Future of humans - by govts - bitter or better ?
Something massive is coming, and the silence around it is deafening.
We are possibly in the final years before a full-blown intelligence explosion — a moment where AI systems dramatically outpace human cognitive output across nearly every domain. And yet, if you walk through any tier-2 or tier-3 Indian city today, speak to parents, students, local politicians, or journalists, you will find almost no awareness of what this actually means.
Not because people are stupid. But because no one is telling them the truth.
The IT dream that became a trap
Over the last three decades, the IT boom reshaped the aspirations of an entire generation of Indian families. For parents who spent their lives doing physically demanding work — on shop floors, in warehouses, behind counters — watching their child sit in an air-conditioned office in formals, earning a salary they couldn’t have imagined, felt like the ultimate victory.
That dream hardened into dogma. Engineering college. Software job. FAANG salary. This became the socially accepted definition of success, especially in middle-class households. IIT became the holy grail, and when that wasn’t accessible, a thousand coaching institutes, backdoor consultancies, and referral networks filled the gap.
It worked — for a while. GCCs opened. Global companies set up local branches. State governments competed with each other, offering land, tax holidays, and 99-year leases in special economic zones. Real estate boomed around tech parks. Infrastructure followed. Politicians claimed credit. People believed them.
And for at least two decades, it made sense to believe them.
Then came ChatGPT
The ChatGPT moment in late 2022 was a watershed — not just technologically, but psychologically. For the first time, a broad swath of people witnessed a machine doing knowledge work: drafting, reasoning, coding, summarising, translating — tasks that until recently required years of education and experience.
And it hasn’t slowed down. Every quarter, every major lab releases something more capable than the last. The pace is not linear. It is compounding.
What took a human days or weeks can now, in many cases, be done in seconds. That’s not an exaggeration. That’s a product demo you can run yourself right now.
Conservative estimates suggest more than 50% of computer-based knowledge work is automatable with current AI. That number will only grow. And no industry is truly exempt — not IT, not finance, not law, not medicine, and certainly not government administration.
What Indian governments are actually saying
Here’s where things get frustrating.
Instead of honest conversation about displacement, skilling, and economic restructuring, what we get from most state governments is chest-thumping: “We signed an MOU with Company X.” “Our state will have an AI city.” “Data centres will bring employment.”
Data centres will bring some construction jobs — temporary ones. The hyperscale facilities that follow require very few permanent employees to run. This is not a secret. It is documented. Yet no journalist of consequence, no editorial board, no policy think-tank in mainstream Indian media is pushing back on this narrative with the urgency it deserves.
Because it doesn’t affect them yet. And in India, problems only become real when they land at your door.
The economic chain reaction no one is modelling
Let’s trace the logical chain that almost no one in public discourse is willing to complete.
If private sector IT employment stagnates or contracts — and it will — consumer spending contracts with it. The restaurants, malls, real estate, ride-sharing, retail, and hospitality sectors built on the back of tech-sector salaries begin to slow. Tax revenue falls. State governments with bloated payrolls and committed infrastructure spending face a squeeze.
A government that can’t pay its employees on time is not a stable government, regardless of how permanent the jobs appear on paper.
The money rotation breaks. And once that happens, the consequences for daily wage workers — the very people that politicians claim AI cities will help — are severe and immediate.
We are not talking about a slow, manageable transition. We are talking about a structural shock for which India has no public preparation plan.
Universal Basic Income is not the answer
UBI tends to be the first policy reflex in these conversations. It shouldn’t be.
Distributing income without addressing the structural collapse of productive activity is just deferred chaos. The more useful question governments should be asking is: what happens to food security, water access, and basic human welfare when large-scale unemployment arrives? How do we ensure that a worst-case scenario doesn’t trigger civil unrest?
The real investment priorities should be in agriculture R&D, water infrastructure, decentralised food systems, and genuine public safety nets — not headline-grabbing announcements about AI governance frameworks that nobody can define.
Why this silence suits everyone in power
Politicians benefit from delayed awareness. The longer people are distracted — by caste politics, celebrity news, regional rivalries, cricket — the less they demand preparedness.
This is not accidental. The art of Indian political communication for decades has been to keep voters focused on identity and grievance rather than structural economic futures. And it works, until it doesn’t.
The reckoning will come. It always does. The question is whether it comes as a manageable transition or as a crisis.
People will start asking the hard questions the moment their own livelihood feels the pressure. By that point, the window to prepare will have already closed. We should be asking these questions now — not waiting for a crisis to make it feel urgent.
“ The storm is coming. Whether we’re ready for it is entirely up to us “