Finding the boundary of AI era on Mother’s Day
There is a spine-broken diary on the granite counter of my family’s Delhi kitchen. It is an ordinary object filled with slanted Hindi script and measurements making no mathematical sense. On a page detailing a Gajar ka Halwa recipe, there is a faded thumbprint. It is a stain from a drop of warm ghee that fell a decade ago, pressed into the paper by my mother’s hurried thumb.
Beside that diary is my smartphone. Applications can photograph my mother’s recipe, translate it into Mandarin, calculate its caloric breakdown, and generate a hyper-realistic video of a digital chef cooking it. I could take three minutes of her WhatsApp voice notes, feed them into a neural network, and have an AI archive her pitch and intonation forever. While this tech allows us to preserve our heritage with total fidelity, our obsession with AI’s infinite capabilities is creating a dangerous blind spot in how we understand human love. We are confusing data preservation with devotion.
In the tech industry, we design systems with a singular goal: eliminating friction. We want processes to be seamless and perfectly efficient. But when we bring this mindset into our homes, we forget that an Indian mother’s love is built entirely on friction.
When a mother spends three hours by a hot stove in the sweltering humidity of a summer afternoon, she is not executing a task a robotic arm could replicate. She spends a currency she can never earn back: her time, energy, and cellular youth. Every act of maternal devotion is a microscopic expenditure of her mortality, given willingly to fuel yours.
Viewing her labor as a mere optimization task blurs her sacrifice. While an AI model never fatigues, a mother has joints that ache with the monsoon rains. Unlike AI, which consumes cheap computing power, a mother sets aside her ambitions to absorb the messy details of your heartbreak. She spends her life-a resource neither cheap nor renewable. As a generation of busy
professionals, we often assuage our guilt of absence by throwing technology at the problem. We buy our parents smarter devices, set automated deliveries, and point high-definition cameras at them during Diwali. We think building an efficient digital infrastructure means loving them better.
But AI, for all its staggering brilliance, gives you the product of a mother without the cost. And the cost is what makes it love. As a physicist, I study the laws of thermodynamics and the inevitable decay of systems. We build intelligent machines to outsmart this decay, attempting to mathematically archive ourselves into eternity. As we wade into this algorithmic age, we must draw a hard boundary. We do not need to resist Artificial Intelligence; we need to put it in its proper place.
The purpose of AI is not to simulate human connection, nor perfectly archive our mothers so we can comfortably ignore them while they are still here. Its true, revolutionary promise is giving us our time back.
This Mother’s Day, let AI draft your emails. Let the algorithm manage your calendar and optimize your spreadsheets. Let the machine absorb the friction of the modern workplace so you can step away from your screens and back into the kitchen. Use the machine’s ultimate efficiency to afford the beautiful inefficiency of being human. The most sacred artifacts of an Indian childhood are inherently imperfect.
It is the slight misalignment of a hastily applied bindi. It is the dal she forgets to salt because her mind is paralyzed with worry over your career. It is the way her voice cracks with tears when blessing you over a video call. These imperfections cannot be prompted by an LLM. You cannot engineer a hallucination of genuine worry. These flaws are the friction of a human soul colliding with a difficult world, trying to shield you. Digitizing the recipe cleans up the archive, but you lose the ghee stain. You erase the messy, chaotic evidence that she was actually there, breathing, rushing, living, and loving you in real-time.
This Sunday, do not buy her a smarter gadget or send an AI-generated poem. Use the time technology saved you to sit across from her. Look at the lines around her eyes and recognize them as the physical receipts of the worry spent keeping you alive. Eat the food she made, knowing you will never taste this exact batch again. Listen to her voice, knowing the sound waves will permanently dissipate into the air.
Let AI handle the infinite. But let your mother be beautifully, fiercely, and painfully temporary. Because it is only when we accept that our time with her is a finite resource, that we finally understand the sheer magnitude of what she did with it.
The writer is a theoretical physicist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Views presented are personal.
