Have you noticed how mankind works very hard to enable mankind to work less? Look how far we have come! Driverless taxis have made their debut somewhere in the world. Check out Waymo.com or Zoox.com if you don’t believe me. This is but the continuation of a saga that began long long ago – of the pursuit of relieving humans of physical work. It has long been possible to get our homes and offices vacuum cleaned at pre-scheduled times even if we are away or busy with other things – because we have the amazing knack to stay super busy anyway. Robovacs now come with a self-cleaning feature. This means we don’t even need to do the one last task of periodically clearing-out its dustbin. I am not even going to talk about washing machines and dishwashers. Those inventions are so old that people don’t even remember the convenience they brought into our lives. We now fight over who will put the dishes in the machine or who will hang the washed clothes to dry. Oh wait, we can get a dryer for that. The chore then becomes transferring the washed clothes into the dryer and then folding them – or calling the ironing service. Small mercies for domestic manual labourers. And for the health and fitness industry that provides us with clever devices to ‘work’-out. Of course only the wafer thin section of the population can afford these facilities. Luckily technology gets cheaper as it gets more and more sophisticated. Appliances are available in cheaper variants or on EMIs.
It was all hunky-dory until now. Matters got serious when skills like coding, design, art, writing, translation, music composition and overall creative expression became automated. The fear was the loss of jobs. The fear is of losing our unique offering. Since yesterday, my social media pages have been flooded with Ghibli renditions of pictures of my friends, family, celebrities and more. If a signature style of art can be easily, instantly replicated using Grok3 – free of cost, the anxiety is unparalleled. What is to become of us? This fear is universal in varying degrees. How we respond is what will determine the success of brands, businesses and individuals. The idea of dooms day is as old as humanity itself. There are voices that make every disturbance to the status quo seem like a sign of impending apocalypse. Time and again, people who welcome inevitable change and adapt to it drown out those voices.
The change seems to be that the idea of copyright will become too complex a battle to fight. Today we find social media posts with unplayable background tracks because of copyright restrictions. The joke is that the content creator most likely had no idea that they were infringing on copyright. If they knew they would have simply used a different freely available number. 99 percent, the impact of the content will remain undiminished. Seems like a pointless battle. In a world where virality and wide sharing is a key metric to success, removing your track from content over copyright concerns appears to be an outdated practice in discord with the times.
Perhaps we need to let go of the ego that comes with something being one’s original creation. If it’s any solace, what we can do is own the claim of being the OGs. OG is GenZ slang for ‘original’. We live in times when being copied and being further built on, with or without due credit as a testament to the quality of our creation. How we make money from what we create is changing. We may lose some avenues of earning an income but we have gained as many, if not more, avenues of making money – with or without automation – but with the unmistakable use of digital technologies and social media. It is imperative to learn about these newer avenues instead of choosing to fight losing battles in an outdated arena.
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