In the last column of Seeing Silicon, it’s time we acknowledge the truth: synthetic minds are a part of our lives, and we have to adapt to their clumsiness.
Last week, a cousin mentioned how her medical company in the US had sent an email instructing all employees to use artificial intelligence (AI) in their work. She’s using it even though many times she didn’t think an AI chatbot was needed for her tasks.
She’s not alone. Millions of office
In the last column of Seeing Silicon, it’s time we acknowledge the truth: synthetic minds are a part of our lives, and we have to adapt to their clumsiness.
Last week, a cousin mentioned how her medical company in the US had sent an email instructing all employees to use artificial intelligence (AI) in their work. She’s using it even though many times she didn’t think an AI chatbot was needed for her tasks.
She’s not alone. Millions of office workers are being cajoled, instructed, taught, and ordered to adapt to AI systems in their companies. According to a report by Stanford University, corporate AI investment reached $252.3 billion globally in 2024, while use of AI in at least one business function jumped from 55% in 2023 to 75% in 2024.
We’ve probably said it enough in this column, and I’ll reiterate: AI has permeated not only employee laptops but also our smartphones and personal lives.
At the same time, advances in robotics are increasingly making robots an everyday part of our lives. Both in their digital and physical versions, synthetic intelligence is becoming part of our daily lives, leading to new—sometimes interesting, sometimes fascinating—changes in our social fabric, pushing ethics and morality in a new direction.
We’re in a relationship with synthetic minds
My very first column in this series was about how some humans in San Francisco were putting traffic cones on top of self-driving Waymos to stop them. Call it a last hurrah of human protest against robots. Two years later, Waymos are a tourist attraction in the city, and regular commuters prefer driverless cars as they’re clean, trustworthy, and drive predictably.
Through this column, I’ve told you about improbable AI-driven technologies that I’ve seen in Silicon Valley, which are pushing human interaction with synthetic minds in new directions: AI-driven weather balloons that give us precise weather data, longevity AI startups seeking human immortality, and even security robots that monitor warehouses and commercial premises. I’ve covered the dark side of surveillance technology and space colonisation, as well as new archaeological sites being discovered the world over—thanks to AI advances.
Through all of these stories, one thing’s clear: robots and AI are here to stay and help us—whether we want them to or not. New technology equals new problems, equals new businesses solving them. Last year, I spoke about how I was scammed by a fake AI profile on LinkedIn. Since then, AI-created profiles have increased so much on all social platforms that Reddit is considering a partnership with World, a startup that has developed a digital iris scan to distinguish between humans and AI in online spaces. (It’s also funded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.)
Synthetic minds might be a slop-creating nuisance—but we love them, don’t we? After all, we’ve become more productive, more reflective, with an AI agent at our beck and call. We also love how we can pour our hearts out to an AI model, tell them of our creepiest desires, without being judged. A recent New York Times report found that a growing number of people are having “persuasive, delusional conversations” with bots like ChatGPT in marathon messaging sessions. Medical experts are now wondering if ‘AI psychosis’ is a term they need to add to their dictionary.
We’ve to adapt to this synthetic species
With increase in usage of a certain technology, comes frustration, reminding me of the time when some of us (the older dial-up phone generation) would wait for our desktops to boot through floppy disks – that many times became corrupt.
In the AI age, Gen Z has started using the slur ‘clankers’ to express their frustration with AI agents that answer wrongly, make up information or generate slop. The term comes from the Star Wars franchise where it’s a slightly racist word used for robots.
Perhaps AI chatbots and cyborgs, the synthetic species we are adapting to, feels this racism too. I wrote about it last year when a Korean-robot jumped off a floor, to its suicide. “Robots are fragile,” Dr Oussama Khatib, director at Stanford Robotics Center told me in an interview. Almost like he was urging us to adopt AI agents and robots and be patient with them. Much like we are to human toddlers.
In a lot of ways, AI and mechatronics are at the toddler stage. We don’t know what these technologies will become. But we do see them in our lives. The future of work, of personal life, even personal relationships is increasingly to work with synthetic minds. If you haven’t done it already, you will ask AI for medical and mental advice, to write your emails, create videos and photos and slidedecks to send to family and bosses.
Even if our social media drowns with a slurry of AI slop. As we wade through one cringe after another and laugh through some of them, we’ve to wonder if in this AI deluge, we might just lose ourselves as a species. I’ll be there, covering AI and emerging technologies in all their clumsy aspects for you. Till then, make a synthetic friend, folks.
(Shweta Taneja is an author and journalist based in the Bay Area. Her fortnightly column will reflect on how emerging tech and science are reshaping society in Silicon Valley and beyond. The views expressed are personal.)
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