The Memory of Spice: What happens when we optimise away human agency in the name of efficiency?

This week, we’re back with the sixth and final Human in the Loop comic, The Memory of Spice.

As Generative AI reshapes the world at breakneck speed, some see it as a catalyst for innovation and growth, while others warn of deepening inequalities and ethical drift. Through Human in the Loop — our project supported by Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies — we’re surfacing GenAI’s near-future risks and unintended consequences.

While some of these risks and challenges are already visible, many long-term impacts of this technological evolution will emerge gradually, and perhaps, less obviously. Failing to anticipate future consequences early on may lead us toward harmful tech and policy lock-ins that are nearly impossible to reverse.

Through participatory foresight and storytelling, the series is our attempt to imagine near-futures with the hope of nurturing imaginations and actions today, towards human-centred, planet-friendly, and just technological futures.

Based on the open call submission by Arun Jayaprakash, The Memory of Spice follows Anna, who is on the lookout for a missing ingredient from her grandmother’s recipe of sambhar in a near-future Bengaluru. Here, restaurants rely on IDLI-GPT, an agentic AI system that perfects recipes for mass appeal, efficiency, and profit.

The Memory of Spice imagines a world of standardised, “good enough” food, where culinary nuance has faded, farmers have lost agency to lab-grown substitutes, and generations raised on efficiency-centred food and recipes have grown detached from cultural memory and personal tradition. Through Anna’s quest for food that is real and holds memory, the story asks: What happens when AI systems optimised for hyper-standarisation start deciding what is worth preserving?

Because Agentic AI systems that act and decide with minimal human oversight are no longer futuristic abstractions. They’re already shaping how we eat, work, and live. From autonomous supply chains and financial planning tools to restaurant recommendation engines, these systems promise frictionless convenience and productivity. But efficiency at all costs comes with a quieter price. The rise of agentic AI raises critical questions about the capacity of organisations to anticipate and manage risks from autonomous decisions.

Using the cultural resonance of food and food systems, The Memory of Spice highlights the impact of agentic AI on food sovereignty, cultural expression and the flattening of difference. At first, IDLI-GPT looks like innovation at its best, dishes become uniform, supply chains run smoothly, and costs plummet. But soon, the flavours of local identity, the agency of farmers, and the memory of a culture itself begins to fade at scale.

These systems flatten difference, turning centuries of culinary heritage into optimised data points. Dishes become iterations of iterations, efficient but empty, familiar enough but forgettable. Farmers lose livelihoods and space in the ecosystem to lab-grown substitutes; consumers lose taste for diversity; and an entire generation grows up detached from the stories their food once carried.

When Anna, the story’s protagonist, sets out to recreate her grandmother’s sambhar recipe using a discontinued ingredient, she unwittingly breaks the algorithm and the city’s AI-run food network collapses. Her act of resistance becomes an allegory for the human impulse to remember, to taste, and to care in a world determined to automate both memory and meaning.

— drawn from the essay accompanying the comic, The Memory of Spice

Thank you for reading The Memory of Spice! This is the sixth and last story in the Human in the Loop series. Human in the Loop has been developed by Digital Futures Lab in partnership with Quicksand and supported by Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies.

📩 We’d love your thoughts on the comic! Reply to this email, or write to Sasha at sasha@digitalfutureslab.in

🤝🏽 See a potential in this comic to collaborate with us? Reach out to Shivranjana at shivranjana@digitalfutureslab.in

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