The fear of a mechanical god is as old as the stories of the asuras creating mayavi—illusions—objects or scenes so convincing that even the gods were momentarily deceived. Today, as we digest the ominous predictions of tech prophets like Matt Shumer in The New York Times, we are witnessing a modern version of that same ancient panic. The prophecy is grim: AI is coming for the white-collar worker, the artist, and the engineer, leaving a trail of redundancy in its wake. But as I look at the market and technology today, I am reminded of 2000.
Just as investors today oscillate between existential dread and frenzied investment, the dot-com era saw similar visions of a world in which physical reality would evaporate overnight. A recent Bloomberg opinion piece rightly points out that this “AI panic” often ignores the facts. Markets thrive on hype, and corporations often downsize not because the machines have arrived, but in anticipation of rumours—a pre-emptive strike against a digital ghost. The reality is that despite decades of downsizing and technological leaps, we have yet to see a single complex product, like a full-length feature film, created entirely by AI that has achieved genuine theatrical or commercial success.
I was recently invited to a leading studio that proudly showcased its latest AI-generated ad films. The technical wizardry was, on the surface, staggering. Yet it took only a few seconds for a trained eye to see the “holes.” There is a basic structure, a decent skeleton, but the “prana”—the life-breath of human creativity—is missing. The production quality has glaring gaps; it lacks the richness, the messy complexity, and the soul of a human-made product.
This leads us to a fundamental truth that many fear to admit: human creativity remains irreplaceable. While AI can process vast amounts of data and recognise patterns at lightning speed, it lacks the “innovative spark” driven by personal insight and emotional experience. Human art is a product of our vulnerability, our history, and our messy interactions with the world. A machine can analyse a thousand scripts to write a generic scene, but it cannot “feel” the devastation of a character’s loss or the subtle nuance of a cultural joke.
Furthermore, the greatest danger to AI might not be human resistance, but its own digital inbreeding. We are entering a phase of data corruption known as “model collapse.” As of 2026, the internet is becoming a closed loop. Models are increasingly trained on data that is itself AI-generated—a diet of digital echoes. Like a photocopy of a photocopy, the richness of human expression is being diluted. AI has a habit of “hallucinating” and, worse, “pleasing the prompter.” It tends to agree with what we ask rather than challenge us with a new perspective. This recursive loop is creating a ceiling on its potential; instead of reaching for a higher intelligence, it risks collapsing into a parody of itself.
However, “gradual” is not a reason for complacency. We saw this during the dot-com era. The world panicked, the bubble burst, but the infrastructure left behind—the fibre optics and the code—gave birth to the Indian IT miracle. Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Gurugram weren’t built on the “hype” of 1999, but on the mastery of the tools that followed. AI is going to change the world, but the promises made before the burst won’t happen as quickly as predicted. Changes come faster than we think, but they settle much more slowly than we fear.
This is where the hope lies. In this transition, the human eye will always be the final judge. We shouldn’t fear the machine; we should ensure we are the ones who know how to build, fine-tune, and master it. AI is not a replacement for thinking; it is a new grammar for the 21st century. It is a tool that, when wielded by a trained hand, can solve the mundane, leaving the human mind free to pursue what is “yet to be expressed.”
For India, this is an unprecedented opportunity. We are already at the centre of the global conversation, as seen in the ongoing India-AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi. To seize this advantage, we must treat AI literacy as a basic universal skill. It is high time our school curricula, from the primary levels (ideally starting from Class 3), integrate AI not as a “computer subject,” but as a foundational logic. Our children must learn to “prompt” with clarity and “debug” with scepticism.
The software boom gave India a seat at the global table. The AI wave can give us the table itself. By democratising AI tools and embedding them into our education system, we can ensure that a farmer can use AI for crop diagnostics, a weaver can co-create new designs, and a filmmaker can have the power of a global studio at their fingertips. The transition will be a marathon, not a sprint. We must move beyond the panic and become the masters of the illusion, ensuring that technology remains human-centric, inclusive, and, above all, a servant to our own imagination.