The era of "Influencers"

In a world where everybody is trying to become some sort of an influencer using the power of social networking, I feel that the outcome of this can be disastrous. There is an abundance of resources and tools out there to learn from, to increase knowledge in a matter of hours, days and months as opposed to years that would have taken before, to publish ideas, to advertise, to get traction, to try to influence others and thus gain popularity. All of this is cool and alluring initially but with rising competition, it may become difficult to keep up with the growing demand and may cost them their mental health - peer pressure, mental trauma, depression, and fear in this rat race. Our generation firmly believes in "Follow your heart", "Pursue your passion", " Chase your dreams" etc. probably because that's the only thing we feel was missing in our childhood. Today, if people fail to get a rank in competitive exams for engineering or medicine or MBAs or any national or international public sector jobs, they become coaches, open their training centers or youtube channels, or even pay to social media platforms to get more followers. This is quite common in many professions - gym trainers, health experts, dance choreography, music and singing choreography, content writers (bloggers sometimes not just focus on delivering their primary content but also write about "how to become a great author", or "mistakes to avoid in content writing" - it's good to share experiences learnt so that people can benefit from it, but you see my point here?), etc. This can also be viewed as a growing trend of entrepreneurship and startup culture where people are trying new things, failing, learning, and eventually succeeding possibly. This is truly impressive and promises a better economic growth in the coming years. Being a Software Engineer, I'm a big promoter of technology and always have a personal bias towards new innovations and developments, change in today's operational processes, which also bring diversification of skills in every home as they'll have to adapt to the growing demands of today's world in order to sustain. However, this age of digital revolution, combined with Artificial Intelligence, is causing more and more manual jobs to be automated. Besides, it looks like there will be no place for mediocres a few decades from now. What do you think our next generation would be like and would want to do? Our generation would definitely encourage them to pursue their hobbies, be more curious and creative in their area of interest; we would promote exploration. For a middle-class family in India, this was not an option (or at least not considered safe) in the late 90s or early 2000s. Our parents used to aim for risk-free jobs for the security of our lives, our health and education. But a lot of today's parents seem to be engaging their children in creating social media posts for the mere purpose of increasing their own followers. Is this a good childhood for them? These kids can get extremely attached and addicted to these activities in their growing years. And then they would expect freedom to explore and influence in the same way. We would love to become closest friends of our next generation, but then will things work as we would want? Freedom is important but only until it's used for self-growth in some way or for the growth of society if you have that power. But no lifestyle can ever replace the importance of education in the early years of life.

As mentioned before, today there are ample resources for learning, and shortcuts for any kind of knowledge - youtube videos and podcasts in place of books. I myself do that and appreciate the efforts of those content creators who would definitely have done a lot of research to get to that - they're our great time-savers! In many cases, these actually provide just useful information and eliminate all unnecessary content, plus the way they deliver that is just awesome and catchy, which for some, also makes learning far easier than via reading books. Together with ratings and reviews, and large number of viewers and subscribers, they also get an edge to build a level of trust and we also start considering them as authentic. These are great platforms for us and for our future generations. What next? After all these learnings, would they also want to walk through the path of influencers, to get fame and try to become one of them? I'm keen to see where it takes us in the coming years.

The world has been through agricultural revolution, industrial revolution, and still going through technological revolution, where researchers, scientists (including data-scientists), engineers and businessmen are combining multiple technologies to automate human labor thereby easing up part of our day-to-day work whereas on the other hand, when everyone thrives for excellence and expertism, this may mean a struggle for those who're not the best and are happy doing mediocre blue-collar jobs which are getting replaced by the machines and factories. How much of our life is going to be driven by dumb machines turned into smart bots, how's it going to impact the economy in upcoming decades? Wouldn't there be a pause to innovation ever, now that everyone is trying to be their creative self, living unique experiences and not doing something just as a hobby but also to make money out of it?

Food for thought:

1. Is the world (including us) moving/progressing in the right direction?

2. Will the jobs that we're doing today continue to exist after a few decades from now?

3. What's it that people would always need, and no-one can automate or produce at scale (though I'm pretty sure, whatever comes to our mind - there will definitely be someone smart enough to crack it at some point of time in future)?

There are many different professions existing today - starting from administrative services, health services, construction work or housing sector, tourism sector, transportation and automobile industry, journalism, entertainment industry, to manufacturing goods which can be anything from clothing or fashion items, groceries and/or food produce, restaurant chains, household stuff, electronic items, and the list goes on. Much of the skilled labor in each of these areas has already been replaced by machines running inside big factories. To cite some examples of automation, many healthcare services are now using AI powered devices - couple of classic examples include medical imaging analysis, forecasting kidney diseases, helping with cancer diagnosis, etc. The clothing sector has greatly reduced handloom weaving. There are machines that can produce similar designs, for example if each item can be categorized, and designs and artwork that's most sought-after can be standardized, then specific machines can be built accordingly for every different step involved in the process. There can be shapes and sizes which again are usually definite, and do not demand that level of customization and can be fairly achieved by standardization. In the agricultural sector, people are mixing stuff to create hybrid products, for their long shelf life, and thus increasing profits. Ultimately, it comes down to infrastructure set-up for any business so that you won't need employees for your work. Another small example is - self-checkout machines at grocery stores, supported by security cameras. This world is slowly becoming a place only for innovators. We all are becoming victims of machine-controlled ecosystem. Talking about machines, I would highly recommend watching a Netflix documentary "The Social Dilemma" which explains the dangerous impact of social networking shared by a few tech experts from Silicon Valley and top tech companies. There's a statement I would like to quote from it - "Only two organizations call their customers 'users' - illegal drugs and Software". The next generation will trust their bot friends more than parents because parents would not always agree with them but their bot assistants would (to clarify, I do not necessarily mean Alexa or Siri or the new player, ChatGPT but I'm also considering an auto-recommendation system here like the reels suggested by instagram or the advertisements that pop-up here and there on our social media profiles as well as every single page or site we visit for that matter) and this can cause more confusions and lack of trust when they would later get to know at some point that these bots are not the real living species. It's a trap. It could be traumatizing. Consumption of drugs among children has increased manifold since the 19th century. Suicide rates have been increasing ever since then. I might be taking it to an extreme level, which is really heart-breaking, and I understand that parents will always be there for them no matter what and will let them know of their past and the usual lifestyle back those days when not everyone had a broadband connection or even a computer at home. That's ok, so we feel that we can sort everything out for our kids. I'll leave this here, but I don't think it's that simple because even we don't always listen to our parents when the questions are with respect to our personal life decisions. Right? Anyway, coming back to machines, what if there are conflicts between bots themselves? Who knows - they may pose a threat or trigger a disaster. This might sound like an exaggeration, but bots can start small - that is quite possible. Or even without conflicts arising, there can be an accident inside a manufacturing plant, which happens even today. No wonder machines are replace-able but to scale at the level that we're discussing here would mean a plant big enough that can even destroy living beings in the nearby environment. With that said, I'm actually an anti-superstition-believer kind-of person, but the development of last few decades seems to be well-aligned with what's written in our mythological books - kalyug will eventually end followed by the apocalypse. Who knows - just like in casinos, "The (creator's) house always wins!"? Well, well, that could also be attributed to climatic and environmental changes happening today. To be honest, let's keep this aside because I've not read much on this. I believe in God as it gives me hope and positivity and faith in good doings. But on the other hand, I hate superstitions just like everyone else in our generation - we're surrounded by incredible science and gaze at the wonderful nature that universe has gifted us in awe! Let's not divert and get back to the topic. Let's enjoy every moment because all of this could be centuries away! However, being close to our family (and not society, not virtual society in any social media platform) will always help in keeping us happy and the only (or rather major) challenge to solve for that is teaching growth-mindset to everyone close to us. This growth could be related to self-learning, suggesting ideas, sharing own opinions, seeking feedback, self-retrospection, learning from failures, learning from achievements, spreading awareness and positivity, contributing for a cause in the form of time or money, and n number of ways that we read in leadership and self-help books.

Ok, that's not all, I have more to say regarding technology. What if OpenAI's ChatGPT takes over most of the today's tech jobs? I've read a couple of poems generated by ChatGPT. Darn, it's just amazing. One of OpenAI's products is designed to generate images - what if it generates fake images and mentions these are worth visiting, along with its fake location!? We are so involved in social media these days that if the likes for an AI-generated picture increases fast, someone might try heading there!! Yet another skill that it has is to generate code. I wonder, it will be able to self-research and devise new algorithms in future based on our gradual technological evolution - which can be collected from past data and stats for its training. The machines and bots may be used for treatments at home after a few initial doctor visits - at least for common and known diseases. It can also take into consideration the location of the patient (or should we rather call "user"?) to determine the best suitable medicines taken in their environment, so the results can be localized just like today's auto-suggest feature. On the similar lines, ChatGPT is also known to have generated lyrics of a song. Oh, this is getting crazy! We all know that there are a lot of songs from historical times, in different languages, lot of voices, lots and lots of movies in every genre and all of this can be used to train them. One day, it will start generating advertisements, or even movies based on learning from thousands of movies in that particular category. What if AI-generated human faces are used in movies in place of real actors and actresses? It's quite possible, and probably way cheaper. Live shows will get more traction, but there the audience will be limited. People would definitely pay to see their real heroes on TV but what if those exact scenes can be auto generated? According to a recent NDTV news, Netflix is getting slammed in Japan for using AI-generated artwork in its anime "The Dog & The Boy" and people aren't happy. Oh crap! Again, where is this going?

The power of "influence" is slowly shifting to bots as opposed to the humans. Smart people are creating smart devices that are dominating the former's world. These researchers, scientists and engineers are making big impacts by creating self-sustainable bots that'll be able to self-learn, self-improve, self-control and self-lead like humans. Checkout this 39-second clip: https://www.instagram.com/reel/CjN9uibj_MK/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link. Also, I haven't yet but am thinking to watch the series "Black Mirror" sooner or later. A short glimpse of Tipsy Robot doing the waitressing job (not a great example but this is the only video related to the topic I have on my phone right now, you'll find a ton of related series and good shows on the internet, few of which I mentioned in this post):

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/c9fac6_a9ea53f6ad794673907821406e70c580/480p/mp4/file.mp4

P.S.: We are not talking about next decade or next generation but a few generations from now - when there won't be much customer pain-points, not many problems would be left to solve. It may no longer require skilled labor but rather human intervention just for infrastructure repair and maintenance in big data centers, labs or factories. Even if skilled jobs continue to exist, the required knowledge can be passed on to interested folks, who can easily take it ahead. For example, important pieces of self-driving cars that're different from manual ones like sensors, camera, actuators, configured actions, processors, their assembly etc. can be taught to mechanical engineers who can take care of their future manufacturing and production. Would there be any more mystery in science and technology or medicine or any other field for researchers to unfold? With respect to innovation, what's going to be the next level? Will the medical researchers be busy with experiments to develop vaccines for more epidemics or pandemics that the world has not seen yet? Or landing to Moon or Mars would become more common? Or the next revolution would bring self-flying airplanes? After a bunch of people get their products safely transported to desired places in these flights, more and more folks would start trusting, just like self-driving cars today. But do you recall what happens when some of the top-rated brands fail to abide by their promised quality and well-known authenticity? There are many such examples - Volkswagen, Johnson & Johnson, Nestle, and Hershey's to name a few. In a matter of hours, the story takes a complete U-turn. Would bots worry about or consider AI ethics the way tech giants claim today? They would have so much of our personal data through which they can easily gain our trust and grab our attention. Nevertheless, I feel people would get paid for whatever they're (or will be) expert at, just like today. Tournaments will always be everyone's favorite. So, could it be more like - stagnation would be more prevalent in areas that require problem solving? We're already going through the worse tech downturn ever seen. Many of the brightest minds have been recently laid off in the core software companies, and the next two years are highly likely going to be very uncertain for the tech market. Oh wait, I actually recently watched an episode in Shark Tank India where the two women entrepreneurs cracked a very common problem faced with the fresh flowers - by increasing their shelf-life from 2-3 days to 15 days. This is a great example of innovation as well as problem-solving as it requires a totally different thought-process and a lot of experimentation specially when there are no (or may be quite a few) competitors in the market (the packaging process that works for fruits and snacks doesn't work for flowers). As expected, they're raising big. Conclusion: Observe (the surroundings), define (the problem and scope), research (the history), read (the tried methodologies that failed/succeeded), learn (the trends or the latest on it), think (about the possible solutions), experiment (with the different identified solutions), refine (the final approach or solution), maintain (this solution keeping up with the trends), scale (the overall process), and repeat. And hence I end on a positive note. ;)

Was this eye-opening for you or something that we're all already part of but didn't realize the best and the worst outcomes of it? I'm not sure if all of this made much sense but I'm pretty sure no-one would have imagined the world that we live in, in the 18th century either! It all evolved incrementally. It's indeed a world of dreams, far from reality, for our foreparents. In my opinion, we should just let our next generation be aware of our hard-work, dedication, determination and teach them to make proper use of the precious resources around them, rather than exploiting them. Just being mindful of this plus what I concluded in the last paragraph should be good enough for their happiness and satisfaction. Demands will always change with time, but what is important is to be able to quickly adapt to the changing environment and seek opportunities wherever possible, without wasting the precious time worrying about being a top-notch.

Thanks for your valuable time and for still being with me. Happy reading!