🤖 Sastry on Today: Life with AI — Jobs Lost or Wisdom Found?

🌿 From the Mantapa: Sastry on Today

Wit • Wisdom • Insight • Inspiration

🤖 Sastry on Today: Life with AI — Jobs Lost or Wisdom Found?

Every invention in history has arrived with both applause and panic.

The printing press was accused of ruining memory. The typewriter was supposed to kill handwriting.

The calculator, many feared, would make arithmetic extinct.

Computers? They were meant to end employment altogether.

And yet here we are, busier than ever, working longer hours, inventing new forms of stress to keep ourselves occupied.

Now, the new villain of the piece is Artificial Intelligence.

AI writes essays, paints pictures, diagnoses diseases, and even composes lullabies.

The cry rises in boardrooms and tea stalls alike: “What about the jobs?”

The Echo of Old Fears

Sastry chuckles:

“When fire was discovered, cooks must have panicked.

When the wheel rolled in, palanquin bearers must have cursed.

When tractors arrived, bullock cart drivers saw their livelihoods vanishing.

Yet, humanity adjusted — cooks became chefs, palanquin bearers became chauffeurs, and farmers learned to drive machines instead of oxen.”

The pattern is clear:

technology does not end work. It shifts it.

It destroys old jobs and creates new ones.

The ones that vanish are the repetitive, mechanical, replaceable tasks.

The ones that appear demand creativity, adaptability, and above all, human imagination.

The Human Monopoly

AI can indeed write a poem, but it cannot feel heartbreak.

It may compose a song, but it cannot hear the tremble in your grandmother’s lullaby.

It may design art, but it cannot understand why a child’s crayon scribble matters more than a masterpiece.

Creativity, Imagination, Orginal thought, Wisdom, empathy, humour, love, courage — these remain gloriously human monopolies.

And if we cultivate them, no machine can replace us.

The Real Question

Perhaps the question, then, is not “Will AI take our jobs?” but rather “Will we upgrade our humanity?”

If we cling to sameness, machines will outpace us.

If we embrace curiosity, learning, and collaboration, AI will not be a threat, but a partner.

The farmer who feared the tractor eventually grew more crops.

The teacher who feared online classes found new ways to reach thousands of students.

The doctor who feared digital records discovered faster diagnosis.

Wisdom in the Age of Machines

The challenge is not to beat machines at their game, but to deepen our own.

The world doesn’t need humans who type faster than AI, but humans who can dream, laugh, forgive, and inspire — things no algorithm can code.

As Sastry signs off, stirring his evening filter coffee with that sly smile of his:

“Machines may learn, but only humans can laugh. And in that laughter lies the real future of work.”