What should humans do when robots take all the jobs?

Take the robots’ jobs, of course. In Pranav Bhasin’s biting mockumentary ‘We Were Here’, three unemployed men in an Indian town protest against machines replacing human jobs by pretending to be household appliances. The award-winning short film follows Bagchi (Satish Kashyap), Pimple (Devendra Dodge), and Ganguli (Arindol Bagchi) as they launch an absurd campaign against the machines. Convinced that the machines are making human workers redundant, the three men begin impersonating domestic appliances such as a satellite antenna, a car’s reverse parking camera, and even a microwave. They spread disinformation and taint AI training data by misidentifying pizza as dal baati churma, and even break laptops when Pimple’s son joins an AI training start-up as an intern.

As LLMs and Generative AI become increasingly entangled in ordinary life at the cost of human labour, conversations about its effects and implications have largely centred on technocratic talking points like productivity, efficiency, and “development”, overshadowing the people — especially working-class people — whose livelihoods, skills, and sense of purpose these technologies are putting at risk. Despite the film’s overall humorous tone, Bhasin uses the unironic seriousness of Bagchi, Pimple, and Ganguli’s crusade to question who bears the cost of this technological progress and who benefits from the devaluation of human labour.

While proponents of AI development often present the technology as an inevitable and universal “good”, recent developments such as the disproportionate need for freshwater to cool AI data centres, leading to water shortage across the world, widespread job losses, and skyrocketing costs of personal computing, have led detractors to decry the human and environmental cost of AI as unsustainable and unjustifiable for humanity.

With ‘We Were Here’, Bhasin adds to the argument against AI adoption. Near the film’s end, one character draws a line with a crayon next to a computer-generated straight line as a metaphor for the imperfections that make us human. The scene is juxtaposed with another character reciting a poem: out of infinite galaxies / infinite stars / it is in this land I am born / this shaky line / is all that makes it mine. It’s an oddly simple yet poignant declaration of humanity at a time when the ruling class seems to be turning away from the human imperfections and friction that make the world our own — that we must reclaim as our own.

‘We Were Here’, executive produced by Aarti Lohia (SPLF Media), Priyanka Chopra Jonas (Purple Pebble Pictures), V (Eve Ensler), and Andrew Scott, is currently streaming on The New Yorker’s YouTube channel.

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