Everywhere I turn—be it a coffee table chat, a LinkedIn scroll, or even a casual family dinner—the topic of Artificial Intelligence somehow creeps in. It almost feels like AI has become this invisible roommate living with us, silently shaping our decisions, choices, and even conversations. Over the past few years, we’ve gone from asking “What is AI?” to now wondering, “What will be left untouched by AI?”

Living With AI Today

AI is no longer futuristic sci-fi—it’s right here in my everyday life. Google Maps reroutes me through Bangalore’s tangled traffic. My banking app’s fraud detection system alerts me when something feels fishy. Netflix knows my guilty-pleasure genre a little too well (slightly creepy, honestly). And at work, AI-driven tools make presentations, analyse data, and even write emails faster than I can.

It’s convenient, yes. But sometimes I pause and wonder: in this constant race for efficiency, are we losing a piece of our authentic selves?

The Promise of Tomorrow

Looking ahead, AI feels like a double-edged sword. There’s immense potential:

• Healthcare: Faster diagnoses, robotic surgeries, and treatments tailor-made for individuals.
• Education: Adaptive learning, so every child learns at their own pace without being left behind.
• Work & Life: From automating the mundane to creating smart cities where traffic and energy are optimised.

But here’s my personal concern—will everything start to feel… manufactured? Will creativity be measured by prompts and algorithms rather than raw human imagination?

Merits and Demerits at a Glance

• Merits: Productivity, cost reduction, accessibility, innovation.
• Demerits: Job displacement, bias, privacy intrusion, and that creeping sense of inauthenticity.

And then there’s this subtle irony: while AI gets better at “thinking” like us, sometimes I feel we’re slowly outsourcing the very things that make us human—our messy handwriting, our flawed but heartfelt ideas, our trial-and-error problem solving.

Looking Back, Looking Ahead

When I think of our parents’ or grandparents’ generations, I can’t help but admire how much they achieved with so little. They built businesses without the internet, raised families without smart gadgets, navigated cities without GPS, and solved problems with sheer perseverance. There’s a raw authenticity to that—a kind of grit that AI can never replicate.

Maybe that’s what unsettles me about AI. Yes, it can make us faster, smarter, and more efficient, but will it ever teach us resilience? Will it ever replace the satisfaction of struggling through a problem, failing, and finally finding our own solution?

My Takeaway

For me, AI isn’t the enemy—it’s the tool. It’s not about rejecting it but about remembering not to lose ourselves in the process. The future of AI isn’t about whether it will dominate; it’s about how we choose to coexist with it.

So, while I welcome the convenience and possibilities, I also want to hold on to something our previous generations instinctively knew: authenticity matters more than perfection. And maybe, in this AI-driven age, our real task isn’t teaching machines to be more like humans—it’s ensuring we humans don’t forget how to be ourselves.