Humans in the Loop

How does artificial intelligence interact with a developing economy, particularly at its lowest rung? Humans in the Loop hits like the casual threats you hear in corporate offices: “Everyone’s replaceable. This is the AI era,” echoing memories from when computers began replacing paper and people. The immediate question then, as I recall, was: “Who will operate them?” Okay, let’s face it. There is no running away from technology. It will only get sharper and smarter, but will human beings grow more intelligent alongside it? In Aranya Sahay’s quiet yet powerful feature, we meet a sharp woman whose natural intellect is tested as she struggles to earn a livelihood. Set in India’s rural Jharkhand, the film opens with Nehma (Sonal Madhushankar), who belongs to the Oraon tribe, failing a CAPTCHA test in a village recruitment drive. She fidgets her fingers, applying human logic as she identifies traffic lights, taxis, and zebra crossings. It is important to mention her caste identity in light of her marital status (or its legitimacy at all). Nehna’s ex-husband, Ritesh (Vikas Gupta), seeks custody of their children, one of them a toddler. A regular job is the only way Nehma would stand a chance against the upper-caste man who lives in the state capital, Ranchi.

I’ve always likened the opening stretch of a film to a train about to leave the station. The best films give the impression that the train has been running long before we boarded, and one that will continue after we get off. It’s during these opening moments that, as viewers, we decide if we want to get on the train and go on a journey the director has planned for us. In Aranya Sahay’s Humans in the Loop, this opening stretch features a woman waiting to take a test at a data labelling centre, in rural Jharkhand. Haunted by visions of a childhood spent with a porcupine in her ancestral village, one she’s forced to unceremoniously return to after her divorce begins, Nehma (Sonal Madhushankar) fails the test for a job at the centre. She has an infant tied to her back, as her friend pleads her case in front of a superior. “She belongs to the local tribe, and is undergoing her divorce. She really needs it,” the friend advocates in front of the manager (Gita Guha). “She’s a graduate and fairly acquainted with computers.”

A great concept can be a curse. Take the one-liner of Humans in the Loop, for instance. An Adivasi single mother named Nehma (Sonal Madhushankar) starts working as a ‘data labeller,’ a job that requires her to train AI models to recognise the world in pictures and videos. This one-liner alone is so fertile — so ripe with cultural parables and documentary minimalism — that it’s hard to imagine a fictional film that expands on it. What can a feature-length story express that isn’t already implicit?