AI and How It Is Changing the Way We Live

Yesterday, while chatting with a friend, she told me she had landed a new job in advertising. Unlike her previous role in the same industry, she now produces content using artificial intelligence.

She pointed out a brutal reality: before, the estimated time to produce a single image for a campaign was one month; today, the expectation is to deliver five images in a single day.

“We create tools, to make computers, to make tools.”

In recent times, the advancement of digital technology has been staggering. In just a few years, we have completely normalized computers, smartphones, social media, and artificial intelligence. All these tools are supposed to be there to help humanity.

But to what extent are they actually achieving that?

On one hand, they occupy a massive part of our lives and facilitate beautiful things: they connect us with loved ones, store that beach photo from last summer, help us organize our next trip to Mexico, and even act as virtual therapists helping us reflect or make life decisions.

Yet, from a social standpoint, it feels like we are living worse. People are increasingly anxious, overwhelmed by constant comparison, and, paradoxically, further apart from one another.

We prefer to send a reel to someone in the very next room rather than walking a few steps to ask them how they are doing. That reel becomes a sort of digital smoke signal — a message just to check if the other person is still alive.

Before, a letter took weeks and a meal required time to prepare. All of this forced us to develop a patience that we simply no longer have today. Today, everything is instant.

Even Hollywood movies need to pack in more cuts and scenes per minute than before, becoming less deep because it is assumed the audience will be dividing their attention with their phone screen. Where is this leading us?

Nowadays, it’s not enough to just have a profession: you also have to be your own boss, the influencer of your personal brand, and go to therapy just to handle the pressure.

We have turned into walking, multi-tasking corporations. It’s no longer enough to know a trade; now you have to monetize it, package it aesthetically for social media, and sell a narrative of constant success. And in the process, of course, manage the very mental health that this system drains from us.

This all-encompassing demand has transferred directly into our work processes: the better the tools, the higher the expectation for a perfect, immediate result.

In the end, technology didn’t reduce the workload; it just multiplied the facets of ourselves that we have to perform at maximum capacity.

There is a quote that illustrates this perfectly: “If man hadn’t invented the train, I wouldn’t need the telephone to communicate with him.”

So, are we doing the right thing or the wrong thing?

Now we need strict diet control, yoga, running, and scheduling hangouts with friends — an ever-growing checklist of activities just to keep our lives balanced.

We could argue that we are fortunate to have this awareness of well-being. But the real question is: weren’t we the ones who caused the crisis that makes this awareness necessary just to keep from destroying ourselves?

“We create technology to save time, and we have less and less time.”