Every major technological shift has always brought the same fear with it. Jobs. And honestly, that fear has never really been irrational. Every time a new machine or system enters the world, it changes the value of human work. Sometimes it reduces effort, sometimes it makes things faster, and sometimes it makes an entire category of work less necessary. We’ve seen that too many times before to act surprised by it.
But what feels different to me this time is that for the longest time, technology mostly came for labor. It came for repetition, routine, physical effort, process. A machine could help produce more fabric, a calculator could solve arithmetic faster, an ATM could reduce the need to walk into a bank for basic things, software could make bookkeeping cleaner and quicker. But in most of these cases, what was really getting automated was a part of the task, not the intelligence sitting behind the task. Someone still had to decide what mattered, what exception needed judgment, what trade-off was worth making, what the context actually was.
That is where AI starts to feel different to me. Because it does not just help you do work faster. It starts entering the cognitive layer of work itself. It can write before you write, summarize before you read, analyze before you have fully framed the problem in your own head, and give structure to a thought before you have done the hard work of arriving there properly. I am obviously not saying it is conscious or wise or that it understands things the way a human being does. But it imitates enough of the shape of reasoning to make the shift feel real. And I think that is why the usual comparisons from history only go so far. The ATM story is useful, factory automation is useful, software automation is useful, but all of those still belonged to a world where the human mind remained much more central to the flow of work.
In fact, this thought became much louder in my head during the Indian IT selloff in February 2026. Around that time, markets reacted sharply to Anthropic’s new Claude-related automation push, and Indian IT stocks took a serious hit as investors started worrying that AI could begin eating into the staffing-heavy, process-driven nature of large parts of the services economy. Reuters reported that Indian tech stocks slumped on February 4, 2026 after Anthropic’s new automation tools raised concerns around the future of labor-intensive IT services, and the pressure on the sector continued over the following days. What stood out to me in that moment was that the market did not seem to be reacting to just another software launch. It was reacting to the possibility that AI might start interfering with the exact kind of structured cognitive work on which a lot of this industry has been built.
And that is why I think this matters so much in the Indian context. For years, a lot of upward mobility in this country has come through IT and IT-enabled services. Not glamorous work necessarily, but structured cognitive work that gave people careers, stability, and a ladder upward. Coding, testing, documentation, support, repetitive business processes, systemized back-end thinking for global firms. India’s IT sector is huge and still deeply tied to workforce-heavy service delivery, which is exactly why these AI fears hit so hard when the Claude-related announcements landed.
That is why I do not think the real question is whether Indian IT disappears. That feels too dramatic and also too shallow. The more serious question is whether the lower and middle rungs of that ladder start getting weaker. A lot of entry-level work in Indian IT has historically been repetitive, structured, process-heavy, and cognitive in a very organized way, which is exactly the kind of territory AI seems most interested in entering. So the issue may not be destruction in one dramatic moment. It may be something slower. Fewer openings at the bottom, less room to learn through repetition, and more pressure to arrive with higher-order skills from day one.
I still do not think this makes human beings irrelevant. If anything, it probably makes distinctly human qualities more important. Judgment becomes more important. Taste becomes more important. Problem framing becomes more important. So does emotional intelligence, responsibility, and original thinking. But transitions like this are never clean. Economies do not adapt overnight, institutions do not adapt overnight, and fresh graduates definitely do not adapt overnight. That is why AI feels like more than just another technology story to me. It is a labor story, yes, but it is also an intelligence story. And for India, especially for Indian IT, it may become a ladder story. Older technologies mostly replaced labor within the system. AI seems to be doing something more unsettling. It is starting to question the level of intelligence that used to hold large parts of the system together.
Kveer, signing out.
