Dr Claudius v Wyk on KPMG, AI, proving Einstein and de-colonising science

LONDON — Another masterclass in the practical application of Holism by Dr Claudius van Wyk. In this episode the discussion ranges from diametric views within South Africa on how to address KPMG and other firms who facilitated corruption; artificial intelligence; a Nobel Prize for scientists providing physical proof for another Einstein theory; and how to tackle the very necessary challenge of de-colonising science in universities. – Alec Hogg

In this episode of Fixing our World, Dr Claudius van Wyk is with us, as always. Claudius, it’s lovely talking with you for some more insights but there are a few things that have been confusing me, (before we get into the Holism discussion) and that’s what’s going on in SA right now, in the business community around KPMG. There is one group led by Business Leadership SA and of course the outliers, Magda Wierzycka and Iraj Abedian, (most famous of them, I guess) who say, ‘zero tolerance.’ You’ve got to get corruption out the system.

There’s another group which does seem to be gaining in momentum, seemingly led by Discovery’s Adrian Gore and even the ex-finance minister Trevor Manuel, who’s saying, ‘no, KPMG is too big to fail – clemency is required in this case.’ How are we, from a holistic perspective, from a New World from the world we’re trying to get into. What are we supposed to make of all of this?

Alec, good to talk to you. This is a really subtle question that you are raising here, of those differences of opinion. It brings us back once again to a conversation that we’ve already had about the evolution of values, of worldviews. So, if we just go straight to that subject of KPMG and the different responses to how people think we should proceed with that. On the one hand you get a very dogmatic view that is rule based and that says, ‘they’ve actually done wrong and they should bear the consequences of that.’ It goes right back to the old biblical times of, ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ That is a view and it is maybe not the most constructive view but it is a very important view to hold in our consideration for SA.

The view that emerges from that is a more pragmatic view, and that pragmatic view relates to, ‘what will be the consequences of acting against an organisation like that?’ What will be the consequences of almost opening a can of worms, or opening a Pandora’s box? Are we going to set precedence that’s going to be really disruptive of practice in the business world, which is opportunistic, which throws a bit of a blind eye to certain things that aren’t right? Which is flexible on the side of opportunity and is it actually going to throw the business world into a wobbly? Is it going to create a precedence that could have unforeseen consequences?

So, that pragmatism says, ‘okay, slap them on the wrists and let’s just get on with life as usual.’ But there would be another view, and that would be the wholistic view that says, ‘when you begin to tolerate in any society – when you begin to tolerate that which is corruptive of society for the sake of letting sleeping dogs lie or for the sake of not rocking the boat.’ You are actually setting a long-term precedence that is going to increase the corruption (increase the cancer) so, we have a very subtle question here where we have to counterbalance the potential economic harm that can be done in an economy like the SA economy, which is under such high pressure, and the qualities that we want to employ in managing and in designing the way we’re going to conduct business into the future.

Now, it’s not an easy one this, as we discussed in a previous conversation, Alec. We said that, ‘SA is an emerging society where the most important aspect that needs to be established now is the rule of law and the willingness to obey the rule of law, apply the rule of law, and that the consequences of breaking the rules need to be felt so, that we can generate a disciplined society.’ You, yourself in your BizNews column made mention that, ‘the authorities seem reluctant to take action and maybe civil society must rise to this.’ My own view is that there will be a short-term cost to taking a very clear and rigid stand on this. There will be a short-term cost. It’s going to be disruptive but it will be necessary. When you have a bad tooth, you’ve got to get it out, and it will be necessary. So, pragmatism, absolutely but it needs to be principle pragmatism, Alec.

But how can it be principle pragmatism? Really, what I’m getting at here is, you had an actor who has a license granted by society, which businesses tends to forget sometimes. It’s society that allows businesses to operate and not the other way around, and that license has or the terms on which that license was granted were abused, to the detriment of society, generally. Maybe I’m going more with the ‘eye for an eye’ kind of approach, but if you don’t have consequences. Jakkie Cilliers wrote in his wonderful book, ‘Fate of the Nation – this republic of no consequences.’ If there is no consequences and if KPMG does get a slap on the wrist, even though it might smooth out the short-term surely that’s not even something to contemplate. Or am I being a little absolutist here?

Well, I think that there is a meeting point between what you’re suggesting and what I’m looking at here. On the one hand there’s pragmatism and pragmatism says, ‘just accept the situation as it is and let’s move along and let’s just try and make the best of it.’ Principle pragmatism says, ‘we have to take into account that we are establishing our choice on a principle and that principle wants to guide us into the future.’ So, in this case, if there has been a clear misdemeanour, a clear breaking of contract, (a clear breaking of the rules) then that needs to be very clearly identified. It needs to be an example. Here, in the UK, when big fish break the rules the system actually goes for the big fish because of the examples it sets. So, I think that needs to apply in SA as well.

We need to counterbalance. Not the need for revenge but we need to counterbalance the establishing of a guiding principle for the future with the extent to which punishment, if you will, will be meted out that might damage many lives. So, that’s a subtle question but that’s what makes it principled and pragmatic. We have to consider those consequences and then there will be a short-term cost, and maybe even a medium-term cost but it needs to be undertaken in such a way that it gives everybody the opportunity to rehabilitate and to build a much better principled business community in SA.

Dr Claudius van Wyk

You’ve really nailed it there because so often I hear the thought. Here in London talking to people about SA in the financial community and they say, ‘everywhere in the world there is corruption – as long as it doesn’t get out of hand we’ll be happy that we can still invest in SA bonds, etc.’ But that just perpetuates doesn’t it, the existence of something that is not sustainable in the long-term?

Yes, absolutely. I’m going to give you a direct example of that. Many years ago, my teenage son came to me and he said, ‘dad, I can pick up a desktop computer for a very good price.’ And I said, ‘where is it coming from?’ He said, ‘you don’t want to know.’ I said, ‘well, maybe this is what you need to consider – what industry will you be supporting?’ He said, ‘I know what I have to do,’ and he made the right decision. What is the industry? What is the kind of atmosphere we’re creating? What’s the kind of precedent we’re creating? What’s the kind of principle that we want to use as an example? In this case, I think SA particularly at this point, where particularly because the business community is so suspect and has been cast in such a negative light in this whole notion of radical economic transformation, and white monopoly capital. The business community needs to become as clean as a whistle. It’s really got to get its act together and by being able to act and indicate the willingness to become ethical, to become credible, to become transparent, and to become accountable – it can actually restore the role that business has to play in SA. So, there will be a short-term cost but that short-term cost is like school fees and I think that action needs to be taken.

Needs to be seen to be doing right and not just doing right, interesting. Great stuff but moving on a little bit. You’ve been writing about artificial intelligence and a lot of this was shaped by your preparation for going to the Science Festival, which was attended by many Nobel prize winners. I want to get into that in a little while, but this attraction or appeal to you of artificial intelligence, how does that fit together with consciousness?

It is a very intriguing question that you’re asking, Alec. So, the one hand is the capacity to process information. So, if you take the simple thermostat for your heater in your home there is a device to process information and it can be pre-programmed to respond according to the data that you want it to respond to. That is a form of sentience of sensitivity of response capacity and that can be then extrapolated right into the highest forms of computing. Now, our capacity to compute information, I discovered the other day, what our computing capacity or our information capacity has been able to generate in the form of stored information in the last 10 years or the last decade, is equivalent to the last 10 thousand years of human history. Since the beginning of our written, recorded history.

So, in the last decade we’ve been able to generate and store information equivalent to the last 10 thousand years. It is exponential and astonishing what we’re able to do with managing information, storing information, and getting technology to respond to information. Now, on the one hand this is very helpful particular in this era of climate change to be able to have multiple sensors that are detecting what is happening in the weather patterns so that we can have early warning signs to at least generate the right kind of responses. This would be a very potent application of artificial intelligence.

Dr Claudius van Wyk

At the Norway Conference on Science they were talking about multiple sensors around the world that are tracking to what’s happening to the ocean and these multiple sensors are sending data through to central information storage processors and they are able to detect the patterns of what’s going on so, that we can predict. So, that we can hopefully change behaviours, hopefully accommodate and manage earth changes better because we definitely are in an era of earth change. So, we do have a very potent application for artificial intelligence including, for example, the CEO of Mercedes Benz who gave an address the other day to say, ‘that if we had driverless motorcars the benefits of simply in reducing motor accidents, would be enormous.’ Machines or artificial intelligence are going to have a much better road behaviour than us, normal drivers so, we can look forward to technology becoming very useful in being able to order this complex world and very necessary for us to make the right decisions of how to engage with this complex world.

Claudius, I love that example about driverless cars but if you were to put it into SA it would have a massive impact if you consider the rules of the road in a country where lots of people just don’t bother to have licenses. Unfortunately, the sad statistic there is that you have a 10 times greater chance of having an accident in SA than you do in the UK, and the UK has I think, something like 10 times more cars on the road. That just gives you the indication of how much of a benefit that could be.

You are quite right, Alec. The CEO of Mercedes Benz was just talking, ‘that it probably portends the end of the motorcar insurance industry.’ So, the impact of artificial intelligence, as applied to technology, is going to be disruptive of entire industries and hopefully it can be disruptive in a way that betters many things. That enables our resources not to have to be applied to fixing up the mess we’ve made but our resources to be applied to doing things more generatively. The scaling side of artificial intelligence is where one of the Nobel Prize winners, who is a neuroscientist, whose actual research for which he won a Nobel Prize, was being able to change memory by genetic editing. You can actually go into brain cells and re-edit the genes in the brain cells and change memory.

He’s very exciting about that. He’s saying that he can change human memory so, that people suffering from depression and so forth, won’t have those memories anymore that are depressants. There were other people that were horrified at the prospect of that. But what he predicted is that we would have robots within the next decade that would have feelings and that would have emotions, and that could be ‘values driven.’ So, this brings us to the prediction or the notion of Schwab, at the World Economic Forum (WEF) who actually said, ‘we are now into the Fourth Industrial Revolution.’

The Third Industrial Revolution was, of course, the information technology and the information industry. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is the combination of bio synthetics, nanotechnology, robotics, and artificial intelligence. What he’s projecting is that the lines between what it means to be human, what it means to be a living creature and a synthetic creature are becoming increasingly blurred. Those lines raise real, fundamental ethical questions of how we establish the values that will make artificial intelligence safe for future generations and that it doesn’t become some sort of a super artificial god. These are very big questions that they were pondering over at that conference.

It’s nice to know that the scientists are also looking at that because Elon Musk has made this a huge part of his reason for being. He believes that, at some point in time, the robots are going to take over the world if we’re not very careful about it. But on more pragmatic scales, although it is in a quantum world, 100 years ago, one of our heroes (yours and my hero), Albert Einstein, predicted the existence of what he called ‘gravitational waves’ but of course there’s been no way of proving this physically until now. The guys who won the physics Nobel Prize though, won it particularly for proving what Einstein had theorised 100 years ago. There’s so much around that but that must surely give us a better understanding of this post-Newtonian world, as it might be.

You’ve put your finger right on it. The great different between the Newtonian world, the Newtonian mechanistic world is that we’ve been trying to identify the hard points. So, of course, the discovery of the atom about 150 years ago, was identified as being such a potential hard point. Such a potential basic building block and Newtonian physics, your second law of thermodynamics, the laws of gravitation as Newton identified them, were all based on those premises of hard facts, of hard entities. Einstein revolutionised that thinking with his whole understanding of relativity where he said, ‘the action is not in the hard points.’ The hard points are just places of measurement in a dynamic flux. It is the activity of dynamic flux, which then presents the new science.

So, as we develop technology that was able to pick up far finer frequencies to be able to detect far finer waves, and to be able to detect waves that have come to us from eons ago. Travelling at the speed of light, that quality of Einstein still maintained, we’ve been able to now get evidence that Einstein’s view of the world and, as you said, ‘it’s 100 years ago,’ actually is a far more accurate view of what constitutes life – an organic, flexible, dynamic view rather than a hard, mechanistic view. So, the great gift I would suggest of gravitation field waves and the discovery of that and the validation of Einsteinian relativity, is that it provides us with a stepping stone into a new, Wholistic science. As I say, that Wholistic science is one that then looks at fields, fields of influence, fields of interactivity and really that the dynamic that we experience as physical life is really just manifestation of fields that have interpenetrated and created systems that generate into human beings and the nature that we know it.

All about energy but on that point, I was reading one of your pieces where you spoke about Jan Smuts, a former SA prime minister, polymath or you could go on defining or describing him for ages but a talk that he gave in 1931. What fascinated me, not just that he was given this esteemed position as president of the British Association of the Advancement of Science but that the hall of 5 000 was too small to fit everybody in there, back in those days. So, he must have been a giant, an intellectual giant because clearly these were intellectually gifted people who were coming along to look at the advancement of science way back then.

Absolutely so, you know Smuts studied science and literature at what used to be known as Victoria College, which then became Stellenbosch University, and I think that was an enormous gift. Is that his, and you call him a polymath. A polymath is somebody that has broad and deep knowledge of the world, and he studied literature and science and he could pick up the deepest scientific principles really easily. But at the same time his literature embraced, particularly the romantic poets and particularly the work of Goethe. Now, Goethe in his own right was a scientist. There are even descriptions of Goethe and science which is the science of development and process.

Smuts was able to synthesise conventional science into process science and that underpinned his understanding of Holism. Now, when Einstein first published his book ‘Relativity’ and I’ve got a copy of it here and I’ve tried to read it – it was sent to Smuts and he was able to engage with it immediately. He was able to engage to this extent that Einstein apparently said, ‘he was one of 10 people in the world that truly understood Relativity – 9 scientists and one politician.’ To which Smuts responded that he actually, wasn’t really a politician. He was a botanist at heart. He was only a politician by necessity.

The amazing thing about his knowledge and insight is that his book had made such an impact in thinking at the time it was released. The first edition was sold out within a year. The second edition followed after that. A third edition came in the 30s and then the Germans wanted a fourth edition and he turned that down because he said, some of what he had written about was based on science that was already a little bit tricky. But it had made such an impact that he was invited to take on presidential position for the Centenary Conference. The Centenary Conference is a conference of the association that happens every 100 years and here’s the beautiful piece about his insights and understanding of the future.

He said that he believed at the next conference, which would be in 2031, and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to attend that conference, (I’ll be an old man). He said that at the next conference it doesn’t matter how many people are there. He believes that the people attending would be able to experience the speaker as if they are present with the speaker.

This is Jan Smuts nearly 80 or 90 years ago, wow!

Yes so, if we now look at the capacity of holographic, if we look at where science has taken us you can only imagine the kind of experience that people can have, take for example, virtual reality – amazing. The experience that people will be able to have and he was predicting that because he saw human consciousness as evolutionary but here was a warning that he gave at that same conference. He said, ‘if our science and if our technological development is not accompanied by an equal focus on our ethical development we are actually endangering our civilisation.’ That’s a warning he gave back in 1931, and it was a warning, which was begun to be heard at the science conference in Norway where they actually said, we need to have a global compact that is able to come to an agreement, just as we do with nuclear energy and nuclear power how we will manage and make artificial intelligence safe. It was an amazing prediction that he gave in 1931.

That point about ethics brings us right back to the beginning of what we started talking about with KPMG. ‘What is the ethical base that you want to put into a society?’ I guess, it’s also the same thing that Adam Smith spoke about in World of Nations where he promoted capitalism but said, you had to have a strong moral undertone otherwise it doesn’t work, as we well know. But all of this seems to be lost on a new generation that’s coming up. I’d love to get your insights into the young students who are asking questions but perhaps in their ignorance, (perhaps in their arrogance), are saying, ‘they need to decolonise science.’ They need to start science again from an African perspective. I’m talking about the students particularly at UCT with the #Rhodesmustfall, who have no doubt frustrated the physics department at UCT inordinately. But how do you deal with that? On the one hand my sense is that it’s great that young people are asking questions but on the other hand, it’s only good to ask the right questions.

Yes, this is a very tricky question but it’s an important one to put our minds too. If we firstly, take into account that the western mindset, and you’ve already referred to that, based on the science of Newtonian mechanism. The western mindset increasingly, devalued the deep traditions of western society, it’s ethical traditions that were essentially rooted in its religion, and in-valued scientific methodology. That whole process that flowed from the so-called ‘age of enlightenment’ then spawned what was called the ‘age of modernism.’

File Photo: A logo sits on display outside the offices of KPMG LLP in the Canary Wharf business and shopping district in London, UK. Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg

The age of modernism was one, which suggested that our scientific method would solve the problems of the world. Patently, our scientific method does not solve the problems of the world. It seems to have exacerbated the problems of the world. But it was that western mindset, the mechanistic mindset, that went out and it had a dual message in its colonisation process. The one was our religion is correct and the other one was our science is correct. We’re going to be able to inform you and educate you, and civilise you with our scientific model and our religious model.

Yet the conflict between our moral, ethical, and religious standpoint and our scientific standpoint we exported that as well. We exported a dilemma. We exported a paradox. Now, subsequence to the whole experience of colonial oppression, colonial exploitation, which is not just a product of western colonialism. It’s been a factor of human history from the beginning, of the Empire Building. But what it hasn’t done in this post-colonial era – anything that is associated with eurocentrism that has been regarded as being demeaning or discounting indigenous knowledge systems, be it African indigenous knowledge systems, or N American indigenous, or Eastern, is that we’re kind of throwing the baby out of the bathwater.

What the young students be right to do is to question those very assumptions. What they would be wrong to do would be to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Now, I think that there is a potential creative factor that might be able to be unlocked here. The African view of the world and that resonates with all indigenous knowledge systems of the world, is an animistic view, which means that all things are a manifestation of spirit. The classical, western scientific view has been a materialist scientific view. Where the western scientific view is now being challenged by the very issue you raise that of the discovery of gravitational wave field. Of the relativity model, of the Wholistic science approach that the very model is being challenged and I believe that a new dialogue can be unlocked between thinkers, who are prepared to operate from, an understanding that says, ‘we can learn from each other.’ We can learn from each other’s traditions and we can synthesise a new worldview.

I think that there is a potential for a creative dialogue between indigenous knowledge systems and conventional scientific methods, particularly as far as it now is starting to make that shift to Einsteinium and relativism that says, ‘it is the energetic frequency forms or spirit forms, (if you will) that actually constitutes reality.’ We have a new framework for a new debate but it’s going to have to require a certain humility on both sides, and that’s going to require some leadership.

Fascinating insights from Dr Claudius van Wyk, as we look at our world and ways to improve it.

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