If there has been a revolution in human history that would change human lives across the globe in a matter of some years, radically,  at an electrifying pace, it is what we are faced with now. All the earlier revolutions, from agricultural to industrial to post industrial times, pale before the magnitude and sweep of AI revolution. Even the makers of this revolution are faced with many unknowns when it comes to the impact of AI on our lives in the years to come.

Before the conclusion of this decade of the twenty first century the world, if AI excprts are to be believed, would be in a completely different mode of thinking and living. The disruptions that are contemplated are not just mind boggling they are nerve wrecking. The political, economic and cultural impact of this revolution is too huge, too deep, and too disturbing. It is not yet clear what AI, when it blooms full, will leave behind it as a wreckage of past, and what it will generate as new world of things, practices and power. We really don’t know what will stay with us that is part of our historical human world, and what will disappear. Anything we know and do is under the shadow of uncertainty.

A superficial, yet very relevant, worry is the new job landscape. The work that we do today and that engages us in economic relationships may completely be taken over by AI. That is where the political leadership, the governance structures and thought leadership of any country has to seriously engage with. If it really happens that jobs at a scale disappear then the crises it will bring in its wake would be catastrophic. Quite likely, as many experts say, and our collective experience with industrial and computer revolutions also suggest, it might turn other way round. AI revolution might open up new horizons of economic engagement.

But for this we need a comprehensive change in the way we teach our children, and the way we raise them in societal spaces. AI is bound to disrupt many spaces from individual to family to societal to national and international. Time to re-envision everything, reccaliberate systems.

© Greater Kashmir