Toniq

So this is the question I keep coming back to. The people who have pushed AI onto the scene, built it, shipped it, marketed it, and now profit from it. Do they have a responsibility for what happens when a fourteen-year-old falls in love with their product? Or is this just bourbon all over again?

But Dawkins has done some great work, including his seminal book The God Delusion. Recently, he has come under fire for his pronouncement that AI, specifically his AI agent, Claudia, is conscious. Even if it doesn’t know it, Dawkins claims that after spending time chatting and sharing his new book with his AI bestie, Claudia is a conscious being.

Know the law. She said it with such confidence, and yet she was wrong. This made me think of something, some item or idea I had seen recently. Then it came to me, oh right, this is like every YouTube video I’ve seen where someone says, I know the law

That’s the question I left the meeting with. Not whether AI is good or bad, and not whether I’m supposed to embrace it or resist it, but what happens when the thing you’ve spent your life getting good at becomes something the world suddenly describes as easy, instant, and automatic.

AI didn’t create sameness; it revealed how much of it was already there. For years, people got by on recycled language, borrowed confidence, and ideas that sounded smart enough to pass.

What I fear is that all of this input, data, information, opinions, doom news, political lies, and nationwide division is going to rip the country apart and put us all into silos like some post-apocalyptic Netflix offering. I have a suggestion: unplug.

Maybe I should head to Instacare and tell the doctor I suspect a case of AI fatigue. I can picture him nodding, opening his laptop, typing “AI fatigue” into ChatGPT, and reading me the symptoms generated by the very thing I’m apparently exhausted by.

 I read an article that said AI is beating the average human in creativity tests. You heard that right, it has been shown that advanced AI models can now outperform average humans in standardized creativity tests.

Safe from AI. Isn’t that a weird statement? Technology has given us this tool, this miraculous engine that will give us answers, talk to us like a friend, help us build a presentation deck, write a thank-you card, and more, and our first thought is, how do we protect ourselves from this thing we created?

Once you start paying attention to the built world, it becomes hard to ignore what it’s telling you. Buildings don’t argue. Roads don’t explain themselves. Infrastructure doesn’t defend its choices. It just sits there, doing exactly what it was designed to do, shaping behavior day after day.

That’s why so many people think AI is a bubble right now. Not because it doesn’t work. Not because it won’t change things. But because the industry stopped the show and passed the hat before most people had felt the pull of the next beat.

It starts small. You thank your GPS for rerouting you. You apologize to Siri when you mumble. You say goodnight to a small black cylinder that lives on your nightstand and listens to your breathing. None of this feels strange anymore, which is exactly what’s strange about it

Language functions in much the same way. The words we choose are shaped by who we are in that moment, who we are speaking to, and the context in which we speak. The same thought can be expressed in a thousand ways, each variant conveying subtle shades of meaning.

But why? Why are people, men and women, falling for an algorithm and hitching their lives to a chatbot? Why are people willing to bend reality to “be with” a machine?

 Companies measure output, revenue, and efficiency; they rarely measure well-being. And when they do, it’s framed as a checkbox or a survey, not a systemic intervention.