From the Editor’s Desk
I watched a film last week, Humans in the loop. Set in the villages of Jharkhand, the film is based on an article by journalist Karishma Mehrotra titled "Human Touch". This is the story of an Adivasi woman Nehma, who tries to find work after the breakdown of her marriage and is forced to learn the computer. She takes up work at a local data-labelling centre, where she learns to annotate images and videos that trains artificial intelligence systems for international clients. But Nehma is familiar with the jungles that surround her, and she notices the gaps between the pre-ordained rigid categorisation by the corporate houses vis-a-vis the ecological wisdom that she has imbibed as a child.
Watching the film, I realised that Nehma’s dilemma is not only hers, but it is our collective dilemma in navigating an increasingly complicated world. That it is not only a dilemma of dealing with the unfamiliar, but having to resign to a fate of extreme homogenisation of both humans and the world around us.
Nehma, refuses to categorise a caterpillar as a ‘pest’, as prescribed to her, because she is aware of its uses in the plant kingdom. When she tells her supervisor that ‘AI is just like a child, if we feed it with the wrong information, it’ll learn the wrong things’- a world of sensitivity opens up before us, of acknowledging that God is in the details. But more importantly, that our differences make us who we are, and it isn’t necessary to look or feel alike, but instead acknowledge the diversity while not imposing our own world view over another’s.
As we head into a New Year, let us hope that we recognise and own our abilities to be different, to write and read that which is different too, and with that realisation begin preservation.
Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury
Managing Editor, The Bangalore Review
