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The world is in a churn, geologically, intellectually, economically. Three forces we are told are converging on the horizon like the fabled polar vortex: record capital deployment, widespread job displacement and unsustainable government debts that can not be controlled by old governmental levers of regulations, taxes or rate cuts.

Amid the predictions the biggies in the tech world, Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are set to blow USD 560 billion on developing artificial intelligence. Asked if tech is a bubble ready to burst, Bill Gates’s answer was, tech is not the bubble, it is human “frenzy” moving faster than business models. 

The Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei deepens the fears by remarking the world is not ready for what is coming. And the mercurial Open AI CEO Sam Altman is already telling students in their twenties that if they want to navigate through the churn and survive into their forties, they must not make the “big mistake” of listening to old people. 

We have always passed through mediating structures that have existed to give us answers we seek. But if all of the above was true, children born today would all be growing up with an autonomous AI which, unlike us, would not need to learn to code or Google, but simply direct their queries to an agent. 

The internet was meant to free us from all pre-packaged simplified narratives. But as you look around in metros, buses, trains or planes, people are surrounded by the sickly bluish light that spells 100% capture of minds by forces of capital that despise common shared spaces.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

Usually one associates the creation of art forms with such periods as an impossibility. But looking at great writing and art that emerged during previous chaotic periods in world history, that does not seem entirely true. Going back into our own history, one realises, in this........

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