Satyajit Ray's timeless AI conundrum still echoes in today's world

From loyalty to murder - how Ray's stories foresaw the moral mess of AI long before it began to permeate our daily lives

Sujoy Ghosh’s 2017 Hindi short film Anukul, which is based on Satyajit Ray’s tiny story from 1976, brilliantly captures Ray’s timeless yet provocative futuristic vision of artificial intelligence (AI). “Anukul” means favourable or conducive, and the movie looks at the concept of building machines that are favourable and sensitive to human values and ethics. Is that true, though?

 

Bengal celebrates May 2 as filmmaker Ray’s birthday. However, Ray was no less popular as a Bengali story writer. Some of his sci-fi stories — like Anukul — foreshadowed today’s AI splendour and beyond. The apprehension that machines will be capable of