Almost every conversation I have ends up being about AI. My proximity to the “revolution” working at an AI startup in San Francisco does not really help, as for most “normal” people, even my most mellow takes can seem dystopian.
I’m tentatively traveling to SF next week to spend time at the office (first time in an office since December 2019, btw), pending developments in the Middle East. My views on AI are bound to change while I’m at the epicenter of what is probably the most important period in civilizational history. There’s no coming back from that first Waymo ride.
So before I leave, I’m dumping what I think about AI and its impacts on society, so I have a frame of reference as these ideas undergo metamorphosis.
Even though I live in this SF-Bangalore tech bro bubble, the interactions I have outside it with “normal” users of technology have been the most enlightening.
There’s only a small group of people actively using AI in its best form. This might mean the latest “pro” models or harnesses around LLMs like Claude Code or whatever is considered “cutting-edge” in their industry. This small group is seeing massive productivity gains, while the rest (most people) still haven’t evolved beyond using ChatGPT to write emails. The most savvy in this “rest of the world” group are at best creating photos using Gemini (free).
This includes people working in tech. Only a small subset of tech workers are actively toying with frontier AI models and harnesses. The rest still copy code or tasks into ChatGPT and copy the results back. For comparison, I haven’t written a single line of code this year (by myself).
This gap between the technology enthusiasts and the technology builders is also widening. My brother, a lawyer, has been playing around with tools like n8n and platforms like Google AI Studio to build agents and software. While he is a step ahead of the vast majority of the population, it’s still miles apart from knowing how an LLM works, how to train one, or how to deploy one in production. Saying you have to “learn AI or be left behind” is a huge understatement.
People who are ahead of the discourse and thinking about AI’s impact on society are stuck contemplating just the first-order effects. Yes, there’s going to be more AI-generated content, and yes, people will lose their jobs. But what happens after that? What will the world be like when AI is doing all the jobs we do now? What happens to money? What happens to the existing socio-economic inequalities? These are the second- and third-order questions we need answers to because the rest is inevitable.
I live in a constant battle where my mind’s already in the future, and I’m waiting for the people around me to catch up. A few weeks ago, people in my hometown in Kerala were protesting to prevent a local post office from being shut down. How do I even begin to tell them that the world they know does not exist anymore? Maybe it is better to be ignorant. To be comfortably numb.
While people from my parents’ generation would argue that they also lived through paradigm shifts, most of them were still able to navigate life through a playbook. Get ok grades in school, get a degree, get a job for life. The 1991 economic liberalization and a three-and-a-half-decade bull run that followed helped them retire comfortably. This playbook also worked for older millennials who are now cozied up in top positions, ready to retire before AI is ubiquitously woven into their lives.
But for the rest of us young-ish humans, this hand-me-down playbook works no more. You cannot guarantee a rounded life by following what worked for your parents or grandparents in a world that changes with a new model drop. I’m 29. I’ve followed the standard career advice for software engineers, spent my free time contributing to open source projects, invested my salary in index funds, and controlled my expenses. I’m not sure if any of this will ever be worth anything.
This constant worrying isn’t good for me, but like many others, I can’t help it. I feel a bit better knowing that others also worry, and this is normal.
I have realistically shorter timelines than most people, and perhaps unrealistic optimism about a world with superintelligence. A world where humans don’t have to fight with each other constantly for bigger shares of resources, a world of abundance. But that world might come at the price of a rude awakening.
Would we, as a generation, fall victim to the revolution that would take humanity into worlds unknown, or will we be a part of it?