We once imagined the future—2025—with flying cars, robotic teachers, and cutting-edge gadgets designed to simplify life. While we may not have airborne taxis just yet, we do have AI-powered systems integrated into our schools, homes, and workplaces. But rather than the utopia we envisioned, this rapid technological advance has ushered in an unsettling new reality: one where human jobs are vanishing, privacy is eroding, bias is being codified, and our critical thinking is at risk.
The Human Cost of Convenience
Technology was meant to make our lives easier. But that convenience now comes at a high cost—human employment.
Amid debates over exhausting 70- or 90-hour work weeks and deteriorating mental health, one might expect employers to address such concerns with empathy. Instead, many corporations have opted for a cheaper, cleaner alternative: replace humans with AI.
Take Zomato, for example. The food delivery company recently laid off around 600 customer support executives—many of whom were recruited just last year through the Zomato Associate Accelerator Program (ZAAP). The layoffs blindsided staff. They weren’t underperforming; they were simply no longer needed—because AI had arrived.
Just weeks before the layoffs, Zomato launched Nugget, its AI-powered customer support assistant. According to the company, Nugget resolves up to 80% of customer queries, boosts compliance by 20%, and reduces response time by another 20%. The message was clear: AI is faster, cheaper, and doesn’t ask for fair treatment.
Corporate Trend: Efficiency Over Empathy
Zomato isn’t alone. Across the tech industry, companies are cutting jobs in droves while pivoting towards AI-driven operations.
- Meta laid off 3,600 employees (5% of its global workforce) in February 2025—many of whom had stellar performance reviews. Just one day later, the company began aggressively hiring for AI and machine learning roles.
- Workday slashed 1,750 jobs while ramping up AI investments.
- Salesforce eliminated 1,000 positions in a shift toward AI solutions.
- Dell laid off 12,500 employees amid its transition to AI-powered infrastructure.
- Intel cut over 15,000 jobs as it focused on AI computing.
- Electronic Arts (EA) let go of 775 staffers to increase its reliance on AI in game development.
- Amazon announced plans to eliminate 14,000 managerial roles by early 2025, aiming to save ₹210–₹360 crore annually by automating these functions.
These moves represent more than isolated layoffs—they signal a tectonic shift in how corporations value AI over human labor. According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, 41% of employers plan to reduce their workforce due to AI.
Atomberg co-founder Arindam Paul warns that up to 50% of today’s white-collar jobs could disappear, potentially hollowing out the global middle class. As automation surges, one question looms: what happens to the economy when millions can no longer afford to participate in it?
The Illusion of “Human-Only” Skills
Tech leaders often assure us that “human skills”—like creativity, resilience, and collaboration—will remain indispensable. But AI is closing the gap even there.
A recent trend using OpenAI’s GPT-4o image generator allowed users to transform their selfies into art inspired by Studio Ghibli’s iconic animation style. The tool went viral. People eagerly “Ghiblified” their portraits, unaware that they were also handing over their biometric data.
OpenAI’s training process involves multiple stages:
- Data Collection from public sources like websites, books, and social media
- Pretraining using unsupervised learning
- Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)
- Ongoing alignment and safety checks
By voluntarily uploading images, users essentially waive privacy protections that would otherwise restrict how companies could use their data. Under regulations like the EU’s GDPR, companies must justify data usage through a “legitimate interest” framework—unless users provide explicit consent. Viral trends like this effectively bypass those safeguards.
Studio Ghibli has since objected to the use of its aesthetic, but the real damage is to public trust and privacy. As users hand over personal data for a fleeting thrill, AI companies quietly harvest invaluable training material.
Accuracy, Bias, and Systemic Discrimination
Despite their growing role in decision-making, AI systems are far from flawless. As a tech journalist, I’ve encountered frequent inaccuracies in tools like GPT-4o and Claude. For example, both incorrectly state that “strawberry” has two r’s instead of three—a small but telling sign of their limitations.
More worryingly, these systems often amplify social biases:
- Amazon abandoned its AI recruiting tool in 2018 after it consistently downgraded resumes that included the word “women’s” or listed all-women colleges.
- Popular language models still portray surgeons, CEOs, and engineers as male, while nurses and housekeepers are often rendered as female.
- Google’s image algorithms have been criticized for racially biased results for “professional” vs. “unprofessional” hairstyles.
- The COMPAS algorithm, used in U.S. courts to predict reoffending risk, was found to falsely label Black defendants as high-risk at nearly twice the rate of white defendants.
And yet, figures like Elon Musk have floated ideas to use AI for evaluating the performance of 2.3 million U.S. federal employees—a deeply flawed premise when AI itself is still learning to avoid discriminatory outcomes.
The Erosion of Independent Thought
Perhaps the most alarming threat of all is not to our jobs or privacy—but to our minds.
More people are relying on AI to write emails, solve problems, generate art, or answer basic questions. Each time we defer to a machine, we risk weakening our own cognitive skills. The muscle of independent thought—critical reasoning, memory, analysis—is slowly atrophying.
This scenario echoes Studio Ghibli’s ‘Spirited Away.’ In it, the spirit No Face devours others and absorbs their strengths, growing larger and more dangerous the more it consumes. AI behaves similarly. It feeds on human knowledge, creativity, and labor, becoming ever more powerful—while humans grow increasingly dependent and diminished.
No Face tempted people with gold. AI offers speed, convenience, and efficiency. But as the film showed, that gold was ultimately worthless.
Where Do We Go From Here?
The question isn’t whether AI should exist—it already does, and it’s here to stay. The real challenge is how to coexist with it responsibly.
- We need labor laws that prevent indiscriminate AI-induced layoffs.
- We need privacy regulations that shield users from data exploitation through viral trends.
- We need education systems that double down on human cognition—critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and emotional intelligence.
If we fail to act, we risk building a world where corporations thrive on AI-driven efficiency while people are left to compete with algorithms for what’s left of the economy—and of our humanity.
