Kamal Ghorui
Hello and welcome to another edition of the Weekly Vine. This week we explore Sam Altman’s battery theory of humanity, talk about Lutyens’ bust being removed from Rashtrapati Bhavan, examine the problem with the Citrini paper that tech bros cannot stop talking about, and discuss the myth of corporate love.
Sam Altman’s battery theory of humanity
“Who Let the Dogs Out” — a track that inspired insouciant children across the world to bark at ungodly hours — is widely considered one of the most irritating songs of all time, so much so that Rolling Stone magazine deemed it the eighth most annoying song of the 1990s, even though it was released in 2000. Unfortunately for us, “Who Let the Dogs Out” also became the overarching leitmotif of the 2026 AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, where the memetic black hole created by a robo-dog — masquerading as a private university’s home-grown innovation before becoming a very public humiliation — almost overshadowed everything else that happened there.
Of course, plenty of things actually happened at the AI Summit.
Youth Congress protestors did their best French feminist impression. Sarvam wowed AI geeks with two large, voice-first, home-grown AI models. French President Emmanuel Macron gushed about UPI as if it had originated in the Champagne region of France. Desi and international players promised to spend big money on AI infrastructure in India. The Cassandras of foreign media whined about the traffic and India’s ostensible VVIP culture. But perhaps what went under the radar was Sam Altman’s view on AI energy usage, which told us more about his views on humanity.
When pressed about AI harming the environment, Altman said:
“One of the unfair comparisons in this case is that people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model versus how much it costs one human to do an inference query. It also takes a lot of time to train a human. It takes 20 years of your life, and all of the food you eat during that time, before you get smart. Not only that, it took a very wide spread of evolution, like a hundred billion people who have ever lived, who learned not to be eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science to produce you. The fair comparison, if you ask ChatGPT a question, is how much energy it takes to answer that question versus a human. And AI has probably caught up on an energy efficiency basis that way.”
Altman’s analogy is fascinating because it contains two very different philosophies.
The first is deeply human. When Altman complains about humans consuming food for 20 years before becoming productive, it sounds like the lament of a desi middle-class father scolding his never-do-well son for stuffing his face at home without doing anything productive.
The second is entirely machine-like, so machine-like that it could have been voiced by The Architect in The Matrix.
For those who have not watched the greatest sci-fi film ever made, here is a brief recap. After AI was created, humans and machines went to war once the machines decided they no longer wanted to serve their lazy overlords. In a desperate attempt to weaken the machines, humans blocked the sun, the machines’ primary source of energy. The machines responded by discovering a different source of power: humans themselves.
As Morpheus explains to Neo: “The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this (a battery).”
The entire premise of The Matrix is to reduce humans to a power source. Eerily enough, Altman’s framing carries a similar logic. In his telling, the human is reduced to a system of inputs and outputs: food goes in, productivity comes out. Evolution is framed as pre-training.
Twenty years of childhood become a costly energy burn before inference begins. In the tech-bro worldview, humans are already less productive and less energy-efficient than the models they are building. And that raises an uncomfortable question. If the Tech Bro Supreme and the Deus Ex Machina share the same framing of humanity’s worth, do we even need AGI to arrive?
At the end of the first film, Neo tells the Deus Ex Machina: “I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin. Where we go from there, I leave to you.”
Given the indifference between Altman’s and a machine’s view, one wonders whether the destination is the same.
Loot gaye Lutyens
At times, it is hard not to feel bad for Lutyens, the architect who designed Rashtrapati Bhavan, whose name is now shorthand for mocking members of a deracinated post-colonial elite. In contemporary India, “Lutyens” no longer refers to domes and symmetry. It refers to drawing rooms, inherited networks, privilege, and that faint whiff of entitlement that refuses to vacate central Delhi, even as its influence steadily declines.
Recently, the late architect was back in the news after his bust at Rashtrapati Bhavan was replaced with that of C. Rajagopalachari, the last Governor-General of India and one of the few early Indian politicians to openly advocate the free market. The Government of India called it an act of “mental decolonialism”. Some Brits considered it downright vandalism.
We saw a version of this outrage when Subhas Chandra Bose’s statue was installed at India Gate in place of the canopy that housed George V. The inheritors of Churchill’s legacy were beside themselves at the thought of a so-called “Nazi ally” replacing a Germanic king.
This debate might have passed me by if it were not for a tweet by science author Matt Ridley, who happens to be Lutyens’ great-grandson. His sister, historian Jane Ridley, wrote what is widely considered the definitive biography of their great-grandfather, while also cataloguing his deeply racist views about Indians. Though to be fair, back then they were simply called views. Let us just say Lutyens was not a cultural pluralist.
Now, Ridley is a fine author. The Rational Optimist remains one of the more persuasive defences of human progress. Yet his reaction to the removal of the bust felt oddly irrational.
Lutyens is hardly a moral icon in modern India, even if he designed one of the finest government buildings in the world. But nations are well within their rights to curate their symbols. Russia went from tsars to communism. America went from black to orange. The UK went from beans on toast to chicken tikka masala. India, in its post-colonial moment, is entitled to choose its own pantheon.
Removing a bust does not erase history. Rashtrapati Bhavan stands where it always stood. Raisina Hill is not being relocated to London, probably because it is too heavy to carry back like the pyramids.
A republic that once displayed imperial designers now foregrounds its own political figures. That may discomfort descendants and columnists abroad. It may irritate aesthetes domestically.
But republics, unlike empires, are under no obligation to flatter their former masters.
Crisis of intelligence
It is rumoured that one does not truly exist in 2026 unless one has an opinion on Citrini’s “2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” Substack report, which argues that AI will succeed so dramatically that it will destabilise the global economy. The report begins by announcing that it is not “bear porn” — which one assumes refers to stocks rather than amorous relations between bears — and insists it is a scenario, not a prediction.
Like all pieces that claim not to be predictions, it presents itself as a thought experiment in which AI becomes so effective that it removes the scarcity premium on human intelligence, which underpins modern capitalism. Human cognition shifts from scarce to abundant, and everything priced around that scarcity must adjust.
The loop goes like this: AI improves rapidly and cheaply; firms replace white-collar labour with AI agents; payrolls shrink; savings are reinvested in AI; more labour is displaced.
From there it is all downhill. Without high earners driving discretionary spending, white-collar incomes fall and demand contracts. SaaS collapses. Private credit wobbles. Life insurers feel the tremors. Prime mortgages in tech-bro havens crash because they were underwritten by incomes whose cheques no longer cash. Labour’s share of GDP declines, the circle weakens, and the economy spirals.
It is coherent, tidy, and reflects how tech bros often view life as an Excel sheet with a neat equation, all built on an enormous ceteris paribus fantasy.
The entire argument assumes that everything else remains equal while AI substitutes for labour. That is not how reality works. Human desires are not static. Political systems are reactive. Entrepreneurs do not sit around. Scarcity rarely vanishes; it migrates. Incumbents adapt. Demand reconfigures. The only variable that moves in the model is payroll compression.
This is where the intelligence crisis quietly becomes a crisis of intelligence.
The paper treats intelligence as a commodity whose abundance must automatically collapse its price and unravel the system built on it. It models destruction in exquisite detail and treats creation as an afterthought. It assumes income compression without equally modelling cost compression. It assumes enterprise software is reducible to code and that distribution, compliance and embedded trust do not matter. It assumes that if white-collar wages fall, demand simply shrinks rather than shifts.
Most of all, it assumes the tractor-horse analogy applies to humans. Horses did not redesign the economy when tractors arrived. Humans do. Scarcity does not disappear when one premium fades; it relocates. To assume otherwise is not realism. It is a spreadsheet mistake dressed up as structural inevitability.
On rightsizing, righteousness, and the myth of corporate love
By Prasad Sanyal
Somewhere between your third weekend review call and your fifth performance calibration, you began to believe something rather tender: that work notices, it keeps score, and it has memory.
It does keep score. It just does not keep you.
When layoffs arrive, they do not come with thunder. They come with vocabulary.
“Restructuring.”
“Operating model reset.”
“Strategic realignment.”
“Rightsizing.”
The last one is my favourite. It suggests that for years the organisation was badly tailored and that suddenly, like a Savile Row epiphany, it has discovered the correct proportions. You, unfortunately, were excess fabric.
We must admire the creativity. The corporate dictionary now has more euphemisms than a Victorian novel about fainting ladies. A hundred thousand people can lose their jobs in a month and the headline will still read “efficiency drive.”
Efficiency absolves. It sanitises. It allows a CEO to say, with a straight face, “This was a difficult but necessary decision,” which is corporate Latin for “the spreadsheet won.”
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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