27 observations about AI and the future we’re sleepwalking into

Everything we’re missing while robots take the wheel.

Matt Ruby

Dec 03, 2025

∙ Paid

AI art is to human art what LED candles are to actual fire.
The future is us getting AI-generated text messages all day from our favorite fictional characters. Like, imagine getting a text from John McClane in Nakatomi Plaza asking, “Bro, you ever heard of Asian Dawn?”
In fact, AI means we’re just gonna recycle the same 10 celebs for the rest of eternity. Marilyn, Elvis, James Dean, Jimi – archetypes on an endless loop now. It’ll be endless variations on that “Fred Astaire dances with a vacuum” commercial. It all makes Andy Warhol seem even more prophetic.
AI optimism would be more persuasive if the other side of the argument wasn’t “We need to get there first or else China will enslave us.”
When everything digital is copy/pasted phoniness, the only value left will come from actually being in the room with other humans.
“AI is going to work out great!” That makes sense as long as you haven’t seen everything the tech world has done for the past two decades, how the people running it behave, their bootlicking slavishness to a wannabe dictator, and the plot to every single sci-fi novel ever written. (More on that behind the paywall at the end.)
New TikTok owner Larry Ellison said a vast AI-fueled video surveillance system would ensure “citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on.” Sweet, I’ve always dreamed of living in Soviet-era East Germany!
Eventually, AI will be able to dive through all our existing emails/texts to find whatever’s “interesting.” Conclusion: We already live in a surveillance state, we just don’t realize it yet.
Me whenever AI comes up:
“Your grandchildren will be the last generation to read and write,” said Victor Riparbelli, CEO of Synthesia and guy who doesn’t realize he’s actually the villain in the movie.
If you used artificial intelligence to create the perfect basketball player, he’d be A.I.A.I.
Every time I see AI animation, it just makes me want more claymation and drawing-by-hand. I enjoy fingerprints, stop motion, and elbow grease.
What it was like at the Nine Inch Nails show in Brooklyn, according to some AI slop video that showed up in my YouTube feed:
AI reminds me of “The Wisdom of Crowds” book. Crowds are great at, say, guessing someone’s weight or how many jellybeans are in a jar. But their conclusions can suck if the right criteria aren’t met: diversity of opinion, independence of thought, and decentralization of knowledge. Sounds familiar.
ChatGPT lets people who don’t want to write deliver words to people who never wanted to read them in the first place.
What Heythem Naji wants…
I do not want AI. I want:
- handwritten letters.
- stories told by voice, not algorithm.
- journals filled with crossed-out thoughts.
- books with cracked spines and coffee stains.
- kids with scraped knees and wild imaginations.
- eye contact that makes you forget your phone.
I want the kind of beauty that can’t be optimized.
AI is like GPS. It’ll get you to the same destination as everyone else. But if you want to find a spot no one’s ever been to before, you’re going to have to go off roading.
Relevant: Music producer/engineer Geoff Emerick on tech/soul while working with The Beatles: “Sometimes we’d even accentuate the mistakes during mixing, just to underline the fact that the music was being made by fallible human beings. Today, there’s plenty of technology, but precious little soul.”
David Swindle 🟦 writes, “If a human employee lied to you as much at ChatGPT did then you would fire them.”
We used to get our intermittent variable rewards from casinos. Now we get them from social media and AI. We went from slot machines to slop machines.
Re: those antichrist lectures: “[Peter Thiel] seems to place those who would critique or regulate tech developers into a religious good-vs-evil worldview, where the future of all creation depends on giving innovators free rein.” Sounds like he’s arguing that he (and his VC comrades) should be given total freedom to do whatever they want and if anyone disagrees they’re evil. Convenient.
They keep warning us. We all see it's coming. And yet we're gonna do nothing until it's too late. So is AI the next pandemic or the next climate change?
The attention economy disincentivizes uncomfortable truths in favor of ego stroking, compliments, ragebait, and/or “you were right all along.” AI puts that on steroids.
ChatGPT helping relationships: “In the voice of benny blanco writing a love letter to selena gomez, create a note that thanks my girlfriend for how well she cleans the bathroom.”
my radiant bathroom goddess,
i walked in and the bathtub was so clean i had to squint. i thought maybe i’d died. like—did angels descend and help you? did you strike a deal with the soap spirits?
and the way you wield that toilet brush…it’s not cleaning. it’s performance art. you scrub like you’re avenging a fallen comrade. that toilet didn’t stand a chance. it’s repenting now.
you’re the janitor of my heart. the plunger of my soul’s emotional clog. i’m obsessed with you.
forever your bathroom groupie,
🛁🚽✨your little mildew boy
“Computers are useless, they can only give you answers.”
-Pablo Picasso, 1968
The cumulative effect of AI: Tribal fever.
Attention is correlated with emotional intensity, outrage, shock and provocation. Give artificial intelligence this simple knowledge about what distracts and compels humans, let the algorithms do their work, and the profits snowball. The cumulative effect — and it’s always in the same incendiary direction — is mass detachment from reality, and immersion in tribal fever…Alternative views, unpleasant facts, discomforting arguments, contextualizing statistics, are, with ever-greater efficiency, filtered out of what our eyes can see and our minds absorb. And what we therefore believe becomes more fixed, axiomatic, self-reinforcing, and self-affirming.
Cartoonist Tom Toro on who really wins: