Humanity in the age of AI — Part 2

I wrote a piece on this blog (https://vikasmukundan.blogspot.com/2025/06) just about a year ago and this is in continuation to that. 

While I made a doomsday prediction saying that humanity will face an existential challenge from AI and robotics married with each other and the challenge will be in terms of job losses to begin with followed by survivability of the human race as we have seen in some of the Hollywood sci-fi flicks such as The Terminator series of the The Matrix series. Now that prognosis is something I still am sticking with, however, in this piece I want to highlight what most of the AI companies, as in the big ones such as the Open AI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, et al are up to. The money riding on the success of these companies and the ones supporting them in the ecosystem such as the chip makers, the hyperscalers, the data centers is so high that any chance of them failing or living up to expectations is a difficult to fathom scenario for the economies that are betting on the power of AI to reinvent the hegemony they have held over this world in the last few centuries.

Now, how are they doing this? 

While the prognosis of AI doomsday is real in the long term but how long is this long term is the biggest question. The answer to this question is elusive to 99.9999% or even more number of people on Earth unless you are part of the elite ecosystem that has placed heavy bets to ensure that these corporations survive and thrive so that these countries that cradle these companies go on enforcing and enjoying their hegemony over Earth and humanity. So, how do they plan to ensure that their hegemony continues — their hegemony playbook comprises of the following steps: (1) develop the most compelling AI models with the massive investments (which hardly anyone else can match) they have made via the handful of companies; (2) these companies then created a well curated ecosystem of partners and cheerleaders who help them to continually grow and evangelize the AI revolution; (3) a frenzy is unleashed by all these partners and cheerleaders across the globe making everyone awestruck, anxious and afraid, all at the same time making everyone wanting to join the AI bandwagon at the earliest to ‘gain’ efficiency, cost savings and hence competitive edge over their rivals — this is already visible across the world; (4) with large scale adoption of AI by the large number of businesses and government institutions, the select group companies with the AI models are able to develop AI agents (Agentic AI as it is known) or AI employees with the specific skillsets that are needed to run various functions within the businesses in diverse domains as well as in the government institutions — this step it in play right now — eg. Antropic teaming up with Infosys and other IT companies in India to develop Agentic AI; (5) when these AI agents are developed and they have learnt all the skills the human employee have ‘taught’ them knowingly and unknowingly through the co-piloting they did with AI to help the businesses and government institutions gain efficiency and cost savings, these AI agents will then be made available for hire to these businesses to do the job their employees were doing at a fraction of the cost than what these businesses were paying their employees. While this is happening, the AI models are also evolving and getting better and we will be reaching ASI or Artificial Super Intelligence, which would make these AI Agents better their skills at the work they are doing without any inputs from the humans. This 5th step will complete the loop and establish these large AI behemoths, who are already commanding trillion+ dollar valuations, establish themselves as the next set of monopolies who would decide who rules the business world and in turn the world and humanity! 

This isn’t a conspiracy theory but a prognosis that will dawn upon the world in not a very distant future from now. So, what’s the way forward for low income countries who do not have the economic muscle to develop these sovereign large language AI models? Is their fate sealed? Will this be the beginning of a new way of colonization of countries? Well, that will be the objective with which the US and China are progressing their AI programs — sheer global dominance in every field! 

Having said all this, I have a bad feeling about this — that is, as humanity, we have embarked on a irreversible mission to create a Frankenstien, one that will bring doomsday on itself in not so much distant future. Whilst, humans want to use AI to dominate other humans and perhaps subjugate them too using technology thinking that this too will deliver the same results as it did in the last few hundred years, but this time, its a genie that will be let out of the bottle, one which is unlikely to be controlled by humans!

The next decade will be the defining one, one that will write the future of humanity.

As I finished writing this piece, a news came in that the US government has banned the access of Anthropic’s latest offerings, Mythos and Fable to all non-US nationals (even in the US) as well as users in other countries, other than the US — a clear indicator of the hegemony as mentioned above!