The Machines are Learning. Are the People, Too?
Image: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
In his urgent and timely novel The Machine is Learning (2020), Tanuj Solanki confronts the rise of artificial intelligence with the complexities of 21st century humanity.
First and foremost, The Machine is Learning is a novel about humans, written for humans. It is ironic to say a sentence like that because one could argue all novels, or all art forms, are fundamentally created for the sake of human consumption. But, as the title of Tanuj Solanki’s novel suggests, the machines are indeed learning: they’re learning to write poetry, to draw paintings, to sing human songs. And in the case of the protagonist Saransh Malik’s world, the threat is closer yet, as the machines creep into his professional life, threatening to steal away work from those under him.
There are those novels that are a product of the time, and then there are those novels for which time is written about. Longlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature 2020, The Machine is Learning is a novel not only in dialogue with our world, but one which brings out a dialogue of its very own.
Criss-crossing through Hyderabad, Uttar Pradesh, Mumbai and Goa, the novel is told through the eyes of Saransh Malik, an AI developer at a life insurance company. While Solanki clearly takes inspiration from our modern trysts with globalisation, Internet dating, and artificial intelligence, what roots the story in the greater philosophical discourse is the author’s gift of observation. Whether it is through Saransh’s interactions with his co-worker and best friend Mitesh, humble Local Operations Executive Vijayalaxmi, or the callously free-spirited Jyoti, Solanki distills each and every moment into a comedy of social errors, a heart-turning reflection on a societal flaw, or a great insight in what it means to be human in a digitalising historic context.
The Machine is Learning is not just another novel about ‘great ideas’; much like Dickens before him, Solanki has taken a certain moment of history, within a society he knows very well, and he has given it a narrative draw, pathos, and nucleus that immortalises it in the space of 21st century literature.
Saransh’s role is, as paraphrased by his soon-to-be-girlfriend Jyoti, “to teach machines at BLIC to read text better.” Or, to put it more complexly, to “teach a machine to anticipate the lost text, which basically increases the accuracy of the whole text-reading thing to a level far better than previously known.” From Saransh’s perspective, it is all about efficiency. There are jobs that machines are supposed to be doing, but aren’t being done at their greatest potential yet. He wants to improve how computers work, so that there are fewer loopholes for the programmes to fall into.
However, for the woman sitting on the other side after a hook-up, awaiting her breakfast, there is an important piece of the puzzle that Saransh is not considering. Jyoti reminds Saransh:
What happens to the back-office guys?… The back-office guys in the telecom company… whose job it was to check whether my handwritten address matched with the one on my supporting document. What happens to them after the machine has learned to read?
These are not just the inherent flaws in the premise of AI development that tech gurus forget when they spout off Singularity babble. Solanki writes about that the fact that machines will slowly be taking over our lives, but through the woes, traumas, and flaws of the humans at the core of the problem.
Saransh seems to have little concern for them. He responds: “People find other employment…they reskill themselves.” This is something Jyoti, or many people who look at automation from the human side of things, does not take kindly to. She goes to the toilet to collect her thoughts. A more mature human being would have let Jyoti organise her emotions and return to the kitchen with another topic in mind. Not Saransh. He knows he is right, and he has to impose his view at any cost. Once the scrambled eggs are ready and Jyoti has returned, “Saransh [feels] this desperate urge to say something harsh…” He says, “My current project…is to use the latest machine learning technology to make 550 plus people in my company redundant.” Yes, redundant, Saransh says, with no empathy or ethos, and Jyoti, very much an everyman in this context, speaks on behalf of the reader:
“It’ll do what to the people – your project?’ she asks.
‘Make them redundant,’ [Saransh says]
‘You are almost bragging here.’
‘Am I? I don’t think so – it’s just the job.’
‘You used “make redundant”. Twice.’
The scene then comes alive as everything around it falls apart. Jyoti “inhales, exhales, takes a couple of bites… [as if] she’s assessing whether everything since last night has been a mistake. Her reaction makes Saransh anxious, and as a result, he [puts his] hand on hers. She yanks it back.” Jyoti exclaims that “[they] are not there yet,” which causes Saransh to defensively exclaim “But [we have] enough intimacy for you to sleep with me?’… Enough intimacy to have breakfast together? Enough intimacy for you to be wearing my T-shirt while having it?”
Jyoti is rightfully unhappy. She takes off his shirt, throws it at the plate, and then
[shakes her breasts] in anger. They throw ugly words at each other, until with utter indignation, Jyoti [ purses her lips, nods, and then steps out of the apartment with [Saransh’s ] umbrella, mistaking it for her own.
In just a few pages, Solanki establishes multiple worlds. These are not just the inherent flaws in the premise of AI development that tech gurus forget when they spout off Singularity babble. Solanki writes about that the fact that machines will slowly be taking over our lives, but through the woes, traumas, and flaws of the humans at the core of the problem. It is clear from the minute ways that Solanki writes that Saransh is not merely just a mouthpiece to discuss AI developments.
Image: Pan Macmillan
For example, before he meets Jyoti, Saransh’s immediate reaction is to “[rush] to the bathroom and [check his] appearance in the mirror.” He says to himself: “Closely-cropped hair, a greenish one-day stubble, brown eyes, a high forehead, a sharp nose… I think I’m all right.” What these sentences do is establish Saransh as someone who’s not too self-absorbed, quite self-depreciating, even. He has his insecurities like any other human, and he laughs at them, in a way that few do.
He can also be deeply empathetic, and deeply hurt. Saransh has an inexplicable bond with a picture of a three-year-old Syrian boy, who “drowned, his body washed up on the Turkish coast” in the midst of fleeing the Syrian War. As if he suffers from PTSD, Saransh randomly imagines “the drowned Syrian child[,] [his] face flat against the sand… [the] palms facing the sky.”
It is never really revealed exactly why it is that Saransh is so haunted by this image. I would like to believe that it is that Saransh, like many of us, feels a strong sense of empathy to humans, no matter what nation or creed they come from, and the suffering of someone thousands of kilometres away can still affect him.
The lack of further explanation is one of the novel’s strengths; Saransh has parts of him that are not easy to understand, and are meant to simply a part of who he is, much like any person, or three-dimension literary character, ought to be.
Many of the other characters take on complex, three-dimensional forms, too. Though The Machine is Learning never slips out of first person, and is only told exclusively in Saransh’s narrative, Solanki takes care to share telling details that are observed by Saransh, but fleshed out through Solanki’s authorial hand. For example, we are introduced to Jyoti on the assumption that she is coming to Saransh’s house to play Scrabble, after having matched with him on Tinder. Solanki describes Jyoti as
wearing a frilly brown shirt and a pair of tight black jeans [her hair]… tied in a ponytail. From her left shoulder hangs a faux-leather bag, jutting from which is a black umbrella and a Scrabble box wrapped in transparent polythene. Clearly, the box has never been opened, which [suggests] the thought that she bought it only today, probably on her way here. Which suggests that in the morning she had talked of Scrabble just to talk of something, to create some pretense for meeting [Saransh].
The description also suggests that Jyoti may be a little pretentious, and by summoning this image of this South Bombay babe who brags of things she doesn’t fully own, Solanki is not only rendering how Saransh views Jyoti. He is creating a set of associations for us to tie along to our understanding of Jyoti. Jyoti comes off as immediately recognisable, and she continues to be so, whether it is when “her [naked] breasts shake with anger” after Saransh admits he is making people redundant, or when she waves her arm in a semicircle to refer to the luxuries of [her house] in South Bombay, upon finally confessing that she’s not just a struggling journalist, but the daughter of a famous corporate lawyer.
Jyoti lives for her values and for thrill; her privileges allow her this freedom, as is has never been in a position where risk-taking results in consequence. It is ironic then, when she pressures Saransh—a person from a very humble background who has had to work for everything he knows—to report on all of the exploitative patterns of his company, jeopardising his livelihood, his salary, and his standing in society for the sake of lofty social change.
Saransh’s coworker Mitesh is an equally compelling character. As Saransh’s partner from the first chapter of the novel, Mitesh is described in more detail than Saransh himself. He is a
trueborn suburban-Mumbai Gujurati. Schooling (state board), graduation (B.Tech), postgraduation (MBA) – everything in Mumbai. He is thirtysix, paunchy, balding, with a talent for producing pearls of sweat above his upper lip (temperature no concern). He has an arranged-marriage wife whose career he is not averse to calling ‘a stable base’; a three-year-old boy whose exploits he is prone to recounting even without a smidgeon of interest from the counterparty; a US-settled sister whose estate in Nebraska he visits once every year; a long-dead mother, who he never talks about; and a recently deceased father whose death six months ago due to pancreatic cancer pushed Mitesh into buying an overpriced heart and cancer policy.
Solanki shares another talent with Dickens; he is able to take a character and make them fully vivid and recognisible by conjuring certain archetypes. By introducing Mitesh on his CV, we know how much career is central to his identity. His never-thought-about arranged marriage, his banality at his own son… these too paint the picture of a very specific person that we encounter in any Indian city, small or big.
Then, there are the surprises. Death has made a large impact in Mitesh’s life, as well as the fears of how death can affect others in his family. For all of his aloofness, Mitesh is aware of his smallness of his world. It’s not that he cares about money or stability; it’s that he wants to do something of meaning for his family and society in the little tract of time he will have.
The novel encompasses a plethora of themes, all of which deal ultimately with the various social levels that make up one’s place in modern India—as well as the added looming threat of artificial intelligence. The car of the driver who takes Saransh and Mitesh to Hyderabad “stinks because [the driver] lives a considerable part of his life in it.” Out of pity Saransh hands him two hundred rupees for lunch.
When he interviews LOE worker Vijayalaxmi to find ways of replacing her work with artificial intelligence, he notes that he “[has] a feeling that she doesn’t really understand English very well… [and as a result signals] this to Mitesh [by speaking his] next words very slowly.” Saranash gives no sense of respect or dignity given to Vijayalaxmi during their introduction; in many ways, he even fails to fully recognise her as a fellow human being. Yet, over the course of the novel, it will be Saransh’s pathos towards Vijayaxmi and her circumstances that will sow the seeds of discord at his company’s doings.
The Machine is Learning is not just another novel about ‘great ideas’; much like Dickens before him, Solanki has taken a certain moment of history, within a society he knows very well, and he has given it a narrative draw, pathos, and nucleus that immortalises it in the space of 21st century literature.
One of my criticisms of the story were related to how quickly—and how drastically—Saransh seemed to transform over the course of two hundred pages. While his sympathies towards the problem of Syrian children are commendable, they seem built by Solanki as a space to justify Saransh’s rapid change from apathetic-insurance-company-worker to voice-of-the-people.
I feel that someone like Saransh may have needed a lot more than jostling from a girlfriend to reach the decisions he has made. In the current context, they only feel like an ad-hoc response to Jyoti’s pressuring, and then a sudden burst from the stress. I also think that there’s a lot to be critiqued in the dynamic between Jyoti and Saransh. Other than the obvious fact that Jyoti is clearly using Mitesh for her own vendettas against the system, her thoughts often feel too clearly like the author’s own, in puppet form, trying to reign back the conservative views of the male narratives.
While the characters in The Machine Is Learning writing are vivid, heart-affecting, and well imagined, they do not feel fully liberated from the machinations of the author’s planned plot.
And yet, I return again and again to a comparison to the great Charles Dickens. Dickens, who cared about the world and its problems, who used writing not just as a platform for expression but as a space for change-making, and who humanised the problems of his characters not by psychologically fleshing them out, but by rendering them in contexts which illicit sympathy.
It is in all of these parameters, The Machine is Learning not only succeeds, but conquers. Solanki has created characters that live in the reader’s hearts long after they have been read. He has also used his pen to shine light on the problematic aspects of artificial intelligence, a very real challenge on the horizon for everyone from Karachi to California. And he has done so without sacrificing the depth of the story or his characters.
Much like a spider weaving a gossamer, Solanki created a matrix of his own thoughts and feelings over a gruesome situation, and from his spins of ugly thread, created a work of great beauty and regard. In this, he has absolutely inherited Dickens’ passion, power, and light. I implore him to use it to keep his words shining on.
Title: The Machine is Learning.
Author: Tanuj Solanki.
Publisher: Macmillan (13 June 2020).
Hardcover: 256 pages
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Kiran Bhat is a global citizen formed in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, to parents from Southern Karnataka, in India. An avid world traveler, polyglot, and digital nomad, he has currently traveled to over 130 countries, lived in 18 different places, and speaks 12 languages. His list of homes is vast, but his heart and spirit always remains in Mumbai, somehow. He currently lives in Melbourne. You can find him on Twitter: @WeltgeistKiran and Instagram: Originalsin_0421.
