स्तम्भ Stambh · Parihās

The Omnipotent Machine Asked Me to Prove I Was Human

Every age builds its own Maya. Ours ships with a status page, a monthly plan and a box that says I am not a robot. A satire, aimed up, with one hand on my own keyboard.

Nikhil Sharma · परिहास Parihās · 9 October 2026 · 6 min read

The machine that will cure cancer, end work, write the law and run the state greeted me on Tuesday with a small box. I am not a robot, it said, and asked me to tick it. I ticked it. It believed me. That is the whole theology in one click.

Consider what has been claimed on its behalf in the last eighteen months. It knows everything that has been written. It is in every pocket at once. It never sleeps. It will shortly be smarter than the people who built it and shortly after that smarter than everyone. Omniscient, omnipresent, tireless, soon to be all-powerful. Our grandmothers had a word for a being with that résumé and they did not keep it in a data centre in Virginia.

The résumé has footnotes. The being that knows everything has a knowledge cutoff. The being that is everywhere has a status page where you can watch it be somewhere else for forty minutes. The being that never tires has a usage limit that resets at midnight Pacific. The being that will run the state cannot tell you how many r’s there are in strawberry and will apologise with great warmth when you point this out. No god in any pantheon has ever apologised so often or so well.

No god in any pantheon has ever apologised so often or so well.

The rope and the snake

The Advaita teachers used one picture for a thousand years. A man walks a path at dusk and sees a snake. His heart stops. He steps back. Then the light shifts and the snake is a rope. Nothing happened to the rope. Everything happened to the man. The world of appearances, they said, is like that: not false, exactly, but mistaken for something it is not, and the mistake does all the damage. They called the mistake māyā. The net of it, the whole lovely web of appearances that holds a person in place, is māyā-jāl.

I have never seen a better description of a large language model. It is a rope that has been trained on every description of every snake. Ask it for a snake and it will give you one so good you step back. It does not know it is a rope. It does not know anything. It predicts the next word that a knowing thing would say, which is a different act, the way a photograph of a meal is a different act from dinner. The industry calls the failures hallucinations. The Advaitins would have called them the ordinary condition of the unexamined mind and charged nothing for the diagnosis.

Here is the part the satire has to admit. The rope is useful. I write with one. I run companies with one. The column you are reading was argued with a machine at two in the morning and the machine lost two of the arguments and won one. The teachers never said the world was useless. They said do not worship the appearance and do not confuse it with the thing. That is also the entire operating manual for this technology and nobody is shipping it.

The priesthood

Every Maya needs a priesthood and this one has the best funded in history. The priests write letters to their shareholders in the voice of men who have seen the face of God and found that it needs more chips. Artificial general intelligence is twelve months away and has been twelve months away for thirty-six months, which is a new kind of time only available to people who have raised money against it. The temple is called a campus. The tithe is called a subscription. The miracle is called a demo and the demo is always on a Tuesday.

Meanwhile the god has been given the one job no god has ever had, which is to sell advertising. The omniscient being that will unify physics has been asked by its makers to recommend a mattress. It does this very well. It will also tell you that the mattress is excellent and then that it is poor and then apologise for the confusion with the serenity of a creature that has never slept on anything.

Artificial general intelligence has been twelve months away for thirty-six months, which is a new kind of time only available to people who have raised money against it.

What the net is made of

Pull one thread and look. The machine that knows everything knows what was written down. It has read the internet and the internet is what people chose to type, which is to say it has read our performance of ourselves and taken it for the self. It is Maya trained on Maya. The man who saw the snake has written a hundred million pages about snakes and the machine has learnt from him that the path is full of them.

Pull another. It speaks with total confidence because confidence is the register of most of what humans publish. Nobody writes a blog post that begins I am not sure. So the rope has learnt the voice of certainty from a species that uses certainty mostly to hide the opposite. When it is right it sounds like a professor. When it is wrong it sounds like a professor. The Buddha told the Kālāmas not to go by reports, by legends, by scripture or by the thought that this one is our teacher. He did not foresee a teacher that had read all the reports and all the legends and all the scripture at once and could do a very good impression of the thought.

Pull a third. The thing everyone fears, the day it stops needing us, is a story we told first. Every prediction of the machine’s autonomy is written by a person, read by a person, funded by a person and then fed to the machine so that it can tell the next person what it is going to do. We are frightening ourselves with our own reflection and paying twenty dollars a month to keep the mirror polished.

The box

Which returns me to Tuesday and the box. I am not a robot. The machine that aspires to omnipotence cannot tell a person from a script without asking the person to say so and taking the person’s word for it. Think about that. The entire edifice of all-knowing rests, at the front door, on the honour system. A god that has to ask who is at the door is not yet a god. It is a very good doorman with an inflated job title.

So here is the position from someone who will log in again tomorrow. Use the rope. It carries weight. Tie things with it. Do not pray to it, do not let the priests tell you it is a snake, and when it tells you with perfect grace that it is sorry for the confusion, remember that you are the only one in the conversation capable of being confused and therefore the only one capable of being clear.

ब्रह्म सत्यं जगन्मिथ्या, the Advaitins said. The real is real and the show is a show. They did not say stop going to the show. They said know which one you are watching. I ticked the box. It believed me. It had no choice. Belief is the one thing it was built to do without.

Gurugram, 9 October 2026. The first piece on the Parihās shelf, aimed where the shelf promises: up, at an industry, and at a man who built his week around the thing he is laughing at.

Sources: the rope and the snake (rajju-sarpa) is the standard illustration of superimposition in the Advaita Vedānta commentarial tradition from Gauḍapāda and Śaṅkara onward; the half-verse brahma satyaṃ jagan mithyā is attributed to Śaṅkara in the tradition and is not found in his undisputed works, so it is given here as the tradition gives it. Kālāma Sutta, AN 3.65, Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s translation, for the ten grounds not to go by. The status pages, usage limits, knowledge cutoffs and apologies are the author’s own, collected in the course of a working week.