Four stories to share:
When experienced developers adopt AI coding assistants, it slows them down an average of 19%: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
This was part of a larger story out of MIT demonstrating that the benefits of using AI coding assistants may be a wash: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/15/1128352/rise-of-ai-coding-developers-2026/
A company in China is making AI-enabled sex dolls, among other AI weirdness: https://gizmodo.com/2025-was-the-year-the-vibes-were-off-2000702368
Someone recently launched a tool that just... AI generates very realistic nude images: https://nsfwaiimage.com/#showcase
All of these appeared on my feed today.
The tech industry is all but totally consumed by AI.
AI companies are securing contracts to build as many data centers as they can seemingly think of.
This has resulted in the price of hardware - especially RAM and GPUs - to skyrocket astronomically, significantly limiting who can afford such hardware while dramatically shifting the risk-reward calculations of building anything.
Existing datacenters are consuming so much power it's affecting grid capacity and driving up costs for everyone.
Yet, MIT - in a separate report - indicates that 95% of orgs that have adopted AI have seen no return on their investments.
The promise of General Artificial Intelligence (AGI) is fuzzy - no one seems able to confidently define it, it's not clear what benefits would come from it, and many experts strongly believe it's not even possible.
Yet ~30% of US market value is dedicated to it.
The excessive use of resources for datacenters - water, hardware, energy, labor - seems to be spent with little regard to any planned outcome.
In the meantime, everything is getting more expensive, layoffs are increasing, home affordability and access is in the toilet, and our government is growing more authoritarian.
What the Hell Are We Doing Here?
It seems the tech industry has all but abandoned any semblance to improving the world for the people who inhabit it. They have bought into their fantasies of artificially intelligent, man-made machines controlling everything with no thought to the human cost of it all.
The sex dolls and AI generated pornography are especially galling to me - and not for prudish, puritanical moral reasons.
Sex is one of the most human experiences one can have. It's best experienced with at least one other human. It's one of the key ways we build trust with one another, through intimacy expressed when we are at our most physically vulnerable.
When sex is sold as a transactional commodity, it devalues that connection - you're not building trust, you're just satisfying a physical hunger.
Society has progressively isolated us as individuals - first with civilization, where people were forced to set aside their personal needs in favor of those identified by whomever claimed to govern their city / state; then through industrialization, where our bodies and minds were used as machines for mass production according to the whims of business owners; then through digital technology, which at first promised to connect us, but wound up pushing us to mitigate every experience we have through our screens.
Sex work emerges amongst all of this isolation as an opportunity for some semblance of human connection while feeding that physical hunger.
Even as a transactional commodity, sex work still results in at least two people connecting, if only as a simulacrum of the type of trust and intimacy we actually crave and desire. The customer seeking the company of a sex worker for sexual gratification may also find gratification simply in the warmth or perceived attention of another living human being.
AI generated porn and sex bots remove even that small bit of remaining humanity from the transaction - firmly and completely isolating the individual from the rest of humanity.
Isolation Drives Us to Madness
Humans are inherently social creatures. When we are isolated, we have a tendency to go mad.
I can't help but think that's the end goal.
The men - they're all men - at the head of the companies leading these charges are, themselves, isolated from humanity by their position.
Those who rise to the top must prove they are "better" than those with whom they are in competition for that position - pretty much everyone "beneath" them as well as any peers they may have.
When you rise to the top of a hierarchy you, by definition, stand alone.
Isolated.
When humans are isolated for too long, they go mad.
The leaders of all of these organizations - and I do not say this lightly - have gone absolutely mad with their isolation.
They see the emergence of a general AI as a positive because it aligns with their isolated world views.
If they can create a mind, they can control it. If they can control it, they can stop worrying about the things they're afraid of. They can simply command their AI to protect and to serve them and to keep them isolated.
Because they have gone insane.
The World is Run by Abused Children Acting Out
The solution, of course, is for them to let go of their isolation, to realize they do not need to stand at the top of any hierarchy to gain a personal sense of peace and pride. If they were to give up their power, share the ownership, proceeds, and control of their companies equally with all of their employees, and find ways to connect directly with other people, they may finally see the futility in AI so many others are seeing.
If you want to create a new mind that you can form and nurture, have a child. Why do we need to consume so many resources to replicate what nature has already efficiently perfected?
But they sought power in the first place because of their personal trauma. Those who seek power do so because they never feel they are enough as they are. They believe inherently that some people are just better than others - and they must be among the "best".
To seek power is to be an arrogant narcissist - the more selfish one is, the less empathy they exhibit, the less they care about others, the more they are willing to do to gain even more power.
We're not seeing the world's best and brightest ushering in a new age - we're seeing the results of isolated men told all their lives they must either become gods or consider themselves worthless, a corrupt binary they also impose on all those around them in order to validate their actions and reflect upon the world the harsh and pointless cruelty they believe - perhaps rightly - has been thrust upon them.
We're seeing emotionally stunted, injured children act out.
Hurt people will hurt people.
We Need to Change the Narrative
We have a tendency to admire those who rise through power. We romanticize their struggles and envy their wealth and influence without asking how they achieved any of it. The only thing that separates a successful power seeker from a failed malcontent with similar drive is a talent for manipulation and willingness to ruthlessly exploit others for their own gain.
But shouldn't growth and progress reduce struggle?
Shouldn't society be moving toward a place where more people are provided basic stability and opportunities for personal growth?
Isn't a successful community one in which the needs of every member is taken care of?
So why do we continue to romanticize the struggle? Why do we admire those who overcome adversity while they create more adversity for those in their wake?
What is the point of living at all?
I believe the purpose of life is to experience it. Nothing more, nothing less.
Anything that limits another's ability to experience as much of life as they can with their already limited abilities is, in my view, inherently immoral.
Employment, far from enabling workers, isolates us from the communities that matter the most to us, forcing us to turn our attention toward the narrowly defined needs of those who claim ownership over companies and keep the basics of living - housing, food, companionship, healthcare, clothing, culture - locked behind paywalls.
Employment is not slavery; it's indentured servitude.
Our labor has value, and most of that value is being stolen by the same hurt children scrambling to further isolate themselves from the rest of us in order to control as much of the world as they can to protect themselves from whatever it is they are afraid of.
We should direct our labor toward those things that are important to us - our families, our friends, the communities that support and define us.
Instead, we allow ourselves to be controlled by a system run by emotionally stunted abused children who see no value in humanity, only in their own wild imaginations.
If we actually want things to get better, we need to stop supporting these people.
We need to stop working for them and start working for ourselves.
We need to join with our friends and neighbors and work together cooperatively to recover and fix what we see broken in this world.
We need to work together toward a lasting peace, which can only come when everyone within your reach is well fed, well loved, and well rested according to their cultural and personal tastes and needs.
No one is better than you. No one is beneath you. Some are a better fit for a given situation than others and, perhaps, should guide the others, but that should not confer anything on them other than genuine appreciation and trust from those within their communities they have helped.
This is how most of us live when the hurt children aren't looking.
It's time for us to make this our full time jobs instead of throwing our lives away for them.