SSC Stenographer 2026 PYQ — Question 147

Read the following passage and answer the questions based on it:
In no previous century has the boundary between machinic execution and human agency been so imperceptibly redrawn as in our own. Machines no longer reside merely in factories or data farms; they have diffused into cognition itself—through pattern detection, affect analysis, and probabilistic reasoning. Yet amid this silent migration of authority, a peculiar question lingers beneath the efficiency rhetoric: what becomes of judgment when its form is preserved but its source displaced? It is not that machines err—they err differently. They do not forget, but neither do they forgive. A calculus-driven output, in a medical tribunal or parole board, bears no malice—but neither does it carry grace. This absence of interiority—of remorse, doubt, or ethical conflict—renders such systems unsettling not because they are inhuman, but because they mimic our structures while bypassing our struggles. The specter of neutrality seduces us with promises of impartiality, yet what is more dangerous than a system that believes itself objective without capacity for self-questioning? The issue is not merely epistemic but civilizational: do we measure justice by consistency alone, or by its responsiveness to suffering? To reduce ethics to outputs is to mechanize mercy—and in so doing, abandon it. We must not aspire to human-like machines, but to machine-aware humans, vigilant not only of what machines can do, but of what we too readily surrender.