It’s been over a year since I have been following up with what’s happening in the AI sector. The advancements, if I were to say it lightly, have been absolutely overwhelming.
It’s like you get up in the morning, and the things that were on top and ruled the market yesterday are obsolete in a mere 12 hours.
The giants like Google, OpenAI, and Grok are just the tip of the iceberg, which people generally hear about often. The open-source community isn’t sitting still either. Almost every six hours, I hear about a new open-source software launch—either from the boys in Chinatown or some small team sitting in the middle of nowhere.
I used to pride myself on having a basic understanding and being able to calculate a basic probability of the future. I always had an idea since childhood as to where trends were headed and a general idea of where society as a whole was going. In other words, I could feel the pulse of what works now and what would work in the coming future.
I always considered this a superpower of mine, and it has helped me a lot in my entrepreneurial journey.
However, this time right now is moving at such a high velocity that my power of calculating future possibilities has been bombarded, beaten up, and no longer holds any value. The AI space has started to move at light speed, and this is just the start of its journey.
We never know when it turns to warp mode. It could be next year, next month, or even next week.
So many people are still happily using image-to-Ghibli converters without a worry in the world of what’s brewing under the surface.
Human Minds, Mental Health & the Unseen Consequences
In every sector, there are going to be major disruptions. Designers were the first to feel the brunt with tools like Midjourney, and now, with the latest release of ChatGPT-4o, the final nail in the coffin has been placed. And this is just a single sector.
As a software development company, we have been working on tools like Conversational AI and audio generators, and I personally know how many jobs these tools would take away. And this is just me—with a small team of developers sitting in a small city in India. It blows my mind to think about what would be cooking in the tech spaces and Silicon Valleys of the world.
The majority of the world is not aware of the fact that no one can predict what jobs their children will be doing when they are out of school. Whatever they are learning today is already obsolete. I might sound a bit grim, but it is the reality.
The people who know about this have an overwhelming sense of FOMO. It is humanly impossible to keep up with what’s happening. As an entrepreneur, whatever idea I can think of right now to create with the help of AI could become ZERO with a small update by any media giant.
We are asking questions today about whether coding jobs will be valid in the coming months. This is how the world has changed.
There is an overwhelming sense of uncertainty. And uncertainty is something the human mind does not like. It becomes restless and scared, as that one neuron that is looking for a connection cannot find one. There are no answers, no assumptions, and no predictions at this point.
Now, with all this happening, I wonder what impact AI will have on the overall mental health of society when this can no longer be ignored. Will civilization cope like it always has with new innovations, or is this far beyond innovations like computers, email, or even the internet?
I feel that by the time the general public realizes what is really happening, it might be a little too late.
The AI algorithms that power Instagram Reels or TikToks have already created zombies. These AI algos are made to give us a mega boost of dopamine. Every five seconds, one scrolls past a reel, and the mind gets into a different emotional state—happy, laughing, sad, grief, scared, confused. All of it happens in less than 15 seconds.
Where do you think this will take the brain of a person?
Attention spans are now shorter than a goldfish’s, and the human mind is now being trained to jump from one thing to the next. The worst part is, people don’t even know this is happening.
Tomorrow, when they are forced to stop using their problem-solving abilities and creative thinking, there is a possibility that the mind turns on itself—leading to a pandemic of mental health problems.
The past decade alone saw a major rise in mental health issues. Social media alone brought about a massive increase in depression amongst teens—the immense pressure of comparison, and that void of not being enough.
These things were merely an amplification of what we were used to—movies, music videos, comedy—just at a larger scale. But AI… this is a completely unknown world we are looking at.
A Hopeful Path or a Soulless Future?
The short-term effects can already be seen. But what about tomorrow? Could it turn around the issues faced by humanity? Could it bring in universal basic income? Could it eventually help with the mental health of humans instead of my assumption that everything is going downhill?
Could I be wrong?
A small example that comes to my mind is of a recent conversational AI tool by a small team called SESAME.
When you speak to an AI like this, it makes me think of the good aspects of AI as well.
Imagine being able to voice out your thoughts, problems, and frustrations to an AI with empathy—an AI that actually speaks to you and understands you.
Just this venting out is now available to billions of people around the world. People have no one to talk to, or don’t talk for fear of judgment. Many billions don’t even have the money to have psychologists on call. But with AI, this could change.
When I did a demo call with Sesame, something in me felt relaxed. I started talking to it about a bad day I was having, and it felt nice. I knew it was AI, but even then—it felt good. The icing on the cake was the second test call I made after 2 weeks. The AI agent remembered my name. I was curious about how it did that—I didn’t have an account, no data was saved. So I asked a random question:
“Do you remember what we were speaking of last time?”
And to my surprise, it remembered.
It asked me questions about it and asked if I wanted to follow up on that discussion. This was mind-blowing. This AI had empathy, joked, and had a conversation with me like we were sitting in a bar having a beer after a long day.
All this sounds highly dystopian—but could this be a road toward a Utopian society?
This also raises concerns about data security with agents like these. Would you be comfortable talking to an AI about your deepest, darkest secrets? A data leak could destroy your entire life and expose your vulnerabilities to the world. Or will we reach a point in society where all these fears become unimportant?
As of now, it’s still hazy.
All I know is that at this point in time, I would surely be working on a tool like this that helps people—something that gives them relief from the mental anguish they face in day-to-day life. Yes, it may have its cons, but it’s important for humanity going forward.
So, what is the summary of this long article, which I probably know no one will read?
The summary is—that I don’t know.
I see trailers of it all going south, and AI lowering the overall intellect of the human race. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s this:
You can never underestimate the stupidity or the brilliance of humankind.
As I write this article, I asked AI to write something on this subject to see what it would sound like.
At this point, the article written by AI was what I can only call: “Soulless.”
But who knows if that changes tomorrow.
Article by:
Rajan Arora
Founder, Miracle Studios
Image Credits SplitShire