The Bow Must Be Wielded

People who are good at their jobs usually feel joy from doing it. This joy is not the remuneration primarily but the physical actions which are performed. Using AI takes away these actions and hence the empty feel.

It’s almost ironic how in sci-fi movies we get excited when something technologically advanced is happening, like a voice assistant doing all sorts of stuff for a human, but now in reality as we are taking strides in that direction we don’t feel excited rather scared.

Jobs will be affected. Some sectors like IT will be hit harder than others.

But, and here is the important part, the ultimate goal of our civilisation is to progress towards a future where we have a cure to cancer, we have created habitable places on Moon and Mars. Truth is this will happen and whatever steps needed to do this will be taken. Maybe not linearly but humans will eventually reach there.

In Bhagavad Gita when Arjuna sees his own family standing on the other side, he doesn’t want to fight because the people he has to kill are also the people he loves. Krishna’s answer, in essence, is that Arjuna is only a medium in something much larger than himself. The outcome is not his to decide, his job is to do his dharma. Maybe we are in a similar position today. We have built these tools and now we are scared of what they might do to the work that gives us our identity. But if these tools are ultimately going to push humanity forward, then maybe their consequences are something we will have to accept, even if personally we don’t like where they take us.