Blog 26: Mindfulness

No food will ever hurt you as much as an unhealthy mind – B.B.

Think about this:

• I want to click a lovely picture – Take help of i-Phone or Google Phone
• I want to cook the best recipes from the local ingredients – Take help of online recipes!!
• I want to build a nice model of house using my own specs – Take help of online tool for designing and modelling
• I want to actually see how my new house will look like: Take help of 3D printer
• I want to order food, clothes, grocery, tools, cosmetics.. well almost anything : Take help of Amazon
• I want to get my car repaired / serviced: Take help of online tools of car companies
• I want to withdraw money from my bank account : Why??? Do everything online
• I want to pay bills, taxes, subscription dues:  Well do it online
• I want to create a good music note: Get help of online beat creators
• My voice is harsh and coarse, but I still want to sing: Get help of voice editors and recorders
• I want to make good sketches: Take help of online painting assistance
• I want to write a novel: Tell GPT about the characters, and it will build a story for you
• I have money and I want to build a restaurant: Tell AI and 3D printing can be done to build an entire restaurant!!
• I want legal advice: Take help of online literature. No lawyer required
• I have to take a medical advice: Take online help of hospitals and doctors’ prescription

Look at all these pointers above. A painter, vocalist, musician, infrastructure builders, lawyers, bankers, chefs, doctors are having tremendous help from online tools, Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms and not-to-forget, Chat GPT platforms!

We are living in an extremely interesting time frame, when the digital world is overwhelming all of us! Listen to the talks of Yuval Noah Harari, a noted Historian and public-speaker (links given below) from Israel, and you will find that the “help” which we see now, is going to rapidly convert into “absolute help”  in a very small time of about 5-10 years! A painter may not be required to paint anything. A good camera and a painting software will do a job which no painter can imagine. Volumes of legal books can be assimilated in a fraction of second and we would get a much-balanced legal advice from the AI tool, as compared to even a most-intelligent Lawyer. Take any domain, for that matter, and you will find obsoleteness of the Human over a “AI-enabled entity”!!

What would humans do then, beyond, say 10 years down the line? Mind full ness is very crucial at this stage. Well, people say that this will go towards unemployability. But that may not happen. With industrial era (18^th and 19^th Century), unemployability was predicted, but it did not happen, for example. Hence a domain where human intelligence cannot be replicated has to be tapped. Creative jobs have to be identified. Novel teaching methods, learning models, fine engineering methodologies and researchers would be still required to keep humanity intact. This is a picture of an intellect!

Just as food is ample in the world now (see my Blog 25: https://sangeetakale.blog/2023/12/31/blog-25-abundance/), so is the skill-set! Good supply-chains and organic-inorganic merger for food production has yielded in low-food-deficit, so is the availability of lawyers, doctors and architects.

Therefore, if an individual lacks the skill of being thoughtful and mindful, he/she may not have a decent place in society. We will not need a carpenter, sculpturer or a construction worker now. We will need AI-handlers, 3D printing professionals, network security implementors and fine materials engineers to supply the hardware and software gadgets, their “raw-material”. We have to ensure that we remain the custodians of the next-wave to come and have an edge of “creativity” over AI-ML.

This is a time to gear-up! We have to see where the technology is leading us. Before the technology takes over us (it has, over 80%, already!!), we have to find new ways and means to get ourselves employable! It is not easy… Mindful approach towards our life is important.

The only one single thing we have, and which will differentiate us from our previous versions is “our imagination” and “creativity”. Just as food is abundant, so is the technology and conventional skills. Humans have to upgrade themselves rapidly..!

Therefore, just as junk food and mindless eating is injecting life-style related diseases in humans, non-utilisation of brain would lead to related mental diseases. Just think of the cases of Alzheimer’s and vascular Dementia…  these cases are rapidly increasing.

Therefore, new definition of Poverty now, is: Who is mindlessly consuming food and mentally not vigilant, but sticking to old models of professions are poor-enough to perish!! And this perishability is going to be very very fast!!

Hence, as 2023 ends, today, I would like to say that mindful diet should be given to both Body and Brain. Else human race may suffer a unidirectional paradigm shift and we will have no path to return!! And slowly and cluelessly we may fall inferior to the AI and ML algorithms, when we invented them just with the reverse intention!!!

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