The suits were back in the room. This time, they gathered under the NDTV Summit banner to talk about the two things that keep us awake at 3:00 AM: our failing bodies and our disappearing jobs. The consensus? Everything is changing. The reality? We’re just trading one set of problems for a much shinier, more expensive set of problems.
The stage was a parade of optimism. You know the vibe. CEOs in tailored blazers talking about "acceleration" while ignoring the fact that most people are still trying to figure out how to make a PDF editable. The talk focused on healthcare first. The pitch is simple: AI will find the tumor before your doctor even finishes washing their hands. It’ll scan a million X-rays while a human radiologist is still on their first espresso.
It sounds great on a slide deck. But here’s the friction. Training these models isn't free. We’re talking about Nvidia H100 chips that cost $30,000 a pop. To run a national-scale diagnostic AI in a country like India, you aren't just buying software. You’re building a god-complex in a server room that drinks enough electricity to power a small city. One panelist glossed over the "data problem," which is industry-speak for the fact that your private medical history is now the raw ore being mined by a startup in a Bengaluru coworking space. They don’t want to save you; they want to train on you.
Then there’s the legal void. If a human doctor misses a growth, you can sue them. If a black-box algorithm—hallucinating on a diet of biased data—decides your stage-two cancer is actually a skin rash, who goes to court? The coder? The hospital? The guy who sold the GPU? Nobody had a clean answer for that. They just kept talking about "synergy."
The workforce segment was even bleaker, though they tried to wrap it in a warm blanket of "upskilling." That’s the lie we tell people before the axe falls. The experts at the summit insisted AI won’t replace you; a human using AI will replace you. It’s a clever bit of wordplay. It shifts the blame from the technology to the victim. If you lose your middle-management gig because a script can now handle your quarterly reports, it’s not the company’s fault for automating you out of existence. It’s your fault for not learning Python during your lunch break.
The math doesn't add up for the average worker. We’re told AI will handle the "mundane tasks," leaving us free to do "high-level creative work." But nobody ever asks if there’s actually enough high-level creative work to go around. If a junior analyst can now do the work of five people thanks to a chatbot, the company doesn't keep all five and give them a four-day work week. They fire four of them and give the survivor a subscription to ChatGPT Plus.
There’s a specific kind of arrogance in these ballrooms. It’s the idea that we can solve the messiness of human labor and biological decay with enough compute power. One speaker mentioned that AI would bridge the gap in rural healthcare where doctors are scarce. Sure. But a chatbot can’t perform an emergency appendectomy. It can’t tell a mother her child is going to be okay and actually mean it. It can only predict the next most likely word in a sentence based on a statistical probability.
The trade-off is clear, even if the panelists didn't want to say it out loud. We’re trading human intuition for algorithmic efficiency. We’re trading job security for "agility." And we're doing it while the people on stage are making sure their own seats are bolted firmly to the floor.
The summit ended with the usual rounds of applause and more lukewarm coffee. The speakers headed back to their offices to figure out how to implement the very "solutions" they just spent six hours hyping. Meanwhile, the rest of us are left to wonder if the AI will be smart enough to realize it’s being used to make the world a little colder, one optimized process at a time.
If the future of healthcare is a prompt and the future of work is a "co-pilot," who’s actually flying the plane? Probably nobody. We’re just hoping the autopilot was trained on the right data.