If not learning from past mistakes is a sport, then we are the undefeated champions of it. Every one of us seems to act like there is an invisible gravitational pull which is making our choices for us. We are just the passive vessels. And that is just not true. We are making consequential choices — choices which are shaping our behaviours and setting the rules for what is okay to do. I don’t want to cause alarm but I do think we are at a point where alarm is necessary and should perhaps become unavoidable. We need to accept that a new threat has been injected rapidly into the world, without any time for us to prepare, familiarise or even comprehend it. I am exhausted of people saying if you don’t get with AI, you are going to get left behind. Sure, use AI responsibly, use it to understand how to do your tax returns faster or how you can solve that #ERROR on Excel, but why are we acting like complete idiots and voluntarily offering all our crucial personal data to these tech oligarchs, who will use it create systems that will be used to surveil us, create our likenesses so accurately that you will no longer be able to distinguish between a human and a bot behind the screen? Most posts I see on LinkedIn are so CLEARLY written by AI, there is no point reading them anymore. People are churning out the same idea over and over again, with the same emojis and sentences. That is not the worst part — the worst part is I can no longer distinguish which thoughts are actually worth a dime anymore.
AI companies have spent billions of dollars into building their tech and they depend on us mindlessly using their machines. You can choose not to be mindless about it. There is no effective regulations for AI usage and many engineers and developers have exited these companies (Jabob Coxon from Anthropic most recently) because they would go as far as to think that AI has at least 10% potential to destroy the world. DESTROY THE WORLD. Why are we using it to produce 80s nostalgiacore? It’s NOT a good enough reason to use a tech that has these odds of destroying the world. If there was 10% chance of raining today, I would carry an umbrella. Here we are talking about human civilisation ending and not only do we not have a back up plan, most people do not even know that it may actually happen.
It’s a technology still being built and we don’t know how bad it could get and these companies have openly admitted that 1) AI could lead to the end of the world (Sam Altman said it and he also added that in the meantime there will be some great companies built) 2) it will replace entry level white collar jobs and 3) they don’t have the processes in place to prevent its adverse effects.
Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.— Evan Hubinger (@EvanHub) September 9, 2026
The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger. Jacob Coxon (@hilbertspaess) September 9, 2026
After Coxon resigned from Anthropic citing his warning of the world potentially being destroyed, Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s head of alignment stress testing, basically agreed that it is racing to continue to remain the “good guy” against OpenAI (which is the equivalent of a supervillain in my opinion) and if Anthropic wants to catch up, they don’t have the time to put safeguards in place. Mind you, these are the good guys. I cannot fathom what the bad guys are up to.
We had over 70 years to deal with climate change. We (the people in power) did not, and now we (all of us) are on the verge of a mass extinction event. In the last few years, after numerous bleak warnings and doomsday clock notifications, it felt like that we might be nearing a semblance of political goodwill about climate change mitigation — after all it is the beginning of end. That did not happen at all and the problem is now going to be much worse. Not only do we have to deal with climate impacts that have been brewing for decades, we have new variables in the equation that will further worsen climate crisis. There is not even any regulation for it. How are we okay with using this technology to create cartoons of ourselves? It’s not that hard to frizz up your hair and wear a denim jacket to dress up as your 80’s version but we are being pulled to live our life behind the screen. We have a choice not to be pulled, this isn’t imposed on us. Every AI trend is for these companies to harvest our data, train their models to become more powerful and will eventually end in consequences that even THEY still haven’t thought of.
I am not the one for putting the blame on individual consumers. I don’t blame the person who picks up a polythene bag at the supermarket because they forgot the cloth bag at home. But we must distinguish the perils of a new, completely uncharted technology from debates and researches that have had 70 years to form. You cannot compare participating in an AI trend with using a disposable cup. For only one of these behaviours, we know what the consequences are and to what extent. Only communities have stepped up to stop data centres from being built, not politicians. The policymakers and governments are not going to regulate AI — because there are billions of dollars to be made and races to be won. We are on our own here. So please stop treating it like it’s all fun and games.
This was originally published on Substack in the wake of the millionth annoying AI trend where we all acted as is frizzing up our hair without typing it into ChatGPT was impossible.
