FOBO: The Fear of Being Obsoleted

Lately, I've been thinking about FOBO — the fear of being obsoleted. It's a term that has been gaining traction in conversations about work and AI, and for good reason. The world is changing at a pace that feels almost dizzying. Google has asked 20,000 workers in its Android and Pixel divisions to "voluntarily exit." Mark Zuckerberg is preparing to cut 5% of Meta's workforce, just as he predicts that AI engineering agents will soon rival mid-level human coders. These shifts don't just threaten jobs; they threaten identities, stability, the futures we thought we were building for ourselves and our families.

When technology evolves faster than we can process, it's natural to feel like we're standing on shaky ground. But lately, I've been thinking about AI in a different way. Instead of seeing it as something that only forces us to look forward, what if we considered how it allows us to look back? Because for all the fear that AI might reshape the future in ways we can't yet comprehend, it is also revealing the past more clearly than we've ever seen it before.

The story begins nearly 2,000 years ago, in a villa in Herculaneum, a Roman town at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. A philosopher believed to be Philodemus of Gadara sat in his study, writing about music, pleasure, and the nature of joy — questions that still plague us today. His thoughts, recorded by scribes on delicate papyrus scrolls, were meant to be preserved for future generations. Then, in 79 AD, catastrophe struck. Vesuvius erupted with unimaginable force, burying Herculaneum in volcanic ash, entombing the philosopher's words, freezing them in time.

For centuries, these scrolls remained trapped, too fragile to be touched and too brittle to be unrolled. Scholars could only imagine the knowledge they contained. In the 18th century, when excavations uncovered these carbonized remnants, people tried to pry them open, but most attempts ended in destruction. The wisdom inside remained unreachable.

In 2022, AI did what human hands could not. Researchers Youssef Nader, Julian Schilliger, and Luke Farritor took on the Vesuvius Challenge, using machine learning and computer vision to digitally unroll the scrolls, revealing their delicate layers without risking destruction. Yet even with this breakthrough, the text remained invisible. The carbon ink blended seamlessly with the charred papyrus, beyond the reach of the naked eye or traditional imaging.

This is where AI truly stepped in. Deep-learning models, trained to detect the subtlest variations in texture and contrast, began to recognize patterns no human could discern. Through repeated iterations, the algorithm extracted 2,000 letters — the first readable words from a sealed Herculaneum scroll in history.

This is something to be celebrated, and perhaps it offers us a different way to see AI — not as a force that makes the future harder to navigate, but as one that illuminates the past and brings back what was once lost. Rather than fixating on how AI might disrupt our path forward, we can recognize that it has also helped clear a path to our splendid past, lost but now rediscovered. And in that, there is a kind of reassurance. It gives us courage — a reminder that we are living in an extraordinary era, not just as participants but even as witnesses to history being rewritten. There is something remarkable about simply being here to see it happen.