I was reading this book called Ways of being by James Bridle. It triggered something in me that awakened little optimism in what I thought is a bleak future and told me to be more skeptical about progress. Especially progress in technology.
The way things are progressing, it’s like starting with a crutch, then moving to a bike, and now we’ve got a fully autonomous ride that picks you up and drops you off wherever you need to go. Yes—I’m talking about AI. For the sake of the argument, let’s assume AI to be the proxy for the contemporary technological development.
I am not going to get into the details of AI advancements or limitations. It is more an observation that I thought will be useful for a lot of us. The abstractification of things we once did by putting in a lot of effort is now automated. An interesting similarity is the industrial revolution.
Both the Industrial Revolution (1760–1840) and what’s happening with AI revolution last 3 years represents transcendental moments, significantly altering of the society, economy, technology, and even culture. While they may differ in context, and implications, there are clear parallels in their patterns of disruption and impact.
Back then, we moved from jobs demanding 100 percent manual labor to semi-automated jobs, and in some cases, completely automated workforce that worked for us, by us. Steam engine, bulb, machine to produce textiles and telephone were some great outcomes of the innovative progress that eventually led to mass production, scale efficiency, and industrialization.
Like Naval said, “Most problems are communication problems.” Think about it, the speed at which we communicate plays a huge role in solving global challenges. Today, we are solving problems at speeds unimaginable compared to waiting around for a pigeon or a bald postman to deliver news of a groundbreaking discovery.
As a consequence of the revolution and progress in technological innovations, many lost their jobs, people were slapped by long working hours, machine learning, except that people were learning how to use machines, added by psychological uncertainty filled with a mixture of fear and optimism–a global existential crisis. I think we have got used to this as a collective race, however, now it is that we need to deal with it quite often and in a way that we have not dealt before. The uncertainty always exists, its etched in the fabric of our DNA. But it becomes greatly tangible when everyone around us experiences it simultaneously, and that feels like the moment we're living through now.
With technological advancements, comes war, greed, soul food for capitalists and a surge in prices and commodities that triggers economic disruption until the larger population figures it how to handle it all. People were forced to work with machines even if they liked it or not. The rest, who were lethargically tech defiant, just patiently waited until technology welcomed itself inside their households.
But it was all worth it! The steep learning curve of humans trying to work with machines is a reasonable explanation for why there was slow growth during the transition to stability during the revolution. Of course, there are other factors, but, yes.
Back to 2025, it feels like the same pattern repeating. I expect some jobs to be displaced , some becoming non-existent, others emerging from the cracks. And once again, the foundations of the tech industry we built in the wake of the internet are being reshaped. This is important because tech improves the speed of communication and provided methods to solve and handle problems, which in turn, improves problem solving, as a consequence, enhances growth, people find jobs, become hopeful, improved GDP, tadaaa - we have a growing nation living off what’s left of the earth.
Urge to solve problems and abstraction
I guess we can all see through the fog now, assuming AI as the metaphor of growing tech and economic progress, AI is able to search, code, write, build products, market them etc. Someone good at coding, now, with an AI assistant can actually emulate a tiny workforce of junior developers with naive programming experience. But looking at economics, history, medicine, AI is still super significant in assisting research and accelerating breakthroughs there as well. There is a long way to go before we automate everything around us, for us. But what we have now is already a significant leap in tech that is making our lives easier, difficult, and reshaping how we think.
Historically, the technological advancements has been measured by its ability to construct reductive frameworks for studying nature, understand and classify them. The kind of one-size fits all solution is over hyped though. Like the Grand Unified theory or AGI for example. Every attempt to simplify the problems, or to perform any abstractions with that intent always leads us to the very structure of life itself where all classification and abstractions starts to blur. Like Natural language as an interface for programming complex software and was not a technological breakthrough o truest sense, but succeeded in adding a layer of abstraction that only significantly improved the efficiency and speed of communication.
The urge to abstract and optimize, often framed as a quest to uncover something essential about ourselves—may be less a path to truth and more a mirror of our impatience and greed. We might resolve certain tensions, design comfort, even stumble into episodes of happiness. But still, it's utility, not enlightenment.
Richardson’s paradox tells a similar story. The more finely he tried to measure the coastline of England—summing up ever smaller fractal units, the longer it became, tending toward infinity. And yet, this isn’t just a mathematical abstraction. And ironically, Richardson stumbled onto it while doing cartography, not to study geometry, but to quantify the chances of war. He believed the likelihood of conflict between two nations was proportional to the length of their shared borders. So he set out to measure coastlines and accidentally discovered a paradox that would later inspire fractal geometry. Interesting how an attempt to mathematically model war led to a much deeper insight on abstraction itself, or maybe revealed how unstable measurement itself was. It’s this nature of technology and the growing need for optimization that raises questions on its intention. Whether it is to solve problems or feed the tech giants with monopoly over technologies that eat all the bread and only leave the crumbs for the rest. It is actually quite hard to see who is winning. I am inclined towards open-sourcing certain tech that will benefit everyone. Creativity is great, until it just becomes another ladder to power. That’s when we start to question, what’s the intention.
The leap of faith for the new age.
With major countries becoming economically more nationalist, and reduced cohesiveness and kindness of neighboring countries only make this time we are in more uncertain.
Many of us are working everyday, some driven by passion, some destined and disillusioned. Some of us carry on with the unsettling feeling, a quite dissatisfaction, others with the drive to become the best or reach the top or just escape the hold of a capitalistic butt hole, or to achieve something profound in the little time we have left. And sometime, sometimes, joy powered by sprinkles of compliments, dopamine from completing tasks or rewards with incentives or an applause.
It is important that we don’t settle for this. I think it is an illusion of achievement projected by the society into making us think we have to constantly validate ourselves It is more important than ever to be aware of the larger perspective of things and have some reluctance to give into the small narratives of survival and building wealth.
The closer we move toward becoming fully AI-native, the more essential it becomes to preserve and foster originality of thought and inner clarity. This means truly understanding the purpose behind technologies and consciously looking beyond their immediate applications. For example, the recent Studio Ghibli trend involving ChatGPT illustrates a classic case of superficial engagement with technology. While it may be fun, such usage barely scratches the surface of what AI is truly capable of doing. Instead of exploring its potential, we often remain captivated by surface-level novelty, missing to take shots at deeper innovation and meaningful progress. I am not talking about the research in AI here, I am talking about the users its targeted at.
Evaluating the role and potential of technology in our lives has become as fundamental as basic literacy or mathematics. It forms the foundation upon which much of our current economic wellness and growth depend. The questions on creative theft, data usage, responsible AI use and privacy policies must be explored and studied by all users.
Questions like, “What draws the line between what AI must do and not?”
I believe such thinking will contribute to a truly secure, safe and smooth transition to an AI native era. We must look beyond abstractions and understand the true meaning of what it means to progress and what it means to adapt a particular technology. There are major caveats to Techno-optimism, where there is an abundance of fallacies and biases that will blur thinking and prevent us from understanding the broader implications.
We need the ability to think clearly, to see the bigger picture before making decision; to stay mindful of how and why we use the technology around us. Adapt and evolve mindfully!