 voices once again, but became an inadvertent performance that, instead, added a new dimension to the work.
An installation that would’ve been viewed by a few hundred people — art being a niche interest in Pakistan — had now reached millions around the globe, making international news and becoming part of mainstream discourse. It was immortalised through images and the story behind it shared widely on social media, and the injustice spurred a round of performative protests from members of civil society and the art community.
Adeela Suleman ‘Statecraft of Violence’ (2021-2022) | Ghalib Hasnain
Much like Ai Wei Wei’s performance, here too, the erasure granted the work more visibility and through its own destruction, it is now permanently etched on to the pages of art history, to be discussed and dissected for years to come.
What would perhaps have merely been an artwork, viewed and appreciated in the moment, has now become a significant political event, where civil liberties came under attack. It sought to remember the victims of injustice, and now it will itself be remembered as a monument to the injustice it endured.
Art And Censorship
Art and the state are inextricably linked by their relationship with violence. Art reveals certain truths about life and human nature through its portrayal of violence, while the state instigates violence to silence these threatening truths.
“The provision of justice or other basic services is of no interest to the government. As the state is becoming weaker, it is becoming more authoritarian,” says Faisal Siddiqi. In order to hide this weakness and re-establish its power, an exercise of control is needed. This manifests in the form of censorship in one form or another and, thus, censorship itself can be a form of violence inflicted by the state.
But why does the state target the arts in a country where its audience is fairly limited, and their efforts merely fan the flames? In the case of Suleman’s installation, it is even more perplexing, as the artist states that it was merely a reiteration of facts already in public knowledge, adding nothing new to the discourse.
She feels it is due to the same reason Naqeebullah’s case captured the attention of the nation — the power of the image. This power of art to influence opinions and rile up the nation challenges the power of the state, and thus it retaliates to re-assert its hold.
However, it is also the subjective nature of art, and its position as the response of an individual that, in turn, draws an emotive response from the audience. It is not presented as cold facts in media reports, and is not backed by multiple powerful media corporations with their own political backings, but a defenceless citizen presenting an opinion, even if in subtext. While Suleman insists she is simply telling a story, the way this story is presented takes a stance that threatens those involved in the crime and instigates a defensive reaction.
Furthermore, while the artist insists her work is a memorial and not a protest, the idea of memorialising such tragedies, in itself is an act of defiance and resistance, when the perpetrators rely on our propensity to forget and move on to grant them impunity.
Adeela Suleman pictured at the ‘die-in’ protest | Marvi Mazhar
“We live in a society that believes in forgetting acts of brutal state violence,” writes Faisal Siddiqi and that it was the initial mobilisation by civil society that overcame the fear surrounding Anwar’s accountability and sustained the legal battle against him. It was only when this mobilisation lost traction that he was able to slip away. Memorials help us remember, and this remembering becomes a form of silent protest, and so the authorities did not like the idea of Suleman reminding us yet again.
While the attempts at silencing her backfired, its long-term effects are still detrimental to the arts, creating a culture of fear that leads to even more self-censorship. Suleman says, “Here it is important to note that, even when such efforts do not actually suppress particular types of expression, they cast a shadow of fear, which leads to the voluntary curtailment of expression by those who seek to avoid controversy… The arts cannot thrive in such a climate of fear.”
Religious extremism already makes it tenuous for artists to navigate the treacherous waters of artistic creation in Pakistan, and many practitioners who choose to dabble in controversial visuals and subject matter risk limited exposure at the least and threat to life at the most.
Incidents like these may stoke the fire within a few rebellious hearts but remind a large majority why it is simply not worth the trouble. What was only in the subtext and merely assumed in the past is now proven to be true, that no one is exempt, free speech is a myth, and artists who step out of line are not safe. Art is pushed further into the margins and peripheries.
This is clearly evidenced in the Karachi Biennale Trust’s response to the entire incident, which was to abandon the artists in the name of saving the biennale and bringing art into the mainstream discourse. Was it a sensible move to sacrifice the one to save the many, and to allow the show to go on for the benefit of the larger art community?
Or was it cowardice to throw a fellow artist under the bus in order to protect themselves? If only a certain type of art can remain in the centre, dictated by those with their own agendas and a narrow understanding of the standards of contemporary art, then what is even the point?
In the face of this dilemma, the inscription on Suleman’s memorial graveyard becomes even more pertinent:
“When confronted with violent terror we acquiesced, in the denial that the same beast of intolerance raged rampant within our own souls. Do you wonder why we lie before you, the countless un-mourned? We ourselves are the victim but also the perpetrator of this very terror.”
As the old adage goes, “Zulm sehna bhi zulm hai [Tolerating oppression is also oppression].” In our refusal to stand up in the face of oppression, we ourselves risk becoming the oppressors.
The writer is an independent art critic and curator.......
As a rather commerciallysuccessful author once wrote, “the night is dark and full of terrors, the day bright and beautiful and full of hope.” It’s fitting imagery for AI, which like all tech has its upsides and downsides.
What’s on deck for AI in 2023? Will regulation rein in the worst of what AI brings, or are the floodgates open? Will powerful, transformative new forms of AI emerge, a la ChatGPT, disrupt industries once thought safe from automation?
Expect more (problematic) art-generatingAI apps
With the success of Lensa, the AI-powered selfie app from Prisma Labs that went viral, you can expect a lot of me-too apps along these lines. And expect them to also be capable of being tricked into creating NSFW images, and to disproportionately sexualize and alter the appearance of women.
Maximilian Gahntz, a senior policy researcher at the Mozilla Foundation, said he expected integration of generative AI into consumer tech will amplify the effects of such systems, both the good and the bad.
Stable Diffusion, for example, was fed billions of images from the internet until it “learned” to associate certain words and concepts with certain imagery. Text-generating models have routinely been easily tricked into espousing offensive views or producing misleading content.
Mike Cook, a member of the Knives and Paintbrushes open research group, agrees with Gahntz that generative AI will continue to prove a major — and problematic — force for change. But he thinks that 2023😊 has to be the year that generative AI “finally puts its money where its mouth is.”
“It’s not enough to motivate a community of specialists [to create new tech] — for technology to become a long-term part of our lives, it has to either make someone a lot of money, or have a meaningful impact on the daily lives of the general public,” Cook said. “So I predict we’ll see a serious push to make generative AI actually achieve one of these two things, with mixed success.”
Artists lead the effort to opt out of data sets
DeviantArt released an AI art generator built on Stable Diffusion and fine-tuned on artwork from the DeviantArt community. The art generator was met with loud disapproval from DeviantArt’s longtime denizens, who criticized the platform’s lack of transparency in using their uploaded art to train the system.
The creators of the most popular systems — OpenAI and Stability AI — say that they’ve taken steps to limit the amount of harmful content their systems produce. But judging by many of the generations on social media, it’s clear that there’s work to be done.
“The data sets require active curation to address these problems and should be subjected to significant scrutiny, including from communities that tend to get the short end of the stick,” Gahntz said, comparing the process to ongoing controversies over content moderation in social media.
Stability AI, which is largely funding the development of Stable Diffusion, recently bowed to public pressure, signaling that it would allow artists to opt out of the data set used to train the next-generation Stable Diffusion model. Through the website HaveIBeenTrained.com, rightsholders will be able to request opt-outs before training begins in a few weeks’ time.
OpenAI offers no such opt-out mechanism, instead preferring to partner with organizations like Shutterstock to license portions of their image galleries. But given the legal and sheer publicity headwinds it faces alongside Stability AI, it’s likely only a matter of time before it follows suit.
The courts may ultimately force its hand. In the U.S. Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI are being sued in a class action lawsuit that accuses them of violating copyright law by letting Copilot, GitHub’s service that intelligently suggests lines of code, regurgitate sections of licensed code without providing credit.
Perhaps anticipating the legal challenge, GitHub recently added settings to prevent public code from showing up in Copilot’s suggestions and plans to introduce a feature that will reference the source of code suggestions. But they’re imperfect measures. In at least one instance, the filter setting caused Copilot to emit large chunks of copyrighted code including all attribution and license text.
Expect to see criticism ramp up in the coming year, particularly as the U.K. mulls over rules that would that would remove the requirement that systems trained through public data be used strictly non-commercially.
Open source and decentralized efforts will continue to grow
2022 saw a handful of AI companies dominate the stage, primarily OpenAI and Stability AI. But the pendulum may swing back towards open source in 2023 as the ability to build new systems moves beyond “resource-rich and powerful AI labs,” as Gahntz put it.
A community approach may lead to more scrutiny of systems as they are being built and deployed, he said: “If models are open and if data sets are open, that’ll enable much more of the critical research that has pointed to a lot of the flaws and harms linked to generative AI and that’s often been far too difficult to conduct.”
Examples of such community-focused efforts include large language models from EleutherAI and BigScience, an effort backed by AI startup Hugging Face. Stability AI is funding a number of communities itself, like the music-generation-focused Harmonai and OpenBioML, a loose collection of biotech experiments.
Money and expertise are still required to train and run sophisticated AI models, but decentralized computing may challenge traditional data centers as open source efforts mature.
BigScience took a step toward enabling decentralized development with the recent release of the open source Petals project. Petals lets people contribute their compute power, similar to Folding@home, to run large AI language models that would normally require an high-end GPU or server.
“Modern generative models are computationally expensive to train and run. Some back-of-the-envelope estimates put daily ChatGPT expenditure to around $3 million,” Chandra Bhagavatula, a senior research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI, said via email. “To make this commercially viable and accessible more widely, it will be important to address this.”
Chandra points out, however, that that large labs will continue to have competitive advantages as long as the methods and data remain proprietary. In a recent example, OpenAI released Point-E, a model that can generate 3D objects given a text prompt. But while OpenAI open sourced the model, it didn’t disclose the sources of Point-E’s training data or release that data.
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“I do think the open source efforts and decentralization efforts are absolutely worthwhile and are to the benefit of a larger number of researchers, practitioners and users,” Chandra said. “However, despite being open-sourced, the best models are still inaccessible to a large number of researchers and practitioners due to their resource constraints.”
AI companies buckle down for incoming regulations
Regulation like the EU’s AI Act may change how companies develop and deploy AI systems moving forward. So could more local efforts like New York City’s AI hiring statute, which requires that AI and algorithm-based tech for recruiting, hiring or promotion be audited for bias before being used.
Chandra sees these regulations as necessary especially in light of generative AI’s increasingly apparent technical flaws, like its tendency to spout factually wrong info.
“This makes generative AI difficult to apply for many areas where mistakes can have very high costs — e.g. healthcare. In addition, the ease of generating incorrect information creates challenges surrounding misinformation and disinformation,” she said. “[And yet] AI systems are already making decisions loaded with moral and ethical implications.”
Next year will only bring the threat of regulation, though — expect much more quibbling over rules and court cases before anyone gets fined or charged. But companies may still jockey for position in the most advantageous categories of upcoming laws, like the AI Act’s risk categories.
The rule as currently written divides AI systems into one of four risk categories, each with varying requirements and levels of scrutiny. Systems in the highest risk category, “high-risk” AI (e.g. credit scoring algorithms, robotic surgery apps), have to meet certain legal, ethical and technical standards before they’re allowed to enter the European market. The lowest risk category, “minimal or no risk” AI (e.g. spam filters, AI-enabled video games), imposes only transparency obligations like making users aware that they’re interacting with an AI system.
Os Keyes, a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Washington, expressed worry that companies will aim for the lowest risk level in order to minimize their own responsibilities and visibility to regulators.
“That concern aside, [the AI Act] really the most positive thing I see on the table,” they said. “I haven’t seen much of anything out of Congress.”
But investments aren’t a sure thing
Gahntz argues that, even if an AI system works well enough for most people but is deeply harmful to some, there’s “still a lot of homework left” before a company should make it widely available. “There’s also a business case for all this. If your model generates a lot of messed up stuff, consumers aren’t going to like it,” he added. “But obviously this is also about fairness.”
It’s unclear whether companies will be persuaded by that argument going into next year, particularly as investors seem eager to put their money beyond any promising generative AI.
In the midst of the Stable Diffusion controversies, Stability AI raised $101 million at an over-$1 billion valuation from prominent backers including Coatue and Lightspeed Venture Partners. OpenAI is said to be valued at $20 billion as it enters advanced talks to raise more funding from Microsoft. (Microsoft previouslyinvested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019.)
Of course, those could be exceptions to the role.
Outside of self-driving companies Cruise, Wayve and WeRide and robotics firm MegaRobo, the top-performing AI firms in terms of money raised this year were software-based, according to Crunchbase. Contentsquare, which sells a service that provides AI-driven recommendations for web content, closed a $600 million round in July. Uniphore, which sells software for “conversational analytics” (think call center metrics) and conversational assistants, landed $400 million in February. Meanwhile, Highspot, whose AI-powered platform provides sales reps and marketers with real-time and data-driven recommendations, nabbed $248 million in January.
Investors may well chase safer bets like automating analysis of customer complaints or generating sales leads, even if these aren’t as “sexy” as generative AI. That’s not to suggest there won’t be big attention-grabbing investments, but they’ll be reserved for Players with clout.
