The AI future from a 70-year-old Roald Dahl story is here – are you afraid?

It was the mid-’'90s when I became obsessed with Roald Dahl. His twisted humour, dark allegories, and grand imagination hooked me, a lonely, bullied child, struggling to learn the ways of the world, and an alien language in Bengaluru. Dahl helped me escape reality. I became James Henry Trotter, flying across the world in a delicious giant peach – a fruit I had never seen, let alone tasted. I was envious of Charlie Bucket, and dreamed of going into Willy Wonka’s fabulous chocolate factory. I cheered on Matilda Wormwood against her bullies, knowing fully well that I would never be a genius like her.

Then, very briefly, he just vanished from my life. Instead of the works of Dahl, joyless science tomes written by Morrison & Boyd (Organic Chemistry), SL Loney (Plane Trigonometry), and the much-dreaded IE Irodov (Problems in General Physics) took over my bookshelf and imagination, as I tried to enter the hallowed halls of the Indian Institutes of Technology. That misguided attempt, of course, did not work. I licked my wounds, went to a lesser engineering college and went about life in a student hostel.

Like the relapse of a malignant disease, Dahl again entered my adult life. His yarns, written for readers of Playboy and The New Yorker, were even...

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