How to Be a Human Being Among Automations in the Age of AI?
I’m scared.
For us.
Before we start off, this post will be about learning how to be a human being stuck in the age of AI, reading books instead of our phone screens, and me starting my next college term next week!
Let’s be clear on one thing, people have predicted the future before. And people predicted AI. Before AI rose to this much…independence and intelligence, people were already talking about a time when it’d happen so. Doraemon?
Table of Contents
How to be a Human Being Among Automations
In this section we wonder how to be a human being among the countless automations that surround us in our everyday life, homes, work, social relations.
The question remains, is this a phase? Or are we actually at a crossroads from where we can see both the paths but were always destined (or rather doomed?) to choose a particular one.
Is this a pause or are we facing the change of the century as more and more tools are developed and humans’ effort replaced?
AI can paint. AI can write. AI can read something off the screen. AI can work. AI can solve problems. AI can reason. AI can apply logic (if only you tell which logic, which theorems, which knowledge to apply; just wait a tad bit more and you won’t even need to do that). AI can drive. AI can fake stuff. AI can…I don’t know, give health advice, and financial advice (though it’s a bad idea to take that advice seriously, but that does not stop AI from giving it, and to be honest, that does not stop us from taking it either). AI can think. So what are we supposed to do? What job are we supposed—are we supposed to be software programmers—but, oh wait! AI can write code too.
Outsmart AI, future-proof your career.
Reading in the Age of AI
This is not a post about giving you an existential crisis—we all suffer from that every once in a while. So what, let’s just talk about the good ol’ reading. How is AI changing the process of reading? What do we have to retain? What do we have to keep intact so that the legacy that’s come down from centuries does not deter?
Let’s just talk about how to be human being in the age of AI, staying true to your roots and realizing how much better it was when we hadn’t made a machine this smart.
I was supposed to read books this month of July 2025 when I had a whole month of vacation and no homework. But guess what, a certain blog kept me kind of busy. And I could not read anything.
Do you bother experimenting with books anymore because you just type in a particular trope and AI might return a book that—does not exist. I’m not kidding. I, for one, took book-recommendations from ChatGPT because I thought that’d save me time and help me find a book with the exact tropes that I wished to read.
But the tropes I wanted to read were so rare and under-represented that ChatGPT—who has an answer for everything—returned names of books that simply did not exist. Like, nada, nothing, no books written with that name.
Or sometimes it mixes names and credits some book to some other author and another book to another author. Or sometimes it creates synopsis when the book in fact is not about what ChatGPT says it is about.
Aaah, I miss 2019. You might ask, why 2019?
In a way, that was the year after which everyone suddenly got farther apart and now everyone needed someone, some automated machine that could make them feel like they were still in control of their lives, when…nothing is farther from the truth than that now.
Anyway, I’m not going to pretend that this is a revolution where we talk about the ill effects of AI and think of ways how to eradicate this dependency we have on machines. The people who know it know, but the ones who still have to ask AI for their easiest test questions can still do that (and, like, majorly affect their brain power), but who cares, right—why think when ChatGPT has got particular thinking models you can toggle on and off? Thinking. Reasoning. Deep Research.
Anyway, this month I began reading Hunger (#2 in Gone series) by Michael Grant, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, Psycho-Cybernetics, by Maxwell Maltz, Master Your Emotions, by Thibaut Meurisse.
You know what the very funny thing is? I completed none of them. That’s so refreshing, things taking time to happen, not being served to us on a platter within seconds.
Starting My New Term
I’m starting college in a week and I’ll try to share everything I learn here. Studying English literature is more exciting (and more hard) than some people might think. You know what the first thing I hear when I tell someone I’m studying literature, is?
Here’s how it plays out:
She: So, I’m studying political science.
Me: Wow, that sounds nice. It must be interesting,
She: Yeah, it’s also very hard, all of the students in my class were you know…A Grade students. Everyone’s smart. What are you doing?
Me: I’m studying English literature.
She: Oh…wow, so…do you guys, like, read story books or something?
*pause*…
…*pause*
Me: Oh, uh…but we also study literature form countries from the other side of the world, from as far back as the 14th century, so I just finished off Chaucer—that’s Geoffrey Chaucer, English, court poet, and we analyzed a lot of texts, and it’s hard to get into the mind of the writers because Shakespeare died some five hundred years ago, but he’s still the greatest so we’re always trying to understand what they meant to say when they wrote in riddles and stuff…
She: Cool, uh…but…you…you read stories, right?
Me: *pausing* Pretty much, yeah.
*Me venting about it in a blog post.*
Whichever book you’re reading right now, I hope you’re enjoying it.
I hope you’re seeing how much more beautiful it is to feel the weight of the book in your hands and realize just how much hard work it took for this magical thing to come into existence, someone wrote it, someone cried over it, someone spent nights awake perfecting it, someone worked in the factories to make sure it was polished, someone built those machines that built this book, someone actually thought about the world while creating all of this.
I’m still worried. I’m still going to keep going on. I hope you find strength, hope, and positivity to be a human being above everything else in these changing, volatile times.
I’ll be off. Gotta go do my laundry now, I guess.
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