Solo travel finding its footing in Pakistan

By Syed Tahir Rashdi A time ago before the first computer, the first library or even the first book people thought memory was the most important thing for knowledge. Whole societies relied on it. People remembered laws and stories by heart. Passed them down to their children. To remember something was not just to recall facts it was to keep your identity, culture and history alive. A time ago in ancient Greece people started to worry about memory. In a book called “Phaedrus” Socrates tells a story about a god named Theuth. Theuth invented writing. Thought it would make people wiser and help them remember more.. The king of Egypt, Thamus did not agree. He said that writing would actually make peoples memories weaker. People would start to rely on written words of trying to remember things themselves. They would think they know something just because they can read it. They would not really understand it. Course that is not what happened. Writing did not hurt society it changed it. Books became a way to store knowledge and share ideas with people all over the world. Socrates was worried about something that is still important today. The question now is not whether we remember things because of books. It is whether we remember anything all. Today we have information stored somewhere than ever before. Our phones remember our conversations. Computers store our photos forever. We can find answers to questions in seconds. Machines can summarise books. Help us find information fast. Never before has much information existed outside of our own minds. This is a change in how people relate to knowledge. A man named Marshall McLuhan said that every new technology is like an extension of our abilities. The wheel is like an extension of our feet. The telescope is like an extension of our eyes. By that logic our phones are like an extension of our memories. They help us remember things. The problem is obvious. As we get better at storing information outside of our minds we get worse at remembering things ourselves. We do not remember phone numbers because our phones do. We do not remember birthdays because our computers do. We do not remember how to get places because our phones tell us. We are not trying to remember things much as we used to. We are just looking them up. That small change might be one of the most important things that has happened to our minds in the past century. It is easy to see why we like to store information outside of our minds. Who would want to go to using paper maps or big books to find answers? Digital technology has made it easy for everyone to get information. We can find things out in seconds that used to take days. The question is not whether this is useful. It is whether it is changing our minds in some way. Some psychologists did a study in 2011. Found out something interesting. They found out that when people know they can find information easily they do not try to remember it much. They just remember where to find it. This is a deal. Our minds are changing from storing information to finding it. We are getting better at finding the path. Not the destination. This is not a habit it is how we think. Remembering things is not about storing facts it is about using them to make decisions to imagine things and to be creative. When we remember things we can connect them in ways and have new ideas. When we store information outside of our minds that changes. A man named Nicholas Carr said that digital technology is not just changing how we get information it is changing how we think. The internet is great at giving us answers. It is not so good at helping us really understand things. If we get used to getting answers we might not be as good at thinking deeply about things. This does not mean that technology is making us less smart. It means that our intelligence is changing. The problem is not that we do not know things. It is that we are too dependent on technology to remember them for us. A student might think that they can just look up answers and not really learn anything. A professional might rely much on reminders that they do not even try to remember things. Machines are getting better at remembering things for us. That might mean we do not have to try as hard. Slowly remembering things is becoming more like looking them up. Knowledge is becoming about getting access to information. Thinking is becoming more about getting things done. Technology has definitely helped us store information than ever before. The question is whether it is also making us less likely to try to remember things ourselves. Memory is not just about storing information. It is about how we experience life. A computer can store every document ever written. A machine can look up every photo ever taken.. They cannot turn experience into wisdom. Our memories are not just storage they are how we interpret things. We forget some things we remember others. We use them to understand ourselves. A writer named Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story about a man who could remember everything.. This gift was actually a curse. The man could not forget anything so he could not think about things in a way. He was trapped by his memory. Borges was saying that forgetting is not a thing it is actually necessary for thought. This is not about how we think as individuals. It is about how we learn and how we understand ourselves as a society. Education used to be about more than learning facts. It was about learning how to think. If we just store information outside of our minds education might just become about looking things up. The same thing applies to our society.

By Syeda Samar Zahra Zaidi When you ask an AI chatbot a question it does not know the answer to, an odd thing can happen: instead of hesitating or saying, “I am not sure!” it confidently delivers a tidy, well-structured, completely fabricated response—often with fake citations, fictional figures, and an authoritative tone. This phenomenon is known as the ‘hallucination trap ’, and it may be the most significant barrier between trust and artificial intelligence. I was introduced to the term “AI hallucination” for the first time in the workshop under the project titled “Digital Trust and Free Expression in the AI Era” at Department of Media and Development Communication, University of the Punjab, supported by the U.S. Mission to Pakistan in partnership with the Pakistan-U.S. Alumni Network (PUAN). I learned that a “hallucination” occurs when a language model produces information that sounds convincing but is factually incorrect or completely made up. Examples include inventing a legal case that never existed, citing a research paper that doesn’t exist or boldly misrepresenting a historical date. What is disturbing is not merely that AI can be wrong-humans make mistake too- but rather the way it presents that incorrect information with clearly, confidence and without a trace of doubt. Large language models are essentially highly complex pattern predictors trained to produce the most likely next word in a sequence. As a result, when a model has encountered a topic thousands of times in its training data, the predictors are typically accurate. However, when it comes across a gap, an unidentified fact or a question at the outer edge of its knowledge, it doesn’t shift into a hesitant mode. Instead, it continues doing exactly what it was trained to do: generate a logical, fluent piece of writing, producing a response that is structurally sound and grammatically correct but based on nothing. In human communication, confidence is generally perceived as a sign of strength which is important. We naturally prefer to trust a calm, reliable voice over a hesitant one. AI systems unintentionally exploit the tendency because their language remains confident whether they are right or wrong. The risks increase with the use of AI, as students may unintentionally include false information into their work and journalists have published articles citing artificially created sources and quotes, negatively affecting the credibility of their publications. Such inaccuracies influence what millions of people see, believe or share, thereby amplifying fabricated content. The reason AI does not simply say “I don’t know” is partly due to the way these systems are trained. Many models are designed to provide helpful, comprehensive-sounding answers and are rarely rewarded for expressing doubt during training. This means that a model that frequently acknowledges uncertainty may be judged as less helpful than one that consistently provides an answer, even when that confidence is occasionally misplaced. Such incorrectly aligned incentives arise when the training process gradually teaches the model that sounding confident is more valuable than being accuracy. Retrieval-augmented generation, which relies on responses in actual, verifiable records rather than internal memory alone, improved training techniques that explicitly account for uncertainty; and systems built to simply cite sources. So, users can independently verify claims are just a few of the ways developers are using to addresses this problem. While none of these solutions fully eliminate hallucination yet, taken together they represent a major shift from blind confidence toward earned trust. The most dangerous outcome is not an AI that makes mistakes but a culture of users who stop questioning because the system always sounds so sure of itself.   Therefore, until AI becomes more reliably aware of it own limitation, part of the responsibility falls on the people who use it: treating AI-generated output as a starting point rather than an endpoint, cross checking important facts against credible sources. In the end, the hallucination trap serves as a reminder that illusion is not the same as truth. As AI becomes increasingly common in education, digital media and everyday life, understanding why it occasionally lies with confidence is not only a technical curiosity but also a fundamental aspect of digital literacy. We must strengthen our ability to verify the information provided by AI as they become more persuasive. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Mission to Pakistan or USEFP. The writer, Syeda Samar Zahra Zaidi, is a student of Media and Development Communication at  University of the Punjab, Lahore and can be reached at samarzahra456@gmail.com.