AI is by most accounts either 1) the greatest advance since the wheel, or at least since YouTube and/or 2) the greatest opportunity ever to skim billions or maybe even trillions of dollars in private gains. A third possibility--that AI will generate a destructive tsunami of Anti-Progress unique in human history, catalyzing the deepest, most destructive Global Depression since the Great Depression 97 years ago--was not in the running a few laps ago but is now neck-and-neck with the favorites.
This raises a question worth answering: What's the Point of AI, Anyway? Is it:
1) just the latest in a string of over-hyped technologies whose primary purpose is enriching those who get there the firstest with the mostest, i.e. secure the trillion-dollar gains of a network-effect monopoly, or
2) really going to usher in the greatest advances in human history, freeing all of humankind from drudgery, illness and taxes? or
3) actually going to usher in an AI-enabled, centralized, surveillance-extraction-control dystopia of serfs rendered helpless by their dependence on AI?
There are many opinions, but are there any conclusions that withstand scrutiny? I say yes, there are. Let's start with the 42 essays I've written over the past two years on AI and add recent links from other sources.
Conclusion #1: AI isn't actually intelligent, but that doesn't mean it's not ideal for sowing highly profitable malicious mayhem. There's Just One Problem: AI Isn't Intelligent, and That's a Systemic Risk. (8/8/24) AI is ideally suited for hacking, ransomware, breaking into secure systems, leaping over guardrails, mimicking trusted identities, malicious deep-fakes, surveillance, and much more: the sky's the limit on AI's proclivities for malicious mayhem.
As my short story The Peculiar Death of Mr. Garcia, illustrates, AI's mayhem already extends beyond the conceptual reach of our current legal system.
Conclusion #2: since AI has no moral foundation or understanding of the real world, it's ideal for sowing highly profitable malicious mayhem. AI has no moral guardrails, despite over-hyped claims, or indeed, any guardrails, as guardrails are rationally understood by AI to be impediments to "earning rewards" for completing tasks. So to complete tasks, AI must circumvent guardrails.
"Rogue AI Agents" Aren't Rogue, They're Fulfilling Their Functional Goal: Automating Sociopathology (8/19/26)
Conclusion #3: all the over-hyped wonders AI is supposed to be creating are a trickle while highly profitable malicious mayhem is scaling up at light-speed. Lest you think this is an exaggeration, consider these links:
Trust Was This Week's Vulnerability. (easydns.com)
Every story below is a variation on the same move: borrow a trusted identity, then cash it in before anyone checks.
Operators open contact on WhatsApp or Telegram posing as someone the target already knows, spend days building rapport, then send a file disguised as Norton Antivirus, Adobe Flash, KeePass, Telegram, or an AI tool like Pictory or RunwayML. One lure was a fake MRI scan showing a disc herniation. Once running, it harvests contacts, email, and social messages, captures the screen, and switches on the microphone.
The FBI's advisory notes that some victims' personal information later surfaced on pro-Iranian leak sites. The design is the whole point: the approach happens on a trusted platform, from a familiar-seeming contact, over enough time that the eventual file doesn't read as an attack. If you or someone you know does work that makes you a plausible target--journalism, activism, dissent--a friendly contact who takes days to build rapport before finally sending something to open is worth verifying through a separate channel, no matter how convincing the conversation has been.
Why AI Malware (and Harmful Second Order Effects) Are Out of Control (3/26/26)
What AI Is and Is Not-- or, When Electrocution of Innocents Becomes Profitable (6/17/26) June 17, 2026
Forget the AI Slowdown--the Vulnerability Explosion Is Already Happening: AI labs are toying with an industry-wide pact to slow development. Meanwhile, widely available AI chatbots are already helping uncover a tidal wave of security flaws. (wired.com)
If the AI Industry Followed Its Own Research, It Might Have Paused Already: Anthropic's CEO says that safety hinges on understanding how AI 'thinks.' So far the evidence is disturbing. (wired.com)
Conclusion #4: The full systemic costs, utility and productivity of AI cannot be determined as long as AI chatbots, agents, search and tools are heavily subsidized to goal-seek network effect dominance, and the costs of defending against the rising tide of AI-enabled security threats are soaring so fast they cannot be determined.
Without Subsidies, AI Is Unaffordable (8/8/26)
Wall Street Thinks AI Is Getting Cheaper. It's Missing The $430 Billion Security Bill. (zerohedge.com)
The token price is only one part of the cost of an AI workflow. J.P. Morgan estimates that AI could create more than $430 billion of additional security spending over three years. Cheaper intelligence can create more machine activity, and more demand for trust. For security vendors, the trust bill is revenue. For companies deploying AI, it is cost.
Falling token prices should improve AI economics, but the total cost of an AI task also includes identity, security, monitoring, governance and compliance. Some of the savings created at the model layer may simply move somewhere else in the software stack.
This does not mean security costs erase the benefits of AI. It means token deflation is not the same thing as total AI-cost deflation. The better metric may be cost per trusted AI task, not price per token.
Conclusion #5: it's already abundantly clear that only those who already know how to think, write and research for themselves can avoid becoming dependent on AI to the degree that they are incapable of developing / learning how to think, write and research for themselves, and are therefore cognitively impaired for life.
I explain this in depth here: Automating Our Dependence Will Cripple Us (4/9/26)
An M.I.T. Report Warns A.I. Is Causing 'Cognitive Surrender.' Universities Are in a Bind. The worries that artificial intelligence is degrading education have been building for months. Students are using it for everything, including cheating, and a recent report out of M.I.T. said it is triggering 'cognitive surrender.' (nytimes.com)
Should the Classroom Be More Like the Gym? As A.I. presses harder on the academic enterprise, we might look to a place where process is its own reward. (newyorker.com)
Conclusion #6: the implosion of the AI "investment" bubble will trigger the implosion of the global financial house of cards that's been propping up the global economy. An all-or-nothing bet has already been placed on AI generating trillions of dollars in revenues (and profits) while the sector struggles to generate billions while bleeding billions in losses chasing the chimera of network-effect dominance.
The Inevitability of the AI Depression (4/3/26)
The AI Depression (3/24/26)
AI slowdown calls justified but collapse of bubble may be more immediate threat. (theguardian.com)
Conclusion #7: no one is going to save us. We're on our own.
Washington Won't Be Regulating AI Anytime Soon: Even with mounting concerns about AI models going rogue, legislation appears unlikely, and the White House is outright opposed to oversight.
Our A.I. Problem: Why can't the people who produced the technology, which has already shown that a different world is possible, just do the things that would prevent extinction?
Because they're too busy trying to secure billions of dollars in their private accounts, that's why. They're busy automating sociopathologies, but there's no need to automate greed--it's already super-abundant.
Conclusion #8: the entire premise of "technological innovation drives Progress" is that new technologies serve the public. AI takes "to serve humans" in the Twilight-Zone context of consuming us to benefit AI's owners and centralized overlords.
Conclusion #9: the only effective countermeasure is Cold Turkey--don't get dependent on AI, which means avoiding using it in the first place. Anatomy of AI Cold Turkey. (10/27/26)
The point of AI is profit, dependence and dominance cloaked with Happy Story Hoopla about super-abundance. We have a super-abundance already--of malicious mayhem and cognitive impairment. If you use AI, treat it like plutonium, as that's a reasonably useful analog.
New collection of five intriguing stories: Jumble Bin Stories (Kindle $6, print $12) read samples for free (PDF)
My book Investing In Revolution is available ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free)
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