The other day I was reading yet another article on Artificial Intelligence (AI), and its promises and the spectre of it being a nemesis to humans. The article drew up a long list of issues that the society is grappling with, which have suddenly appeared on the horizon with the arrival of chatGPT, and the endless slew of alternatives and competitors from small and large, public and private, companies.
The article covered topics such as college students using AI to write their essays, artists using AI to create artwork, deepfakes, and so on. But as I was reading the article and thinking about the new Millennial and Gen Z professionals, I was wondering what will happen to them.
You see, these two generations have the peculiarity that from their very birth, they basked in the digital world and electronic-facilitated task completion. So not only are they at ease with operating digital equipment, but they also build their daily lives and planning around them. A bit like Boomers and Gen X did with Automated Teller Machines (ATM). That is, while at the beginning, these machines were used as facilitators for our banking chores, they have become the backbone of our organizational activities: we will not be able to sustain our lives, as we live it today, without relying on them and the related methods (web-based interface, credit cards).
As I went deeper and deeper into the thought, I got more and more depressed, and my ever eternal fear of turning into an angry old man emerged again. You see, I figured with the trending patterns of ‘subcontracting’ the tasks in our life to someone or something else, our younger generation may erase itself.
What I see is this evolution where we pay a little bit of money to an organization to do something for us that we historically did ourselves: delivery organizations get us food, take-outs prepare our food, AI on various sites tells us which books or albums to buy, and again AI does the search for us, and plays our desired music.
The list is long, but my concern is that if we continue as such, our young generation will eventually subcontract everything to someone or something else--except maybe some physical activity-- and has nothing of its own. They eventually become a whole bunch of ‘nobodies’ even though they think they are controlling and managing everything in their lives smartly and efficiently!
Paris, February 5, 2024,
Zeejay