This Isn’t Just About AI — It’s About You, Your Job, and the Culture You're Part Of
We need to understand what has already hit us and be prepared by doing the right things. Not scared, but worried enough to pull our socks up and take action!
Your future is intricately connected to what is going on today in technology and what will happen to you and your descendants. The template we have followed so far to earn a living is no longer valid, especially for the future workforce. In a strange way, it is also a challenge to us to shine at what makes us homo sapiens.
We have to understand the background of where we are today. The Industrial Revolution was a pivotal moment in human history, because of the amount of change it caused across different aspects of human life and touching nearly everyone. The Digital Revolution and The Telecom Revolution shaped the world as we know it today, shaping how we connect, communicate and also consume information. AI as a technology has been around for a while, but the revolution is just about starting. It is important to understand the history of the defining changes that have led to where we are today, and it helps us to form a better-informed opinion of what is to come in the age of AI.
A Brief Look at The Industrial Revolution
Between 1760 and 1830, Britain raced ahead with the Industrial Revolution, locking down its advantage by banning the export of machinery, skilled workers, and industrial techniques. But monopolies are fragile things. Entrepreneurs like William and John Cockerill smuggled British expertise into Belgium, sparking continental Europe's first industrial boom, rooted in coal, iron, and textiles.
France moved slower. Revolution and political instability choked off investment and innovation. Though France became an industrial power by 1848, it remained in Britain’s shadow. Elsewhere in Europe, most countries lacked the wealth, social mobility, and political security to spark industrial change. Germany, rich in resources, only exploded onto the industrial stage after unification in 1870—quickly outproducing Britain in steel and dominating chemical industries by the century’s end.
Meanwhile, the U.S. and Japan charged into industrialization, surpassing their European counterparts. Eastern Europe remained stagnant until the Soviet Union’s five-year plans in the 20th century forced rapid industrialization. Later, China, India, and other non-Western regions joined the industrialized world.
But industrialization wasn’t just about booming factories and new empires. It rewired society itself. For workers, life often worsened before it got better. Traditional rural livelihoods vanished. Cities swelled overnight into chaotic, polluted centers where workers endured long hours, low wages, and grim conditions in cramped tenements. Machines displaced labour, and job insecurity became the new normal. The wealth gap widened; the few who controlled industry amassed fortunes, while the masses toiled with little protection.
Yet the very forces that crushed workers also sowed seeds of change. Labour movements grew. Calls for reform led to regulations on working hours, child labour, and workplace safety. New technologies gave ordinary people unprecedented access to goods, travel, and communication, shrinking distances and broadening horizons.
By the late 19th century, a second Industrial Revolution was underway. New materials like plastics and lightweight metals, new energy sources, and the dawn of automation reshaped industry again. Ownership patterns shifted—from oligarchic control to broader stock ownership and, eventually, nationalization of key industries across Europe. Governments moved away from laissez-faire ideals, stepping into the economy to manage the needs of increasingly complex societies.
By the 1980s, the pendulum swung back toward deregulation and privatization, particularly in the U.S. and Britain. Yet the Industrial Revolution’s legacy—its profound reshaping of work, society, and human ambition—remains deeply woven into the modern world.
History of the Telecom Revolution
The telecom revolution didn't just explode overnight. It’s a story of relentless human ingenuity, starting with smoke signals and drumbeats across ancient Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Early humans hacked nature to send messages over long distances—beacons on hilltops, pigeons carrying notes, and even hydraulic semaphore systems in ancient Greece.
The real leap came in the 1790s, when Claude Chappe built the first optical telegraph network across France—a system of towers relaying coded messages with moving arms. It was fast for its time but expensive, fragile, and needed clear skies. Then came the game-changer: electric telegraphy in the 1830s. Samuel Morse’s dots and dashes broke barriers, sending messages over wires at the speed of electricity. Suddenly, information could race across continents in minutes, not days.
The next big leap? The telephone. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell's invention let people actually speak across distance, collapsing communication time even further and kicking off the age of real-time conversation. The 20th century cranked the pace higher. Radio tore down physical barriers completely, letting voices and music ride the invisible waves. Television soon followed, turning communication into a visual experience and reshaping culture, politics, and entertainment forever.
Then came the semiconductor revolution—miniaturizing and supercharging the tech. Satellite communications linked the globe from space. Videotelephony dreamed of the future with early experiments in video calls. And when computer networks emerged, everything changed again, paving the way for the internet.
Digital tech ripped up the old playbook. Fibre optics, mobile phones, and wireless communication made instant, global connectivity an everyday thing. The wireless revolution took us mobile: suddenly the entire world was in your pocket.
Telecommunication isn't just about tech—it's about how we’ve reshaped culture at every step. From smoke signals to 5G, every leap rewired how we live, work, and relate to each other. And the revolution? It’s still moving—faster than ever.
Also, we have to note the coming together of technologies in the telecom and the digital revolutions.
Background of The Digital Revolution
The digital revolution sparked one of the most profound transformations in human history, beginning in the late 20th century. It wasn’t merely about new devices—it was about a complete reshaping of society itself. The invention of the transistor in 1947, thanks to Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley, lit the first spark, earning them a Nobel Prize. This tiny piece of technology opened the door for a wave of innovation that soon swept across the world.
Analog systems gave way to digital ones, and suddenly, information could move at the speed of light. Microprocessors, personal computers, and, most critically, the internet smashed the old barriers of distance, time, and knowledge-sharing. Communication became instant, industries either adapted or collapsed, and traditional ways of living were upended.
The internet’s birth, originally known as ARPANET and tied to U.S. defense research, was another huge leap forward. From the first website ever made at CERN (still online today, and a moment of amusement while researching!) to the creation of search engines, the internet fundamentally rewired human connection and knowledge access.
Meanwhile, iconic technologies emerged: Martin Cooper’s first mobile phone call in 1973 eventually led to the smartphone era, where mobile connections now outnumber humans on the planet. Personal computers soared in popularity, becoming household essentials in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, although smartphones have since taken centre stage. Television, born much earlier, became truly universal in the postwar decades, and industrial robots—pioneered by Devol and Engelberger—revolutionized manufacturing floors.
The digital revolution didn’t just transform how we work and communicate; it rebuilt the global economy, birthed new industries, flattened hierarchies, and accelerated cultural exchanges at a pace previously unimaginable. Life, business, and culture were fundamentally rewired in real-time—and the world has never looked back.
If we read the defining revolutions above that have shaped humanity, what stands out, or what are the common threads? Let’s summarize them:
Society rewired around them
Cultural changes were put into motion
Things worsened before they got better
Humans rose to the challenge
Can these provide us with some direction of what AI is going to do? Let’s look at the advent of AI first.
The History of Artificial Intelligence
With all the current hype, it’s easy to think AI just popped up overnight. Truth is, AI has been quietly evolving for over 70 years. To understand where today’s tools are headed, it’s key to know where they came from. It started with Alan Turing’s famous 1950 paper asking, “Can machines think?”—and the idea of the Turing Test was born. By 1955, the term "artificial intelligence" was officially coined.
Early AI took the form of expert systems in the 1960s, built to capture human expertise in fields like chemistry, medicine, and geology. Symbolic AI, as it’s called, dominated for decades—peaking in the 1980s when businesses raced to build their own expert systems.
Expert systems worked well because they let subject experts, not programmers, build knowledge bases. An "inference engine" then used that knowledge to solve new problems, even offering explanations for its decisions. Though today's AI has moved far beyond, expert systems still have their place.
Meanwhile, a different track was developing: connectionism. Inspired by the brain’s 100 billion neurons, researchers built mathematical models for “neurons” and tried to mimic brain-like learning. Early efforts in the 1940s and 60s were interesting but limited. That changed in 1986, with the arrival of the multi-layered perceptron (MLP)—a game-changer. MLPs could learn from examples, classify unseen data, and opened the door to practical machine learning, like recognizing handwritten digits.
Things really took off with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in 1998, which learned key features of images automatically, no manual pre-processing needed. These models weren’t just matching patterns anymore—they were interpreting, diagnosing, and predicting.
But the real twist came with generative AI. Rather than just classifying, generative models like GANs and transformers started creating—producing text, images, music, and even aiding scientific discoveries. GANs used a built-in “critic” to sharpen results, while transformers, like GPT-4 and ChatGPT, learned from massive internet datasets, becoming flexible enough to tackle almost any topic.
Today’s AI isn’t conscious but it’s leagues beyond narrow, specialized tools of the past. It’s general, creative, and powerful. Knowing this journey helps us see that today's AI explosion isn’t magic—it’s momentum, 70 years in the making.
Let’s ask ourselves now, what is the fabric of our society? Revolutions, technologies - they come, modify, exist or go away. But what is the constant that carries it all forward? It’s our culture. Culture is the fabric of society and each technology that is disruptive enough changes or modifies it. Let’s look at how that happens.
The Mechanisms of Cultural Change
Culture is never truly frozen in time. It's constantly pulled between forces pushing for change and forces digging in to resist it. These dynamics—tied to social structures, habits, religion, technological changes, and natural events—shape how cultural ideas survive, evolve, or fall away. Change can come from inside or outside. Environmental shifts, new technologies, discoveries, inventions, and especially contact with other cultures all fuel transformation. Sometimes change is slow and subtle; other times it's explosive, sparked by conflict, colonization, or innovation.
Diffusion is one-way ideas travel: the form of something crosses into a new culture, but not always the meaning. For example, burgers introduced to India are the same concept but with different ingredients and wildly different cultural vibes. Stimulus diffusion goes even deeper, where an idea inspires something new entirely.
Acculturation is heavier: it's when one culture's traits start to replace another's, often under pressure, as seen with Native American tribes during colonization. Related to this are assimilation (when individuals adopt a dominant culture) and transculturation (when cultures merge and reshape each other).
Importantly, individuals aren't just passive players. Sociologists like Griswold remind us that macro-culture influences individuals, but individuals can turn right around and influence macro-culture.
Even when cultures resist, change sneaks in through daily habits, inventions, and new needs. Biology gives us our humanity, but culture layers on meaning, which constantly shifts as we discover, invent, borrow, adapt, and remix. Bottom line? Culture isn’t static. It’s alive. It moves, it collides, it mutates. Forces of habit, power, and tradition might slow it down, but discovery, innovation, and contact with others keep driving it forward.
Essentially, there are two takeaways from the mechanisms of cultural change. One, it is ever-changing and all-pervasive, so its effects seep in without us noticing it upfront. Second, individuals have the power to influence cultural change. We will see that the changes have already started taking shape and who are driving them. But there is a lot more to come and more of those who influence the winds of change.
Getting Back To My Story
Towards the end of 2022, I was pleasantly shocked to see ChatGPT in action. I knew it was coming but my estimate was that the technology was still two to three years (2025) away. I had been working on application AI for a couple of years by then, and the moment was surreal- you know what you really worked hard towards was going to be obsolete overnight, the only breather being how long it would take enterprise clients to realize the same and look for newer solutions. But you also know that new opportunities would open up and they would be a thousand times more than what you could have done with the technology of the yesteryears. The world was never going to be the same again. I saw some interesting behavioral patterns around me as well, from excitement to fear, but also a lot of dismissals that Gen AI would never really be disruptive. The ability some people have to be so sure of themselves with such authority, with so little information!
By mid-2023, I started seeing a change in attitude. The media houses were quoting surveys from the Big 4 on the impending disruption to the job market, so finally the dismissers started to believe. But it had to be compared to a past benchmark, but no one I spoke to believed that this would be more disruptive than the Industrial Revolution. Maybe like mobile telephony, I heard. Thankfully, all that has mostly changed now (in 2025). But I see another problem. We are not nearly talking enough about AI.
If your reaction to that is I am kidding, hang on and hear me out! There is a lot of information about AI. But what does it really mean to you? What is your take away, from the ‘noise’? For a disruption that is so overarching, it means something specific to each of us. As an example, for a serial entrepreneur like me, it means I have to look at opportunities differently. Solving the problem, say, of content generation at scale is not a business that I would get into now. However, I could look at the democratization of content generation as a viable business in the age of AI. For a venture capitalist, if they are not from a deep technology or an application technology background, the thesis of how they evaluate businesses to invest in will change. Do they really understand what to invest in or depend on derivative means? What does stepping into the age of AI mean for students and how should they prepare for a career that will look nothing like anything we have seen so far?
As a society, we often depend on what we see or hear to guide us. We follow. That is what most of us will do in this case as well. Which is okay (maybe?), but it is better if we have some understanding and information about what we are going to choose to follow. And what if we could really lead in this changing world order? Since nearly everything is being redrawn, it also offers unique opportunities and information is the first step in the right direction.
So What Should We Do?
Be in the knowhow. START NOW. If we keep ourselves informed about what is going on, we have a better chance of using the changes that are happening to the best of our advantage. We will then automatically take the tiny steps that will move us in the right direction. For those few of us, we will also be able to influence culture. A common concern will be the inability to understand what is going on even if we consume the information. Well, the second step can be to ask AI to make us understand the information that we get. Also, if we persist, the initial difficulty will pass, and our brains will learn and start doing the two plus two regarding AI.
Look back and learn how to deal with such change from our history. That is why it is so important to understand the Industrial Revolution and the others, and how they altered the dynamics of society. The past leaves cues, although the future happens in unique ways. So the best we can do is be prepared, not resist the change that is here to stay and make it work for us.
For those who are building careers, become students! Learn, learn, learn. There is something beautiful about learning, and it gives an unfair advantage to those who do.
And this is not learning to pass an exam, or to get a job, but it is learning with genuine curiosity and understanding (nothing against those who learn with genuine curiosity and understanding to clear exams!). One thing is for sure, information that is understood gives us an unfair advantage. Humans will be pushed to function at their very best, challenged to evolve and the best way to start that journey is with learning.
Participate in the discussion. Ask questions with curiosity. Try out the free apps of all types of AI on your phone! Read a white paper or two although you might not understand what it really means. Ask AI to explain it to you! To generalize, this is a good starting point. The rest will follow.
Next, try out some vibe coding, maybe?