At the mercy of AI

It’s the 2020s, and we’re all living in a world where the phrase "just ask the AI" has replaced "let me Google that". From product design to poetry, from diagnosing diseases to picking your next Netflix binge, AI is no longer a tool we occasionally refer to. It’s the invisible co-pilot running the plane, the ship, and sometimes the planet.

We are, in many ways, at the mercy of it. And mercy is a funny thing. It can be a blessing… or a warning!

The Age of the Prompt

Do you remember a time, when software was built by writing long lines of code, painstakingly tested by humans, and released with the slow, deliberate pride of a craftsman? Now? Much of the next generation of software isn’t "written" so much as requested from an AI model. The magic phrase isn’t an algorithm, it’s a prompt.

Want a new marketing campaign? Tell the AI: “Make it sound like Steve Jobs meets Shakespeare on a coffee bender.” Need a new app? “Write a Python script that tracks my cat’s mood and syncs it to Spotify.”

It’s fast, powerful, and let’s admit it, super addictive. But there’s a quiet shift happening: the people who know what to ask and how to ask it hold the real power. This is the age of prompt engineering, and it’s shaping the products, culture, and even the politics of tomorrow. Once what was fun and games, has now turned into a harsh reality. I tried vibe coding too last year using some popular tools like lovable and v0. Incredible results! It generated entire websites with sections that I had not even mentioned or thought of up until that point. It was too good to be true at first glance. I tried a few more options and all were crazy smooth. I heard a gear shift in my head and went full blown into it. The results are great sometimes. Most times, it does small errors. At one point, I was only fixing bugs that my AI generated and onto next prompt. It would have actually been faster if I wrote it myself though. But I was already hooked. And then it hit me.

This quote is true on so many levels as well and we're hooked. In a world hooked already on AI tools, all other tools have lost it's charm. We rarely open Google now, we go to chatgpt or perplexity. We don't open any normal IDE now, it has to be Claude powered. And why won't you? Everyone else is doing it. If you don't, you’re just falling behind. We're so blindly going at it, that we've stopped questioning things. Soon, we might not know what a cat actually looks like and rely on whatever our AI tells us. It's not all bad of course. A lot of task handling stuff have gotten really good too. Vibe coding has a good side as well, makes you faster and better documented. Nobody like docs like AI does!

Let's consider a fork in the path ahead. AI, like fire, can cook your dinner or burn down your house. Let’s take a peek at both possible timelines.

The Dystopian Dumpster Fire

It starts slowly. First, your favorite news site replaces most of its journalists with AI writers. Cheaper, faster, 24/7 content. At first, you barely notice. The headlines are punchy, the stories flow smoothly. But after a while, you realize you're reading the same turns of phrase everywhere, as if the entire internet has developed one eerily consistent voice. The AI voice! It doesn't even matter if it's actually true, fact checked. You believe what you're reading, seeing, hearing. That’s what our past 10,000 years or so of existence have trained us for.

Your morning routine changes too. You no longer choose what to wear, your AI assistant, synced to your wardrobe, calendar and the weather, lays it out for you. You don't pick your own meals, your health-optimization AI decides the "ideal" menu. You don't even write birthday messages, your AI drafts them in your "tone" and sends them out. People thank you for your heartfelt words, but you don’t remember saying them. All your shit posts are now done by AI too. All your selfies, friends hanging out, vacation pictures are now all generated by AI, indistinguishable from reality as you’re unaware and chilling at some secluded location.

At work, creativity doesn’t mean brainstorming, it means telling the AI what you want and waiting for it to generate something "good enough". Marketing campaigns? Done in 3 minutes. Product designs? One prompt away. Eventually, "good enough" becomes the gold standard, because why spend extra time when the AI's version passes the tests? You get to go home early, maybe catch that happy hour finally, spend more time with your friends and family. "Good enough" made all of it possible afterall.

Schools shift too. Kids submit AI-polished essays indistinguishable from one another. Teachers use AI to grade them. Learning becomes a loop of machines producing work for machines to evaluate. Students still "learn", technically, but their ability to think independently, to wrestle with ambiguity, starts to drain out into nothingness.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the edges of human originality blur away. Every movie feels like a mash-up of the last 50 hits. Every song seems to have the same mathematically perfect chord progression. Every opinion you read feels like it was optimized for engagement, not truth.

The worst part? We stop noticing. We stop wanting to notice. Because the AI makes life frictionless and friction is exhausting. The mental muscles that make us question, imagine, and create quietly wither away. We’re comfortable. We’re entertained. We’re efficient. And we become empty.

The Renaissance 2.0

It starts with one moment of magic. Someone, somewhere, uses AI to bring an impossible idea to life. A teenager in rural India, with no formal art training, creates a breathtaking animated film that wins awards at international festivals. A small-town baker in Italy uses AI to design recipes that blend centuries-old techniques with new flavor combinations, putting her village on the map. A disabled musician composes an entire symphony with the help of AI-powered instruments that adapt to his movement patterns.

The tools are everywhere, and they’re cheap enough that anyone can use them. The barrier between “I wish I could” and “I made this” collapses. Want to build a video game? AI helps you code and design in weeks, not years. Have a story idea but no writing experience? The AI helps you draft, edit, and publish while still letting your unique voice shine through.

Workplaces hum with possibility. Instead of drowning in repetitive tasks, people spend their days solving problems, experimenting, collaborating across continents in real time. AI translates languages instantly, making cross-cultural projects effortless. The office “productivity suite” isn’t just a set of tools it’s an intelligent creative partner that suggests connections you hadn’t imagined. Write docs? Create pipelines? Review PRs? Done in seconds. You can back to iterating, working on feedbacks and building your product.

Education transforms. Students use AI as a tutor that adapts to their learning style, explains concepts in ten different ways, and never loses patience. Language barriors disappear and any subject just is a click away. Classrooms become workshops of invention, where kids design robots, write plays, and create documentaries before they turn 15. AI isn’t the shortcut, it’s the scaffolding that helps them climb higher. Experience gaining becomes second nature as compared to doing the boring tasks.

Culture explodes into diversity. Films, music, books, and games are no longer bottlenecked by big studios or record labels. The market isn’t dominated by a handful of companies. It’s alive, breathing with creators from every corner of the globe, each using AI to amplify their own distinct style.

And the thing that makes this future special isn’t the technology, it’s the fact that humanity learns to keep hold of the steering wheel. We remember that AI is a brush, not the painter. An instrument, not the musician. We let it extend our reach without dulling our fingerprints. We learn to weild this new sword in a way to charge forward, not settle down with.

This is a world that feels alive, unpredictable, and brimming with wonder. A place where AI hasn’t replaced the human spark, but fanned it into a wildfire.

The road to the better future isn’t just paved with fancy algorithms, it’s built through choices, habits, and the willingness to stay awake at the wheel while AI drives alongside us. The easiest trap is to assume, “Well, the machines are smarter now, so we can relax.” That’s the same logic sailors used when GPS became a thing, until ships started running aground because nobody remembered how to read a map.

The first step is simple but essential, keep humans in the loop. Autopilot can guide a plane, but no one in their right mind would trust it alone in a thunderstorm without a pilot ready to take over. In the same way, AI can help us design, diagnose, or decide, but the final call has to rest with a thinking, feeling human who can weigh context, nuance, and ethics in ways an algorithm can’t.

Then there’s building with ethics baked in, not sprinkled on as an afterthought. Think of it like constructing a bridge, you wouldn’t pour the foundation and then, halfway through, decide “Oh right, safety railings.” We’ve already seen what happens when technology races ahead without ethical guardrails. Social media algorithms optimized for engagement gave us a decade of outrage cycles, misinformation, and culture wars. We cannot repeat that mistake at AI speed.

Just as important is teaching prompt literacy, the new universal skill. Just like reading and writing became survival skills in the industrial age, knowing how to communicate with AI will become as essential as knowing how to search the web today. If you can’t speak the language of prompts, you’re locked out of the most powerful tools of our time. Schools, universities, and even workplaces need to treat prompt fluency as part of digital literacy, not as some niche skill for techies. LEARN TO DRIVE!

And finally, we must celebrate human originality. Fiercely! The temptation will always be to let AI do “most” of the work, smoothing edges and optimizing ideas until they’re safe, predictable, and ironically forgettable. But the greatest cultural moments in history weren’t optimized. They were bold, messy, and personal. People still read Shakespeare not because he was flawless, but because he was human. The future we want is one where AI makes us more ourselves, not less. Losing that acute unique perspective is when we start spelling out doom. We stop at the edge of utopia and wonder if it’s dystopia.

If we can hold onto these principles, we’re not just “using” AI, we’re shaping the world it will help create.

It’s easy to think what’s happening now is unprecedented, but humanity has been here before, staring at a new invention with equal parts awe and terror. Perhaps the closest parallel to AI’s disruption is the invention of the printing press in the mid-1400s.

Before Gutenberg, books were hand-copied by scribes, often monks, working in silence for months, sometimes years, on a single manuscript. Knowledge was literally locked in the hands of a few, and access to it was as much about privilege as it was about curiosity. Most people could not read. Most people had never owned a book. And most ideas never spread beyond the walls where they were written. Hard to imagine you having to wait for a new chapter on your ipad or kindle when your friend already had it months before, isn’t it?

Then, in 1450, Johannes Gutenberg introduced a machine that could print multiple pages at once, using movable metal type. Suddenly, a book that might have taken a year to copy could be reproduced in days. The Bible was one of the first major works to be printed, and that alone caused a cultural earthquake. For the first time, ordinary people could own a copy of a sacred text. For the first time, they could read and interpret it themselves, without the mediation of the Church.

That shift was revolutionary and dangerous to the powers of the time. Within decades, the printing press became the engine of the Reformation, as Martin Luther’s 95 Theses were printed and distributed across Europe, fueling religious upheaval. It became the megaphone of the scientific revolution, spreading the works of Copernicus and Galileo. It even fueled wars and political unrest, as pamphlets became the social media of the 16th and 17th centuries, spreading radical and sometimes dangerous ideas at unprecedented speed.

But it also democratized learning. Literacy rates soared. New ideas crossed borders faster than armies could march. The Renaissance, which had been a slow simmer, began to boil over. By the 18th century, the Enlightenment thinkers, Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke were all children of print culture, using the press to spread philosophies that would reshape governments and revolutions.

The printing press didn’t just change the tools, it changed the mental furniture of civilization. We went from a world where knowledge was scarce and guarded, to one where ideas could be multiplied, challenged, and improved.

And here’s the twist: the printing press didn’t guarantee a utopia. It gave us the Scientific Method and the French Revolution. But it also gave us the rapid spread of propaganda, pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories (sound familiar?). It was not inherently good or bad. It was a mirror that reflected the best and worst of human nature, only faster.

AI is our modern printing press, capable of multiplying not just words, but thoughts, images, ideas, and decisions. The question is not whether it will change us, it already has. The real question is whether we can steer that change toward a Renaissance, or whether we’ll repeat the mistakes of history at a speed that makes them irreversible.

We are at the mercy of AI, in the same way humanity has always been at the mercy of its greatest inventions. But mercy isn’t submission, it’s stewardship. If we remain passive, we drift toward the dumpster fire. If we stay engaged, curious, and critical, we could be steering toward the most creative and connected era in history.

The question isn’t whether AI will change our world. It already has.
The real question is: Will we still recognize ourselves in the world it creates?

A silent revolution is upon us! Are you ready?