<strong>We are in the Cyborg Era</strong>

Your smartphone is already a part of you, virtually and spiritually. It’s like a detachable electronic device in your body. It’s your best friend. If someone gets their hands on it, they can make a virtual you in cyberspace that will manage to fool almost anyone. It’s not just that it is with you 24X7 even in the bedroom and bathroom. It’s your Alter Ego.

Now that ego can be embedded inside you. The US FDA has given approval to Neuralink for human clinical trials. In the near future your smartphone will be embedded inside you. You will be a cyborg. How will that change you, social life, the society at large and the world?

Gamers already live in virtual worlds that are much like the Metaverse. They can live there for days on end. It is just a matter of time before someone cracks the same for home and office. We will finally enter the Matrix.

The latest to crash into that club is generative AI. Now an AI companion within a robot’s body is within reach. If you don’t want to embed a smartphone within you and don’t want to enter the Metaverse, will you be able to resist this? A mobile robot at your beck and call? Will it be your slave, companion, assistant or best friend?

We are at a turning point where any of the other options mentioned above could fold out. Which road will we take? Whatever the option, it will be both scary and liberating at the same time.

The printing press led to the haves and have nots. Those who could and those who could not read. The Industrial Revolution divided the countries into the developed and underdeveloped countries. Even a hundred years after the first fully electrified houses we had dark villages. The Personal Computer Revolution never reached the rural masses in India.

It is inevitable that soon a rich class of people will have expensive cutting-edge Physical-Virtual Smart Assistants who will be at their beck and call 24X7, which will increase their productivity manifold.

Will the world then again be divided into the haves and have nots? While progress has maintained the rich class, created a very large middle class, those at the bottom of the human wealth pyramid continue to have it tougher and tougher. When it comes to technology, one man’s utopia is another one’s dystopia.

India is a developing country, which is on the fast track to becoming a developed country. We are already the world’s foremost Digital Democracy. The next few decades will be critical in India for the task of achieving digital inclusivity.