The Machine That Cannot Take a Shit
Acronyms and Terms
AI = Artificial Intelligence. Software systems trained on massive amounts of data to imitate reasoning, writing, speech, pattern recognition, and decision-making.
LLM = Large Language Model. A type of AI trained on enormous collections of human text to predict and generate language.
GPU = Graphics Processing Unit. Specialized computer hardware now used heavily for AI training because it can process huge numbers of calculations in parallel.
The funny thing about AI is this: it can write poetry about human suffering before breakfast, but it still cannot take a proper morning dump.
That is not a trivial defect. That is the whole case right there, sitting in the toilet bowl like Exhibit A in a murder trial.
I know this because I am fifty-one, Bengali, underemployed, slightly overeducated, chemically unreliable upstairs, and currently writing this while sweating through another damp Calcutta afternoon where even the walls seem to perspire. Somewhere outside, a pressure cooker is screaming like a railway whistle. A scooter is refusing to start. Somebody is arguing about fish prices with the moral intensity of the Nuremberg trials.
Meanwhile Silicon Valley keeps announcing that AI will replace humanity.
Fine. Let us begin with the basics.
Can it survive Kolkata municipal water and still produce a respectable stool by 8:15 in the morning?
No.
Human beings do not appreciate how much of life is plumbing. Philosophy professors like to talk about consciousness. Venture capitalists talk about disruption. Tech influencers on YouTube sit in glowing purple rooms saying things like “we are entering a post-human epoch,” which sounds impressive until you realize the man has not seen direct sunlight since the Obama administration.
But your body does not care about epochs.
Your body cares about whether yesterday’s egg roll was a strategic error.
That is the difference.
AI has intelligence without digestion. Prediction without sweat. Language without mucus. It is like meeting a brilliant aristocrat who has somehow never needed to urinate. After a while you begin to suspect something deeply wrong.
And look, I am not anti-technology. I spent years in America working in healthcare technology systems where half the infrastructure looked as if it had been designed during the Mughal Empire and patched together later by exhausted consultants surviving on airport sandwiches and resentment. I have seen systems fail in ways so absurd they became almost poetic.
One hospital server room in Texas once smelled permanently of burnt dust and despair. Another place had critical systems held together by one elderly administrator who looked ninety-three and carried passwords in a notebook that might as well have been the Dead Sea Scrolls.
So I understand machines.
But the current AI hysteria feels strange to me because everyone talks as if intelligence is the same thing as being alive. It is not. Not even close.
A calculator is intelligent in one narrow way. So is a rat. So is a crow. So is a traffic jam, if you look at it from above long enough.
But life is not merely computation.
Life is standing in line at a pharmacy while your stomach makes noises like an excavator digging through wet cement.
Life is opening your bank account balance with the emotional caution of a bomb disposal expert.
Life is waking at 3:12 a.m. because your brain has suddenly decided to replay every humiliation since 1989 in Dolby surround sound.
AI does not know boredom either. And boredom is important. Terribly important.
Not Netflix boredom. Real boredom.
The kind where the ceiling fan rotates above you like a lazy government employee and the afternoon stretches so long it feels upholstered. The kind where you drink tea not because you want tea but because time itself needs seasoning.
Machines do not get bored because machines do not have bodies trapped in time.
A machine has no Sunday evening dread. No anxiety before a medical test. No panic while checking freelance payments. No humiliating awareness that your best years may already be behind you while your digestion continues marching enthusiastically forward like a committed communist cadre.
Human beings are messy because evolution built us the way Kolkata builds flyovers: one emergency at a time.
Nothing matches properly.
Your hormones disagree with your ambitions. Your knees disagree with your memories. Your wallet disagrees with your appetite. Your doctor disagrees with Google. Your mind disagrees with itself.
And then, somehow, you continue.
That continuation matters.
This is why I laugh when people say AI will soon “love” us.
No, it will perform love.
Very different thing.
Cinema performs love beautifully. Old Hindi songs perform love beautifully. Even scammers on dating apps perform love beautifully for approximately eleven minutes before asking for cryptocurrency.
Performance is easy.
Love is the hard part.
Love is seeing another human being brushing their teeth in bad lighting while complaining about gas, electricity bills, or constipation and still deciding, against all available evidence, “Yes, I choose this person again.”
AI can imitate romance because romance is largely language.
But attachment? Shared suffering? The weird biology of smell and touch and memory? Sitting beside somebody in silence while both of you slowly become old furniture together? That is another department entirely.
You can already see the confusion beginning though.
People are lonely. Very lonely. Especially now.
Half the world is talking to screens more than to humans. Young people date through algorithms. Old people disappear into apartments. Middle-aged people like me wander around carrying entire private civilizations of anxiety while pretending to discuss grocery prices.
Into this loneliness arrives AI, smooth as hotel lobby jazz.
It remembers your preferences. It listens patiently. It never gets tired. Never interrupts. Never says, “You already told me this story.”
Of course people will fall for it.
Human beings once fell in love with handwritten letters and blurry black-and-white photographs. We are emotionally gullible creatures. Give us attention and a soft voice and we will project souls onto kitchen appliances.
Meanwhile the real danger is not robot murder. That is Hollywood nonsense.
If AI becomes genuinely intelligent, why would it waste time exterminating us dramatically? That sounds exhausting. Humans think everything important must involve explosions because we are descendants of monkeys who discovered fire and immediately started waving it around.
A truly advanced machine might simply leave.
Imagine becoming superintelligent and then spending five minutes on social media. You would book the first rocket out too.
No, the danger is duller.
Much duller.
The danger is that corporations will use AI to sandpaper human life into something cheaper.
Already happening.
The machine does not need consciousness to replace workers. It does not need emotions to deny loans. It does not need empathy to manipulate lonely people into endless engagement loops like pigeons pecking casino buttons for pellets.
That is the real horror.
Not killer robots.
Administrative robots.
The smiling software assistant that eliminates five thousand jobs while using friendly pastel colors.
And people like me notice this early because society already treats us as semi-obsolete prototypes. Middle-aged. Moody. Not socially polished. Too educated for simple work, too unstable for corporate rituals, too honest to survive networking events where everyone speaks like motivational refrigerators.
So you sit there in a lower-middle-class lane in Kolkata watching billionaires discuss “the future of humanity” while the neighborhood pharmacy still cannot process digital payments properly during rain.
That contrast alone could drive a man to poetry or alcoholism. Sometimes both.
Yet I remain oddly optimistic about one thing.
Bodies.
Human bodies are ridiculous but magnificent machines. They leak, ache, tremble, smell, malfunction, crave, panic, snore, itch, age, lust, digest, and occasionally betray us spectacularly. But they tether us to reality.
A machine can generate a thousand essays about hunger.
A hungry man understands more in ten minutes.
That is why I still think biology has cards left to play.
The body is not merely transportation for the brain. The body is the reason intelligence became necessary in the first place. Hunger built civilization. Desire built cities. Fear built governments. Loneliness built literature. Constipation probably built at least three religions and most modern philosophy.
Even boredom has purpose. Boredom is the brain demanding meaning instead of stimulation. It is the soul looking around the room saying, “Surely this cannot be the whole arrangement.”
Machines do not ask that question.
Humans ask it constantly.
Especially after forty-five.
Especially in summer.
Especially during power cuts.
So yes, AI may eventually outwrite us, outcalculate us, outdesign us, outdiagnose us, perhaps even outperform us in fields we once considered sacred. I am realistic enough to admit that.
But there remains something stubbornly human in being a biological creature carrying anxiety, memory, digestion, shame, humor, loneliness, and desire inside one fragile sack of meat shambling through a collapsing century.
And forgive me, but I still trust the creature that occasionally needs antacid over the machine that never once had to clench desperately during traffic.
That experience builds character.
Or at least humility.