They told us it's gonna change the India. We believed in them. They said let's urbanize everything. We thought they are talking about infrastructure. They said let's increment your salaries 10 fold. We thought it's gonna make us very rich. Later they said you will need to leave your homes and come to cities as we can't urbanize so fast being busy with current cities. We believed them and moved in here. Seeing us move our neighbors moved. Seeing everyone moving, our laborers moved. And a lot of people moved in here to cities. What they found out - heavy-cost-of-living not affordable with the increased 10 fold salaries. Nothing more than tiny little spaces to hide. Overloaded transport systems. Rising costs caused because of our own salaries and the derived reasons. No infrastructure which they promised and were busy with. We found ourselves fighting for daily living and poorer than before. We thought of going back but found we have disturbed the equilibrium. And now we are told to prepare PPTs, audit someone's calculations. Some do better job of automating their process which anyway in turn are consumed by us only and many of which we never needed! We came, believed in them and participated with enthusiasm, but now we are forced to be here, do what they tell. They live lavish life and we serve them pizza wearing a fancy red hat.
One of last staturdays I spoke to first-year students on the opening day of their year. Eighteen, most of them. Some had come for computer science, some for the humanities, some for management or commerce or the pure sciences. Bright, a little restless, and all of them carrying the same question without quite saying it: now that AI has shown up, what happens to my career? I want to write down what I told them, because I don't think it's a question only eighteen-year-olds are asking. Why do jobs even exist? Strip everything away and a job is just a problem somebody is paid to solve. People need food, health, a roof, education, safety, someone to talk to. Those needs don't go anywhere, and every one of them is somebody's work. What's easy to miss is that the needs stay put while the way we meet them gets rewritten every couple of generations. Farming gave us a food surplus. The steam engine gave us factories. Electricity, mass production. Computers, the information...
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