Mirror, Mirror on the Wall!

"Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?"—a question forever entwined with the tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

In asking this, the Queen feeds her narcissism, indulges her vanity, and reveals the depths of her jealousy.

The turning point of the tale lies in the moment the mirror declares Snow White to be more beautiful than the Queen. And so begins the princess’s journey from one adventure to the next.

As a child listening to this tale—and later retelling it to my daughters—I found myself holding an inexplicable grudge against the mirror.

It echoes a sentiment expressed by Cahit Sıtkı Tarancı in his iconic Turkish poem Thirty-Five Years when he says, “Why do you look like an enemy now, mirrors I thought were friends for years?” The mirror, in this story too, becomes an enemy—driving a wedge between the Queen and the princess.

Sometimes, perhaps a harmless little white lie would do more good than harm. At least, the mirror could have tried.

It may seem like just a fairytale, but there’s something profoundly futuristic hidden in this story—a glimpse into emerging technology.

What if the Queen’s magical mirror was, in fact, an early metaphor for artificial intelligence?

After all, this mirror doesn’t just reflect—it analyzes the Queen’s face, identifies blemishes, evaluates her skin tone, and assigns a beauty score. Then it goes even further and compares her to Snow White. That's AI behavior.

In 1950, Alan Turing laid the foundations of artificial intelligence in his paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.”He asked whether machines could think and proposed what we now call the Turing Test to assess machine intelligence. Turing predicted that within 50 years, a machine could pass this test.

And indeed, in 2014, a computer program named Eugene Goostman—designed to mimic the personality of a 13-year-old boy—became the first AI to pass the test by convincing 33% of interrogators of its humanity.

The term artificial intelligence itself was coined in 1956 at a Dartmouth conference by John McCarthy and carried forward by Marvin Minsky, who first introduced artificial neural networks.

Today, the field has advanced to machine learning and deep learning—enabling the extraction of meaningful insights from massive datasets to solve complex problems.

Driven by soaring demand, tech companies’ investments in AI-based technologies have significantly boosted their profitability.

In particular, there's been explosive growth in the demand for next-generation microprocessors that enable AI tasks to run faster. This, in turn, has positively impacted the stock performance of companies providing equipment and technological infrastructure to this ecosystem.

BV Portföy Teknoloji Değişken Fonu (BVV) strategically invests in companies operating in AI-driven growth areas—companies creating long-term value for investors through technological innovation.

I began this piece by saying that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs hints at the future. But it’s just as important to stress the value of reading fairytales, not just the stories themselves.

In Mad, Bad and Dangerous?: The Scientist and the Cinema, Christopher Frayling attributes this thought to Albert Einstein:

"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."