The AI Harmonium Players

Acronyms and terms used:

AI: Artificial Intelligence, software that imitates parts of human reasoning, language, pattern recognition, prediction, and decision-making.

GPU: Graphics Processing Unit, a chip originally built for graphics but now heavily used for AI because it can perform many calculations at once.

VC: Venture Capital, investment money given to fast-growing companies in return for ownership and future profit.

LLM: Large Language Model, an AI system trained on huge amounts of text to predict and generate language.

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The harmonium coughs before it sings, which is more honesty than most AI commentary manages.

It does not begin with music. It begins with complaint. A little wheeze. A wooden shiver. A sound like an asthmatic goat being asked to perform Tagore after eating damp muri from a newspaper cone near Garia station. Then the bellows fill, the keys tremble, and out comes that thin devotional note which says, with complete confidence and no supporting evidence, that civilization is about to improve.

This is how most of us now speak about AI.

We sit in a row, cross-legged before the great wooden box of the future, pumping opinion-air through cracked bellows. Professors. Founders. YouTube bald men with rectangles. Consultants. Students. Nervous parents. Retired uncles. Startup boys with VC deodorant. LinkedIn pilgrims announcing they are “thrilled” about things no normal person would be thrilled about unless there was equity involved.

And yes.

I am also there.

Back row. Local performer. Tea-stained mug. One sock missing. Lower-middle-class Bengali edition. A man in the southern shanty boondocks of Calcutta, aged fifty-one, consulting income thin as municipal tea, brain somewhat dented by depression and anxiety, but still foolishly attached to the idea that sentences matter.

So let me confess first, before someone else files the charge.

I have been one of the harmonium players.

Not the big ones. Not the stage people with headset microphones and white sneakers. Not the Stanford droplet boys with their smooth faces and terrifying confidence. Not the global prophets who can say “compute” and make it sound like Mount Sinai has opened a cloud account.

I am a smaller creature.

A neighborhood harmonium nuisance. The man at the back of the procession still pressing keys after everyone else has turned toward the biryani.

And let me make another thing clear before some young software-salesman nephew says, “Kaku, are you in AI?”

No.

I am not in AI.

I am not in the game. I am not in the stadium. I am not in the dugout. I am not even selling peanuts outside. I am beyond the outside, near the drain, holding cold tea in a paper cup, listening to the roar and telling myself the match is vulgar anyway.

This is what men do when the ticket has become more expensive than both their wallet and their youth.

But opinion, unfortunately, is not rationed by usefulness. If it were, several TV studios would be converted into public toilets, and India would achieve one great leap forward in public infrastructure.

So I speak.

Not because I matter.

Because I remember the before.

Before autocomplete became a second tongue. Before search became memory with a corporate smell. Before students asked a machine for the first outline before their own skull had made its first tiny grunt of effort. Before every difficulty came with a button saying “generate.” Before thinking began to look like unpaid clerical work better outsourced to a polite box that never sweats, never has acidity, never forgets the citation format, never sits on a plastic chair at 4:37 in the morning wondering whether life has become a badly maintained government file swollen by humidity.

The old fear was that machines would become intelligent.

The new fear is less glamorous and much more believable.

Humans may become machine-dependent idiots with beautiful interfaces.

This is not the Hollywood fear. No shining skeleton walking through fire. No killer refrigerator. No Terminator arriving naked in Bhowanipore asking for your clothes, boots, and motorcycle while a tea stall uncle says, “Motorcycle nei, scooter cholbe?”

That fear is almost comforting because it keeps the monster outside the head.

The real thing arrives like damp through a wall.

First you ask the machine to summarize.

Then to draft.

Then to decide.

Then to remember.

Then to choose.

Then, one fine afternoon, perhaps while the ceiling fan is making its famous Calcutta sound like a tired helicopter, you ask it to speak in your voice.

That is where the floor quietly gives way.

A machine correcting your grammar is one thing. A machine flattering you in your own voice is something else. That is not a tool anymore. That is a mirror learning to apply face powder.

Of course, some clever person will immediately object.

“But every technology extends the human mind. Writing did it. Printing did it. Calculators did it. The internet did it.”

Correct.

Also, sit down for one second.

Writing externalized memory, and the old Greek anxiety that people would stop remembering was not entirely foolish. Printing multiplied thought, but it also multiplied pamphlet stupidity, religious rage, political nonsense, and the ancient human habit of being confidently wrong in durable formats. Calculators freed us from arithmetic drudgery and produced people who stare at 17 times 6 as if a cobra has entered the room. The internet gave humanity something close to the Library of Alexandria, and within minutes we used it to argue about celebrity diets, cricket conspiracies, and whether one’s own nation is superior in every measurable and unmeasurable way.

Technology is not a ladder.

It is a borrowed umbrella. Useful in rain. Easily stolen. Occasionally used to poke someone in the eye.

AI feels different not because it is magic, although the salesmen would dearly love to sell magic without admitting they are selling magic. AI feels different because it enters the soft private area where effort used to live.

That is the small locked room.

Effort. Delay. Embarrassment. Revision. False starts. Private stupidity. The long, uncomfortable simmer by which thought becomes thought.

AI does not merely help you carry the sack of potatoes.

It whispers, “Why carry at all? I can make a potato-like document.”

And who can resist?

Not me.

I am not standing here in saffron robes of authenticity pretending I hand-grind my metaphors at dawn. I have used these machines. I have poked them, cursed them, coaxed them, leaned on them, and watched them produce paragraphs so clean they looked freshly bathed. I have also watched them produce nonsense with the confidence of a Bengali uncle explaining world affairs after two pegs and no facts.

The machine is brilliant.

The machine is stupid.

The machine is a parrot made of statistics sitting on a power station.

The machine is a mirror that has read more than you and understood less than it claims, except the insult is not complete because many humans have read little and understood nothing, so the competition is not as flattering as we hoped.

A little history helps, because without history every new gadget arrives like a god in plastic packaging.

In 1950, Alan Turing asked a clever question about whether machines could imitate human conversation well enough to confuse us. It was a neat British sidestep, like avoiding the question “What is the soul?” by asking whether the butler can convincingly impersonate the priest.

In 1956, at Dartmouth, several very bright men gathered and helped give AI its official name and ambition. There is something touching about that era. Men, blackboards, cigarettes, and the innocent belief that intelligence might be formalized if everyone simply tried hard enough before lunch.

Then came the perceptron, the early artificial neuron. It was praised, doubted, buried, and resurrected, like many Bengali political careers. Then came AI winters. Then expert systems, brittle as old papad. Then statistics. Machine learning. Deep learning. Transformers. GPUs. Data centers. And now this circus, where if you pour half the internet into a mathematical stomach and heat it with a scandalous amount of electricity, it burps out essays, code, poems, scams, therapy-flavored reassurance, and corporate strategy documents.

It is astonishing.

It is also ridiculous.

Like discovering your septic tank can sing Mozart.

Here is the part that worries me most.

Not because I am noble. I am not. Nobility and I have never been on speaking terms. I am a middle-aged man who sometimes postpones bathing as if it were a competitive examination. I know laziness. I have hosted laziness. I have given laziness tea.

But there is laziness, and then there is laziness wearing a competent ghost.

When I avoided work as a young man, the work sat there like an accusing buffalo. The book remained unread. The problem remained unsolved. The blank page stared back. Reality did not help. It only judged.

Now the buffalo offers to complete itself.

That is new.

That is not a small thing.

A mind needs friction. Not cruelty. Not trauma. Not some fake heroic suffering sold by productivity merchants in tight T-shirts. Just friction.

The mosquito near the ear. The wrong sentence. The bad first draft. The equation that refuses to behave. The shame of not knowing. The slow burn of being stupid long enough for the stupidity to become compost.

Without that, thinking becomes like a muscle kept in velvet. Smooth. Decorative. Completely useless when the bus starts moving and you have to run.

A future child may not be biologically less intelligent. The neurons will still fire. The brain will still do its wet electrical magic. Sodium and potassium will continue their tiny border-crossing drama inside the skull. The hardware will remain impressive.

But culture can domesticate a brain.

A tiger fed biscuits in a flat is still technically a tiger.

The jungle will not be impressed.

And here we are, teaching the tiger to ask the biscuit tin for strategy.

The optimists say AI will free humans for higher creativity.

Lovely.

From what evidence?

Most people freed from drudgery are not automatically promoted to Shakespeare. They are promoted to scrolling. Give humanity four free hours and it will not necessarily compose a sonnet. It may watch a man fall into a fountain in fifteen edits while eating something orange from a packet and feeling vaguely cheated by existence.

This is not cynicism.

This is field observation.

Still, I cannot join the doom-kirtan crowd either. You know the type. Every invention is the end of humanity. Every software update is a funeral. Every new tool means civilization is finished before lunch.

Humanity is irritatingly resilient. It has survived kings, priests, empires, plague, lead paint, bad schools, television, management consultants, and the Indian marriage ceremony, which alone should qualify us as an endurance species.

We may survive AI too.

But “survive” is a low little word. Crows survive. Cockroaches survive. Certain relatives survive all family functions and return stronger.

The question is not whether humans remain alive.

The question is what happens to inwardness.

That small dark workshop inside a person where he argues with himself without witnesses. That place where the first ugly thought is made less ugly, where the copied idea becomes tested, where the borrowed phrase is rejected, where pride gets slapped around by reality.

If every uncertainty is instantly padded with an answer-shaped object, uncertainty loses its teeth.

And without teeth, it cannot chew.

That, to me, is the center.

Not job loss, though job loss will come like municipal demolition: selective, brutal, badly explained, and somehow always landing first on the people who cannot afford philosophy.

Not plagiarism, though plagiarism will become so common it will need its own weather forecast.

Not misinformation, though misinformation will now wear a clean shirt, speak in neat paragraphs, and look employable.

The center is dependency.

A species that outsources remembering, navigating, calculating, choosing, composing, summarizing, desiring, and eventually judging may not become stupid exactly.

It may become post-stupid.

That is a stranger condition. Glossy on the surface. Hollow underneath. Like a sweet that looks fine in the shop window but has been sitting there since the previous government.

You think the danger is that AI will think like a human.

But perhaps the real danger is that humans will start thinking like autocomplete.

Predictable. Polished. Smooth. Eager to continue the pattern. Afraid of the odd sentence, the private doubt, the embarrassing pause.

And the pause is important.

A pause is where the mind changes direction.

A machine hates pauses. Markets hate pauses. Platforms hate pauses. Even relatives hate pauses. If you pause too long, someone will ask, “Ki holo? Bhalo nei?” and then you must either lie or explain your entire nervous system beside a water filter.

But thought needs pauses.

It needs the blankness before the first word. It needs the burnt toast of failure. It needs the unpleasant smell of effort.

In Calcutta, this is not an abstract matter. Here life already comes with enough friction to sand down a railway bridge. The lane is narrow. The power goes. The lift sulks. The fish seller has opinions. The landlord remembers the rent with Swiss precision but forgets the damp wall like a poet. The internet blinks at the exact moment you are submitting something important. The body sweats. The mind sweats. The shirt gives up.

Then AI arrives and says, “Relax. I will think for you.”

You can understand the appeal.

To a tired man, even a dangerous chair looks inviting.

I know how I sound.

I sound like the village musician still playing after the procession has ended, the food has been served, the children are crying, and the dogs have moved to another neighborhood for mental peace. Enough warning has been issued. Enough clever people have rolled their eyes. The sensible man shuts up.

But I am not sensible.

I am fifty-one, Bengali, dented but not decorative, educated enough to be suspicious, broke enough to be honest, and still foolish enough to believe that the human mind should not become a delivery address for machine-made conclusions.

I do not want AI to vanish.

That would be childish. Also impossible. The genie is not going back into the bottle. The genie has formed a company, raised funding, hired a policy team, and released a premium tier.

I want something smaller and harder.

I want the human to remain difficult.

I want students to get stuck before they get rescued. I want writers to write one bad paragraph with their own bad hand. I want programmers to stare at the bug until the bug becomes personal. I want children to know the taste of not knowing. Not because suffering is holy. Suffering is often just suffering wearing a sacred moustache.

But without stuckness there is no ownership.

Knowledge that arrives too smoothly slides off the skin.

It never becomes bone.

Some things deserve to be old-fashioned.

Thinking may be one of them.

Not because the past was noble. The past was full of lice, superstition, caste, empire, bad dentistry, bad medicine, and men smelling of mustard oil while declaring women mysterious. But slowness had one accidental virtue.

It forced the mind to sit with its own smell.

Now everything arrives perfumed.

That is how rot wins in polite houses.

So let the AI harmonium players continue. Let them wheeze and pump and announce the future in twelve wrong keys. Let executives clap. Let students outsource. Let consultants rename common sense. Let billionaires build power-hungry temples to prediction and call it alignment. Let every second man on the internet explain agents with boxes and arrows as if arrows were thinking.

The rest of us can stand in the heat, scratching our bellies, wondering whether intelligence is leaving the human animal the way hair leaves the scalp.

First a little.

Then strategically.

Then suddenly the whole skull shines with defeat.

I still press a few keys.

A bad note comes out.

Then another.

In the corner, the machine waits. Polite. Patient. Helpful. Dangerous in the way very helpful things can be dangerous. Ready to improve me into someone I may not recognize.

And I sit here with cold tea, one sock missing, and the faint but persistent feeling that my brain has become a harmonium full of trapped mosquitoes.

The future may be magnificent.

I only wish it did not smell so much like a fart in an air-conditioned room.

P.S. References:

Alan M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind, 1950.

John McCarthy, Marvin L. Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude E. Shannon, “A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence,” 1955.