Mother's Day 2026: Don't let Claude draft a loving message for mom!

PIC/PINTEREST@HannahMiles; (right) PIC/PINTEREST@sovannaphoto

There is a dog-eared, spine-broken diary sitting on the cold granite counter of my family's kitchen here in Delhi. It is an entirely ordinary object to anyone outside our bloodline, filled with hasty, slanted Hindi script and measurements that make absolutely no mathematical sense. On the bottom right corner of a page detailing a recipe for Gajar ka Halwa, there is a faded, translucent yellow thumbprint. It is a stain from a drop of warm ghee that fell there, perhaps a decade or more ago, pressed into the paper by my mother's hurried thumb.

Beside that diary is my smartphone, I have applications that can photograph my mother's handwritten recipe, instantly translate it into Mandarin, calculate its exact caloric breakdown, and generate a hyper-realistic video of a digital chef cooking it. If I so desired, I could take three minutes of my mother's scattered WhatsApp voice notes, feed them into a neural network, and have an AI archive her exact pitch and intonation forever.

This miraculous tech allows us, to preserve our cultural and familial heritage with total fidelity. I am grateful that this technology ensures future generations will still be able to hear their great-grandmother's voice.

But as we celebrate Mother's Day, I am realising that our obsession with the infinite capabilities of AI is creating a dangerous blind spot in how we understand human love. We are beginning to confuse data preservation with devotion. In the tech industry, we design systems with a singular goal: to eliminate friction. We want processes to be seamless, untiring, and perfectly efficient. We want to remove the struggle. But what we often forget when we bring this mindset into our homes is that an Indian mother's love is built entirely on friction.

When a mother spends three hours standing by a hot stove in the sweltering, unforgiving humidity of a summer afternoon, she is not just executing a culinary task that a robotic kitchen arm or a smart-appliance could replicate. She is spending a currency she can never, ever earn back: her time, her energy, her cellular youth. Every act of maternal devotion is a microscopic expenditure of her own mortality, given willingly to fuel yours.

Viewing her labour as just a "task for optimisation" or "data for recording" blurs the relevance of her sacrifice. While an AI model never experiences fatigue, a mother has joints that ache with the arrival of the monsoon rains. Unlike AI, which simply consumes cheap and renewable computing power, a mother sets aside her own ambitions to sit by your bed and absorb the messy, repetitive details of your heartbreak. She spends her life, a resource that is neither cheap nor renewable.

We are a generation of migrants, ambitious professionals, and chronically busy adults. We often assuage our unspoken guilt of absence by throwing technology at the problem. We buy our parents smarter devices. We set up automated grocery deliveries. We point high-definition cameras at them during Diwali. We think that by building a towering, perfectly efficient digital infrastructure around them, we are loving them better.

But AI, for all its staggering brilliance, gives you the product of a mother without the cost of a mother. And the cost is what makes it love.

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 is it to perfectly archive our mothers so we can comfortably ignore them while they are still here. The true, revolutionary promise of AI in 2026 is that it can give us our time back.

This Mother's Day, let the AI draft your emails. Let the algorithm sort your spreadsheets, manage your calendar, and optimize your investment portfolio. Let the machine absorb the friction of the modern workplace so that you can step away from your screens and step back into the kitchen. We must use the ultimate efficiency of the machine to afford the beautiful inefficiency of being human.

The most sacred artefacts of an Indian childhood are inherently, beautifully imperfect and human. It is the slight misalignment of a bindi applied in a rush before she ran out the door. It is the days she forgets to add salt to the dal because her mind is paralysed with worry about your career. It is the way her voice cracks with unshed tears when she blesses 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 from the impact.
When you perfectly digitize the recipe, you clean 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.

So this Sunday, do not buy her a smarter gadget. Do not just send an AI-generated poem or a perfectly curated digital card. Use the time your technology has saved you to sit across from her at the dining table. Look at the lines around her eyes and recognize them for what they are: the physical receipts of the worry she spent keeping you alive. Eat the food she made, knowing that it will be gone in an hour, and you will never, in the history of the universe, taste this exact batch again. Listen to her scold you, knowing the sound waves will dissipate into the air.

Let the 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, staggering magnitude of what she did with it.

Nishant Sahdev is a theoretical physicist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States. He makes sense of the AI era in your favourite Sunday mid-day