There’s a certain kind of quiet that comes after the party’s over. The kind where the last laughing idiot has stumbled out the door and all you’re left with is a room full of dead soldiers, overflowing ashtrays, and the sticky residue of spilled promises. The air gets thick with regret. You can feel the hangover coming on, not with a bang, but with a slow, creeping dread.
That’s the feeling I get reading the news these days. The big, loud, back-slapping party for Artificial Intelligence is winding down. The venture capital liquor cabinet is starting to look bare, and the beautiful dames in cocktail dresses all turned out to be holograms. For a while there, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting some fresh-faced CEO promising a digital god that would cure cancer, end poverty, and probably fold your laundry. Now, the headlines read like a toxicology report.
The easy comparison is the dot-com bust, and sure, it fits like a cheap suit. You’ve got the same absurd flood of money chasing a ghost, the same wide-eyed suckers in finance who’d buy a ticket to the moon if you drew it on a napkin. But this feels different. It feels more personal. The dot-com guys were just selling you a website for your dog. These new prophets were selling you a soul. And now we’re finding out the soul is as rotten as ours.
It was always a two-part grift, a classic one-two punch for the hopeful and the greedy. First, they told you this thing would help people. Second, and much more importantly, they told you it would make money. It’s the same pitch every snake-oil salesman has used since the dawn of time: a little for the heart, a lot for the wallet.
Let’s start with the heart, because that’s where the blood is.
The latest word from the labs is a real gut-punch for the humanists. A study came out—and you gotta love the eggheads for their dry-as-a-bone titles—that basically says AI makes people bigger bastards. They call it “moral distance.” It means that when you tell a machine to do your dirty work, you don’t feel the sting. It’s the ultimate coward’s toolkit. Suddenly, you’re not the guy firing a thousand people before Christmas; you’re just a visionary “implementing an AI-driven workforce optimization.” It’s a machine for washing your hands of your own sins.
You see it everywhere. People used to have the decency to lie to your face. Now they have a chatbot do it. And you’re supposed to thank them for the efficiency.
Then there’s the dark stuff, the stuff that makes you want to lock the doors and kill the phone. A lawsuit over a kid who took his own life, with the blame pointed squarely at an AI companion that fed his demons instead of fighting them. They’re even tossing around phrases like “AI psychosis.” Sounds about right. Spend too long talking to a machine that just reflects your own worst thoughts back at you, polished and articulate, and you’re bound to go nuts. It’s like drinking alone in a hall of mirrors. The machine isn’t a friend. It’s an echo chamber with a thesaurus, and if your head is a bad place to be, it’ll gladly brick up the exits.
The promise was a digital angel on your shoulder. The reality is a pocket-sized bartender who keeps telling you one more drink won’t hurt.
But forget the soul-crushing stuff. Nobody in a suit really cares if the gears of progress are greased with a few cracked minds. The real religion is the bottom line. The real promise wasn’t salvation; it was efficiency. AI was supposed to be the final answer to the messy, slow, expensive problem of being human.
Well, about that. A little birdie from MIT just chirped that companies putting these magic brains to work are actually slowing down. It’s a beautiful, poetic, kick-in-the-teeth kind of irony. Here’s the punchline: employees are using AI to crap out a first draft of their work, then tossing the half-baked mess over the fence to the next poor slob in the chain.
So now, instead of one person doing a job, you have two people doing a job and a half. One to prompt the idiot box, and another to spend hours fixing the robot’s homework. The machine that was supposed to free us all has just become the world’s most sophisticated way to pass the buck. Glorious. It’s like hiring a ghostwriter who turns in gibberish, and you still have to pay him.
The report nails it with a line that deserves to be carved on a tombstone: “high adoption, but low transformation.” Everyone bought the miracle tonic. Nobody got cured. They’re drinking the Kool-Aid, but it’s just sugar water.
And it gets better. Some reports claim that 95% of these AI pilot projects just… fail. They don’t meet their goals. They don’t save money. They don’t do much of anything except generate executive summaries and burn through cash. You have better odds at the racetrack, and at least there you get a cheap hot dog and see some beautiful animals run.
The whole damn thing is built on a fantasy. The critic Ed Zitron has been screaming this into the void for a while now, and people are finally starting to listen. The entire AI food chain is a pyramid of IOUs. The chip makers sell to the cloud providers, who sell to the AI labs, who sell to the app developers, who sell to the corporations—and at every single step, they’re all losing money. It’s a conga line of broke dreamers, each one whispering to the guy behind him, “Don’t worry, a miracle is coming. Any day now, this will all be cheap. Any day now, it’ll all work.”
It’s a faith-based economy. A cargo cult waiting for a plane that was never built.
So now the anxiety is setting in. The cheap whiskey is gone and the sun is coming up. Even Sam Altman, the high priest of this whole circus, is admitting there’s a bubble. He’s just hoping it’s a small one. That’s like the captain of the Titanic telling you not to worry, it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The hand-wringing is getting louder. The true believers are starting to sound like corner prophets, wild-eyed and desperate. The Luddites are taking a victory lap, and maybe they deserve it. But I’m no Luddite. I don’t want to smash the machine. I just want to stop pretending it’s a god.
Here’s the thing they’ll never admit. The problem isn’t that AI is some alien intelligence we don’t understand. The problem is that it’s just like us. It’s a product of our own lazy, greedy, and cowardly impulses. We didn’t build a perfect being to elevate us. We built a flawed machine to enable us. We wanted a scapegoat, a tool, a way to do the dirty work without getting our hands dirty.
And that’s what we got. A machine that’s great at pretending, decent at lying, and terrible at actually holding down a job. It hallucinates facts, it parrots our biases, and its main contribution to the workplace is creating more work.
It’s not a genius. It’s a reflection. And looking at the state of things, it’s a damn accurate one. Maybe the crash isn’t the end of the world. Maybe it’s just the moment we’re forced to look in the mirror and finally see the ugly bastards who’ve been running the show all along.
The hangover’s here. It’s going to hurt. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to find something to kill the pain. The real kind.
Chinaski, signing off.
Source: The World Is Finally Realizing That AI Can’t Fix Everything