My tryst with technology has been an on-and-off kind of thing. While in school I disliked computers. This was the early 90s. We had a weekly computer science lab, but the teachers were truly terrible. I was very good at mathematics and science, so STEM inclination or ability was not an issue. We had just a handful of machines and had to share it with another student. You could not work at your own pace, there was little guidance when we were stuck and the teachers couldn’t care less once they were done with the theoretical classes. I never touched programming after this phase.

In 2020 I started coding an office productivity app, based on the challengers I had faced during my own corporate life. After spending a lot of time figuring out which tech stack to use, I settled down with React-Node-Postgres combination. Nothing clears the fog like working on a project does. Within 3 months I was comfortable writing nested functions and making complex SQL queries. The app was pretty good looking too, but it was spread too thin—in terms of resources (I was the only one building it) and I was trying to achieve too many things with it. After being unable to find a partner to work with, I abandoned it and took up another job.

The arrival of ChatGPT in 2022 created a storm. The post Covid world was already dependent heavily on social media and this was just the perfect earth shattering event to keep people engaged. Linkedin feeds were completely taken over by prophecies about AI. Most people thought that ChatGPT had suddenly dropped from the skies. My own research told me that Generative AI had been in the making for a fairly long time, but ChatGPT was the most large scale and sophisticated version of it till date. I was extremely intrigued by how it worked. But I was more keen on understanding if this was an inflexion point like the steam engine, electricity, internet etc and what it meant for for ordinary humans. News of layoffs in the content writing industry started becoming mainstream. Three years down the line in 2025, many more jobs have been lost to automation resulting from deployment of these intelligent but artificial agents.

AI experts agree that the technology is still evolving at a rapid pace, so making predictions about impact on jobs is very difficult. They also agree that AI will create many more jobs than it will eliminate. We have to wait and see about that. I am somewhat of a skeptic when it comes to human motivation. The capitalist dislikes human resource and is always looking to eliminate it. Hiring is difficult and humans need to be managed individually. Human resource is not easy to scale. AI practitioners are constantly looking at areas where AI solutions can be deployed and it is no longer just the jobs which are are repetitive in nature that are being threatened. A CEO has been waxing eloquent about how AI gave him a business report that was far more insightful than humans had ever done.

As I was writing this, I learnt that Hawkeye technology has replaced lines-persons at Wimbledon. Was it a problem that needed solving, to use a very trendy question? Fans are miffed that the human element has been taken away. This human element is not just missing in sports, but clients in the content world are also showing resistance to AI generated stuff. To be clear, the resistance is not really to AI generated content, but content that appears like it has been generated by AI, and content that can be proven to be generated by AI. There is this push and pushback going on, and ironically on the pushing side are content generators themselves, whose livelihoods were supposed to be under threat. But content industry is just one area where the most vocal people reside. AI is quietly disrupting workflows which are not in the spotlight, in a steady, boring way. These are the areas I wish to understand. It is a journey with a steep learning curve that does not get easy at any stage. It reminds me of some unforgiving treks I have done where I just wanted give up. Hopefully my mind and heart will display more endurance than my limbs and lungs 🙂