The Machine is Learning

by Tanuj Solanki

I live alone in the big city, so there are days when I wish for the sun to swallow everything. Also, days when I feel like doing surya namaskars. I guess I’m the conflicted one: too intelligent to remain in the small town, too mediocre to really change the big world. Like Mitesh, I, too, am decent at the job.

Duly I open Twitter and start scrolling in search of something to pay attention to, partly aware of the paradox implicit in the act, for my intention is mostly to file away, through the flicking motion of my thumb, my very capacity for paying attention.

That the tall office buildings are located at a higher ground, that their glass bodies radiate a purposefulness, that they fulfill the requirement of looking as different from everyone’s home (and their idea of home) as it is possible to be – all of this adds to what can be called a religious effect. Make an offer of your faith and austerity, and you will be provided sustenance in return – that’s what these temples, like all temples, seem to tell us.

Here, I was exploring the similarities between corporate workplaces and places of worship.

Back in Zepellin, I open the presentation for the next SCOM and add a new slide about the Brahma proposal, putting in a series of bullet points the premise that emotion always creeps into whatever it is that humans do. While doing so, I think of all the emotion that goes into conceiving emotionless machines.

This is one of the central themes in TMIL: that chasing efficiency isn't an emotionless, ideologically empty pursuit.

How adroit he is with his own conscience. There is a nakedness in him, to him – a vulgarity that hides below the professional facade, but which can bare its head every now and then. Guilt, it hits me then, is the absence of vulgarity. Or maybe vulgarity is the absence of guilt.

Saransh's way of seeing Mitesh changes here. Feeling guilty about the state of the world may not work as prescription, but it increases our ability to spot the outright vulgar.

‘I don’t see what your protest is, Saransh. Is it against automation? I know you are smart enough to know that it is unavoidable. Is it against the vulgarity of implementing it? That’s a workplace thing that can be sorted out. We can systemize empathy and include it in the SPG’s work processes. We can make sure that SPG people don’t have to face the people they make irrelevant. What, then?

Unnikrishnan, Saransh's boss, says this in their final confrontation. This may be vulgar, but it's difficult to argue against the reason.