Maddy was late to office. He knew his boss would have by now circled his cube several times like a eagle for its prey. He deliberately tried to give him a miss on seeing him at a distance, getting into Niranjan’s cubicle.
Niranjan had his head inside the monitor in front of him. Maddy knocked on the cubicle frame and ducked in to sit. He did not want his boss to see him.
Niranjan turned around. ‘Hey man! long time’.
Niranjan turned around. ‘Hey man! long time’.
Yes..In Internet time it is indeed long. We just met yesterday over lunch, right?
Is it? Niranjan was one of those deep thinking types. When he goes deep into his thought it will take few minutes before he can see the person in front of him and answer. Lunch? He was searching himself for what he had for lunch the previous day. He could see himself in the cafeteria with a plate full of …ah he got it. It was those special parotas that got introduced yesterday. Hmm…Now he looked back at Maddy having touched the vision of lunch.
‘Yes man..just the thought of yesterday looks so far away’
See I told you. You live in Internet time. You are like many plugged into the web and consuming every bit of news, every quora question, every chat. A boat capsizing in China is what is in your head now right?
Whoa yes man..I was just reading about it..
OK..step back a little and it would have been Anushka Sharma’s tweet on Abdul Kalam spelling his name wrong?
Yes man..
See I can go on like this…In between you would have looked at Hacker News and read that trending article around How Artificial Intelligence is Inhuman…
Man! you are getting everything as if you were inside my head.
Maddy was happy that all what he said to Niranjan was resonating.
Thats why I told you live in Internet time. You are a slice between the real physical YOU sitting here and the virtual online YOU. So many things happen to you sitting here, the news, the Facebook feed, the mails…now your lunch is just a very small event that crossed you and since you do it every day its not exciting.
Niranjan could not agree more. He was suddenly lighted up by this conversation. He felt he should move around a bit.
Why don’t we go have coffee?
Both walked silently for a while as they entered the cafeteria.
Cafetaria was almost empty as it was just after the first phase in the morning. Everyone was busy in their desk.
A person was vacuuming the floor at the far end of the Cafetaria.
Maddy went to get something.
***
Niranjan’s vision suddenly escaped the current. It expanded into another space.
He and his wife were walking into a popular consumer products service centre. The service reps scattered there enquired his problem. He pointed to a broken tube. He was asked to go further and enter a room at the far end to get it fixed. He walked passed several rooms which had crammed cubicles filled with youngsters fixed on their monitors and phones. He got into the last room on the right and some one saw the tube, took it to a corner, cut it and fixed the remaining into the sucking end. It was done in five minutes.
While walking back to his car, Niranjan told his wife…there’s something wrong about this whole thing.
His wife was following him closely, with cars whizzing past on the road. She could not hear him completely. Back in the car she asked “What did you say?”
“There’s something wrong with this..? don’t you see?”
“With what?”
“This whole Vacuum cleaning stuff?”
“Yes, of course, we have been postponing fixing the tube and it all got done in five minutes”
“No, I did not mean this fixing”
“Then what did you mean?”
Niranjan was now on the road. “Let me ask you something. What did you see in the service centre?”
“What?” his wife was wondering where he is going not getting the context.
“What did you see there as we got in and walked past?”
“We saw a bunch of folks trying to help us”
“OK as we walked further?”
“…Hmm..we entered the room on the far right”
“right..but before that?”
“A bunch of folks on computers”
“Yes. Now you are right there. That’s what is wrong”
“What’s wrong with that?”
Niranjan was silent now. He felt he was not looking at the road for a while. The road had curved to the left and then to the right and become narrower. Several bikes went past. It was quite trafficky.
He took left in the signal and went into the more broader highway. Now he could again slip back to where he left.
“See, why do we use a Vacuum cleaner?”
“Obviously to get rid of the dirt”, his Wife was curious to know where he was going.
“Before these Vacuum cleaners, how did we do it?”
“We did it with a broom. You mean why we need to use gadgets?” She tried to latch on to where he would go next.
“Yes, sort of..what is the reason you use a Vacuum cleaner instead of a broom stick?”
“It saves time obviously. It makes it easy to clean. It is quick”
“Right. It saved your time. But what about the time of those folks you saw stuck to the monitors or those service reps?”
“They are just doing their jobs”
“But to save your time? Then how is their time saved?”
The wife was perplexed. For a moment it was quite amusing for her. She chuckled.
“You see what we are up to? All this automation stuff. We brought machines to free us from the mundanity. Sure they freed up our time a lot. But it ended up adding time for others. Now if I expand this, every piece of thing I use in my life has 100s or 1000s of people behind it losing their time to make another 1000 or 1 million save time.
And I go to office to write code which saves the time for a travel agent and the travellers. But my time is saved by the 1000s of folks at Honda to make me drive the car. The TV, the mobile phone, the WhatsApp and all are invented to save the time for some one and free him to spend it on some other. But we end up spending it to save the time of other.
So effectively none of us get benefitted by this time saving. We are constantly in a tight loop helping each other, each other’s desire while none of us have time to pursue our own desire”
Niranjan paused. He was not sure if he still got this right. But he said what was sticking on his mind and now he could see the road.
They had already come closer to their house.
***
Maddy got back from the counter with two tender coconuts with straws in them.
“Oh…you again got into the thought loop? What is it now?”
Niranjan nodded..”Nah, just that why we want to automate things and stuff” He just briefed the whole thing to Maddy.
Maddy started laughing.
"You are the craziest person I have seen on this planet. It is definitely interesting. But you know what, I have a theory on why we got into this”
Niranjan looked up to Maddy.
“As you said, everyone is looking up to the other to save his time. Though a machine can help me to save time, it has to be maintained, it has to be evolved and therefore you have 1000s behind it to keep it running. The car you use has 1000s behind keeping it maintained, evolved and so on. The worker fitting engine of that car wants to go back and watch TV and there comes your escape route. You shipping that code to far away land wants to escape into a family vacation in Kenya. So it looks like if you want to escape you need to be caught. This is a catch22. The ones that want to do the greatest escape, say own a island or a luxury yacht gets caught the most. The simple worker fitting at that assembly line has a simple escape of watching a TV show.
If you did not want to escape, you wouldn’t be at someone’s service”.
Niranjan nodded. “How can you not escape? I mean how can you not have desires?”
“Guess you cannot NOT have any desires. It is impossible. As thats what you are wired with. But your little vision on how we humans collectively fail at saving someones time by automating is a classic example of the fall out of having such desires.
To fulfil your desire you work to fulfil some one else’s desire and it goes on. Its a cycle cleverly crafted to keep moving on thinking that we humans did really get somewhere when we look back. But am I any different from my great grand father? Not at all. Underlying this skin, I am exactly the same. I have not changed one bit.
Lord Ram had the thought if Sita was safe when Hanuman returned burning Lanka and it is the same thought every father has when he waits for his daughter returning back or a husband waiting for his wife to return from work. All this automation has helped us track things better, instantly and we are going on getting better at that. But fundamentally we are not any better than that pre-historic man. The instincts are pretty much the same. The wiring within is the same”.
Niranjan kept the emptied coconut on the table. The water was a bit sour.
His vision now went to that first Neanderthal Man who had felt the same taste drinking tender coconut’s water.
