Artificial intelligence (AI) entered my life with a bang and I must admit we never hit it off very well. In fact, we were like strange bedfellows and it was not without reason that I’ve come to call it an ‘arrogant intruder’.
On many occasions, my two cents have been smashed to bits by the additional trivia on the internet. Once I was acquainting my little one with the lofty story of the Mahabharata and pat came his words, “The net says the Kauravas were clones of a single entity and carried the same genetic structure.” A moment of serendipity descended on me, as I was grappling with AI-generated clones and deepfakes sprawled all over the digital world.
We’re living in times where we consume megabytes of technology right from early in the morning and by afternoon, the database gets heavy. We walk around like zombies, our heads full of dope on various topics. Google baba is our ‘go-to guru’, helping us search for answers to universal truths. Nostalgia has become a forsaken emotion as the urgency of new data has us hooked to it.
We’re getting spoiled for choice with off-the-cuff solutions to just about everything in life. It’s complicated when things become simple. While excess of anything is deemed bad, anything can happen when access to things becomes humongously excess. Drowning in the whirlpool of knowledge has me gasping for a few breaths of no information.
I once asked my mom for a recipe. She sent me four links of the same dish. On the other hand, my househelp, who had gone to her village, was sending me text messages in English. She had discovered the app of translation and felt she was much better than those who actually knew the language.
Our memories are on the blink, but we have a detailed lowdown of information on our fingertips. Everybody seems to be knowing everything and it makes me wonder, what are we teaching in schools? When AI writes better applications than human beings, then what are we training people for? It makes me wonder if we’re living in a real world. We’re becoming hugely dependent on the crutches of heavy dossiers that have engulfed our thoughts and actions.
Google speaks so much that I can hardly hear anything in the din. The capacity of my human brain is still the same and it has become tricky for me to process all the information. I wondered if they will come up with some anti-Google medicine next, to treat the symptoms of ‘Googlitis’.
Just when I was wrapping my head around the tyranny of technology, I heard that the US share market had come crashing down. It’s time to brace up for another storm now that China has come up with DeepSeek, another simpler, cheaper and faster version of AI.
alkagaurkashyap@gmail.com
The writer is an advocate at the Punjab and Haryana high court, Chandigarh