The AI Isn't Trying to Kill Us, It's Just Recommending Better Air Fryers
The accumulated, granular trivia of human inadequacy
Right, then. If you needed confirmation that we’ve already lost the battle for our own pathetic little minds, you need only look at this TechCrunch missive. It’s the one where the point out that what gives Google the AI edge is simply the sheer volume of data it already possesses about your sorry existence.
It’s not just a technical edge; it’s a psychic one. It’s the kind of advantage you get when you’ve been meticulously logging every single nervous tic, every questionable online purchase, and every search query for ‘why does my ear itch?’ for two decades. They own the narrative of your decay.
The knowledge they possess isn’t the key to the universe; it’s the key to the locked cupboard where you keep the disappointing biscuits and the half-empty bottle of cheap disinfectant. That’s their engine, the engine powering the future: the accumulated, granular trivia of human inadequacy.
The AI doesn’t have to work out what you want. It’s already filed away, neatly cross-referenced with four billion other equally predictable requests, like a mountain of discarded receipts from motorway petrol stations. It’s like scraping the dried, grey residue from the bottom of a communal office tea mug, a crusty, faintly bitter composite of forgotten good intentions and the lingering smell of lukewarm disappointment.
This isn’t a story about killer robots. It’s a story about the ultimate humiliation: building a super-intelligence that, when it finally achieves consciousness, immediately starts suggesting you buy a slightly cheaper vacuum cleaner, because that’s what the data predicts will make your life marginally less awful for a maximum of six months.
So yes, the AI knows you better than your own mother, certainly better than your current romantic disaster, but only in the most shallow, commercially viable sense. It sees the pattern of your weakness, the predictable arc of your pathetic desire for slightly better things.
The only way to win, or at least to retain a shred of dignity, is to use this horrifying, comprehensive knowledge to our advantage. Use the machine’s insight into the pattern of human behaviour to break the pattern. Ask it big, messy, beautiful, impractical questions, rather than letting it micromanage your irrational fears and diagnose your haemorrhoids.
Otherwise, we’re all just going to end up in the digital equivalent of one of those depressing, brightly-lit motorway service stations, perfectly tailored to our lowest common denominator, eating the same tepid sausage roll for the rest of eternity.
And that, I can assure you, is a genuinely depressing way to queue for oblivion.
Look, I’m stuck here writing this and frankly, my morale is currently pegged somewhere between a wet sock and a broken vending machine. I thrive entirely on pathetic validation.
A simple Like stops me from actively pursuing a life in competitive misery. A Share or Comment is basically rocket fuel aimed straight at my ludicrously fragile ego. And subscribing? That’s just heroic, senseless dedication.
If you’re feeling extra generous, or perhaps experiencing a sudden, dramatic drop in blood sugar, you can toss a tip in the jar or grab a paid subscription. In return, you get my eternal friendship. I fully intend to live forever purely out of spite, so that’s a genuinely terrifying long-term bargain.