As a kid, I often saw my grandma making relish and sauces (Indian chutneys) in a mortar and pestle. A bunch of mint leaves, onions, red chilli, garlic, lime juice, salt, black pepper, and sometimes jaggery—all into the mortar and grinding it manually for 15 minutes.
As the lifestyle changed, we had a mixer grinder now. It was so easy—just adding the ingredients in the jar, switch it on. It was ready within 3-4 minutes.
In random conversations, I would often hear that mixers were great time-savers—4 minutes to make it as compared to the 15 minutes when done in the mortar and pestle.
Life sounded easy, 11 minutes saved.
Slowly, she found new use cases to use the mixer grinder—grinding spices, cereals, and sometimes milk shakes with berries and dried fruits. We could not do these new dishes in our mortar and pestle—the use cases here were very limited.
So while technically we saved 11 minutes every time my grandma made chutneys in a mixer, she was more busy now because she had so many new ideas to use the mixer. Add to it—the time for its cleaning, drying, and maintenance such as for repair. Mortar never needed a repair.
Grandma never got those 11 minutes to take rest—there was often something more to do, fresh ideas.
In the 1990s, the introduction of computers worked like introduction of mixer grinders in our family. People feared that it will cause loss of jobs. Gradually, the world saw that in reality, computers created far more new jobs.
We shall see the same for AI (if it survives). All the talks around AI’s huge negative impact on jobs are nonsense—some of my developer friends say that they need to quit technology and do something else. They are watching the rise of tools like Lovable, the posts on vibe coding and prompt engineering and they are of the opinion that because of AI, organizations will drastically reduce the developers’ work. It means an impact on their work–jobs or independent work.
Just as we saw it with the mixers—AI will create many new opportunities in the industry, new categories of businesses, new skills, new types of jobs, and new systems that we need to operationalize and maintain for those new use cases. This should be a no-brainer to anyone who is in technology for more than ten years.
When AI makes way into our mainstream tech work, we shall not get these 11 minutes that AI saves for us. We shall have a lot more to do.
PS: This short post is inspired by my LinkedIn post a few days ago.
PPS: My grandma died in November 2017, I wrote a Medium post for our relationship.
