When you’re in the Indian bureaucracy, you’re expected to know everything from crop insurance to quantum physics, sometimes both before lunch.

So, when an assignment on artificial intelligence landed on my desk, I did what any self-respecting officer would: Pretended I knew all about it, and quietly enrolled in an online course. Somewhere between algorithms and machine-learning modules, I stumbled upon Moravec’s paradox — the odd truth that machines find complex tasks like playing chess easy, but struggle miserably with simple ones like walking. Naturally, the bureaucrat in me stopped thinking about robots and started thinking about… us. If there’s any species that embodies this paradox in human form, it’s the bureaucracy.

Take the citizen who walks into my office, clutching a file, hoping for a straightforward service — a certificate, a correction, an approval. What do I tell him? That he must wait, because I’m busy designing a state-of-the-art service delivery model that will, in theory, serve millions like him. I deny him his today so that I can perfect his tomorrow. The irony doesn’t make me flinch anymore; it’s been stamped, countersigned, and filed away.

We’re excellent at designing the grand opera and mysteriously clumsy with the doorbell. High theory? Effortless. Small kindness? Please submit a representation, attach Annexure IV, and allow 15 working days.

Take my example. Tasked with improving service delivery, I could’ve chosen a readymade solution. Instead, I set out to build a bespoke system. Committees were formed, consultants hired, pilots launched — and eventually, there would be an app, requiring three passwords, two OTPs, and perhaps a blood oath to log in. We’re raised on vision documents and organograms, trained to admire the elegance of systems the way one admires a city plan on paper — straight roads, perfect grids, airy plazas — only to discover that the city actually lives at the tea stall. We like the grid; life prefers the tea stall.

Moravec would have smiled at our predicament. The old, human competencies — listening, noticing, improvising — should come naturally. Yet we outsource them to workflows and escalations. We can model a state in a slide deck but stumble over a widow’s pension request because her Aadhaar is linked to her late husband’s old mobile number that is buried with him. The slide deck doesn’t have a column for that.

Sometimes, I imagine a robot trained in our ways. It would breeze through policy but need a manual to offer a glass of water. It would quote subsections and miss a sigh. In short, it would make an outstanding officer.

I’ve chaired “same-day service” meetings that ended two days later. I’ve seen simplified forms that required a lawyer to decode. I’ve launched pilots, then pilots for the pilots, and reviews to study the pre-pilot. Somewhere between the joke and the jab lies the small ache that brought me to Moravec: The person at the counter who doesn’t live in our future tense. He lives in the now. His request is not a use case; it’s his week’s ration money, his daughter’s school admission, his mother’s surgery slot.

If there’s a way out of our paradox, it may be as boring as it’s beautiful: Deliver one thing today before designing 10 things for tomorrow.

Moravec taught me that machines struggle with things children do without trying. Perhaps, bureaucracy does, too. The trick is to remember our human bits: The ear that hears the sigh, the eye that sees the queue, the hand that signs when signing is the humane thing to do. Big systems can wait a day; the person at the counter can’t. Besides, if we get the door right, the opera might just sing for itself.

(The writer is a Haryana-cadre IAS officer.)