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In their book with the self-explanatory title Why machines will never rule the world, Barry Smith and Jobst Landgrebe argue that, “for mathematical reasons, there will never exist an artificial intelligence that is able to emulate the intelligence even of a crow,” let alone that of human beings. That may be true literally, but machines do rule India in a figurative sense of the word.
Encyclopedia Britannica describes “political machine” as an American phenomenon. It is “a party organization, headed by a single boss or small autocratic group, that commands enough votes to maintain political and administrative control of a city, county, or state.” Anyone aware of the Indian reality would affirm that such machines also exist in our country. Worse, these machines have debauched democracy; they run the country; now democracy means machines of the people, by the people, and for the people.
We just have to look around us to realize that politicians of all persuasions—Hindutva votaries, Congress leaders, Lohiaites, Ambedkarites, communists, et al—are completely unbothered about the real problems that torment people. And there are a myriad of problems, ranging from unemployment and low purchasing capacity to rickety administrative structures and environmental degradation.
The last one is something everyone in Delhi and the surrounding National Capital Region or NCR is grievously suffering from. Delhi’s persistent air pollution is reducing the life expectancy of its residents, the latest Air Quality Life Index 2024 report said in August. In fact, it said, Delhi-NCR is one of the most polluted regions in the northern plains. The report by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) said that 1.8 crore people living in Delhi were likely to lose an average of 11.9 years of life expectancy, as compared to the World Health Organization’s guidelines.
Such reports, like the air pollution in early winters, are not new; newspapers and channels are full of details on how Delhi-NCR has become a gas chamber. One would have expected politicians of all parties to come together and chalk out a plan to combat the problem. After all, politicians, for all their follies and foibles, are human.
Perhaps, they are, but then they don’t run the country; political machines do, and machines are not human. They are devoid of all human feelings, unbothered about the real concerns, and unmoved by any morality. They have only two objectives. The first and foremost is the winning of elections. The second is to ensure that the software that runs their operating systems remains sturdy; that software is ideology.
Administrative, police, and judicial reforms are urgently needed as they, or their absence, adversely affects people from all walks of life. But they don’t even appear in the manifestoes of parties.
A zillion problems like environmental damage, joblessness, and high prices scorch people, but rarely, if ever, these are on the radar of the political class. Our political masters are interested instead in non-issues like ‘one nation, one election,’ changing names of places, cow protection, and caste census.
It is not that the situation became bad after Narendra Modi took charge as Prime Minister. It was the same story when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government under Manmohan Singh was in office. In 2013, the government came up with the fiscally ruinous and economically disastrous National Food Security Act under the watch of Sonia Gandhi who, in turn, was guided by the National Advisory Council.
It may be recalled that the dole-distributing UPA government had badly impacted public finance, frustrating wealth creators, anguishing serious economists, and annoying rating agencies. In fact, at that time there was the real danger of rating agencies downgrading India. But the govt was not daunted by such impediments.
Just like the saffron machine; it too is unbothered about the consequences of the shrill campaigns it regularly undertakes to keep its software sturdy. The machine has overtaken men and women who can’t oppose its dictates even if they want to.
Smith and Landgrebe wrote, “AI algorithms have of course been built that surpass human intelligence in impressive ways; but this is always along narrow lanes (for example in playing certain sorts of games). Rats, crows, and humans, in contrast, have general intelligence, which means that they are able to relate successfully even to environments of a sort which they have never before encountered. The argument of the book is that AI systems will never be developed that have this sort of general intelligence.”
Political machines in our country, however, seem to have developed general intelligence, indeed a life of their own. Large swathes of northern India these days resemble some kind of futuristic, dystopian landscape under heartless, soulless rulers.
We all are already living the terrors of tomorrow.
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Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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