Over the past 18 years of my career, I have witnessed the technological landscape evolving. And if I add my encounter as a kid with the Internet, we have come a long way.
- No more PCOs and queues to make STD calls. We all have mobile phones now.
- No more cyber cafes—once a center for connecting and socializing. I know a few friends who got married after meeting strangers at a cyber cafe. <story for another blog>
- No more dial-up internet connections over BSNL.
- Death of CD/floppy drives with the arrival of pen drives.
- Cable TV to DTH.
- Internet via a cable service provider to fiber cable at home.
- TVs and journalism with advertisements shifting to the internet.
- Social gatherings happening over the internet rather than in person.
- Food delivery, clothes, ACs, and dating via an app.
- Shifting from compiling RPM/DEB packages to apt-get install with a click.
- Buying/burning Linux distributions from friends or labs to downloading the OS on a pen drive.
- Entire marriage celebrations are now captured on a tiny mobile phone, including post-processing.
A hundred others are missing from the list above. In short, our society has become more lazy and prosperous. The rapid change at which we have moved this far is beyond imagination.
In the last few months, I have been reading and witnessing a big wave of AI—or artificial intelligence—coming. It will not end up well. Most things will be automated, and generalists will have a tough time. If we go by stats, the number of entry-level jobs in IT, once considered the safest in any storm, is widely impacted. From content, marketing, media, and finance, the same is going on—people are being laid off, and hiring is at a freeze.
I am imagining a social shift with the advancement of AI, where minimalism will become mainstream and alternate careers will become the new norm. We will move back to our old roots. It is scary and painful at the same time.
I see metro cities drying up soon in India. The AI wave will result in it. No more formal jobs, no more need to be physically available. We will have multiple jobs—from being a barista to a coder to a farmer. Our future is going to be different.