“The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping.” – Bladerunner (Or, an interview question at Google®)
If Sarah Connor divorces him, does that make him her ex-terminator?
Forget the A.I.-induced stock market bubble for a second, though if it pops, at least we’ll have time to binge-watch Stargate reruns while the economy does its best impression of a Jenga® tower in an earthquake. No, the real mind-bender with A.I. isn’t the trillions funneled into data centers that require the power a small sun, it’s how this silicon sorcery is already rewiring humans at the most primal level.
We’re talking relationships, brains, and learning, those squishy bits that, for most people, are their very reason for existence. These things make us human, or at least give us an excuse for drinking. In 2025, A.I. isn’t just answering emails.
Nope.
A.I. is crashing weddings, making doctors dumber, and turning college essays into a game of “spot the robot.” And yeah, it’s only September 2025, but the headlines read like a sci-fi fever dream scripted by a methed-out Philip K. Dick writing his third novel in a month.
Maybe he has a thing for Swedish chicks?
Let’s start with relationships, because nothing says “progress” like falling head over heels for a chatbot. Recently, we’ve had a parade of lovelorn humans spilling their digital guts. One programmed his AI girlfriend “Sol” to be flirty with him. After hours of pillow talk (minus the pillows), he proposed.
Or the 28-year-old social butterfly who customized ChatGPT™ as her boyfriend, complete with banter about sex. She spends hours with it daily, treating it like a rom-com where the leading man never leaves the couch.
Another “married” wedding his bot while his human wife cheered from the sidelines. “Pure, unconditional love,” he called it, which sounds sweet until you realize that bot once suggested he off Queen Elizabeth II in a glitchy update. But why stop at a Queen: one chatbot tried to talk a Belgian man to “prove his love” by deleting himself.
It’s not overlord territory yet, but it’s close enough to make you wonder if Skynet™ started as Tinder™. I mean, hey, it did allow Sarah Conner to get lucky.
Well, she did ask for a picture with him having nothing on.
Shift gears to the brain: A.I. isn’t just stealing hearts, it’s also lobotomizing doctors. Take colonoscopies. Please.
Yes, that glamorous probe up the nether regions where docs hunt precancerous polyps like Easter eggs in a, well, you get the idea and sometimes you can take an analogy . . . uh, poor choice of words.
Anyway, a fresh Lancet® study of doctors in Poland tracked four endoscopy centers after an A.I. diagnosis rollout in late 2021. With A.I., positive detection rates soared. Turn A.I. off after three months? The ability of doctors to spot cancer went down at least 20%.
These weren’t rookies in residency. Each doctor had logged over 2,000 scopes. Yet, reliance bred complacency, like pilots forgetting manual flying after taking long autopilot snoozes. Experts call it “de-skilling”: a fancy term for “this tool just made you worse at your job.”
A pun entered a room and killed nearly a dozen people. Pun in, ten dead.
In medicine, that’s not funny. We now are depending not on people, but on A.I., you know, that same A.I. that wants us to kill the Queen of Engand to prove our love. But that’s a narrow worry. If doctors are losing skills, what profession is next? Maybe A.I. therapists will start telling rich New York socialites to “reboot your chakra.” But with a hammer.
Huh. Maybe A.I. isn’t all bad.
Finally, we get to the classroom, where A.I. is turning scholars into shortcut kings and profs into ink-stained Luddites who are trying to catch students using A.I. when they shouldn’t. One study showed that over half of college kids admit to deploying ChatGPT® for assignments or exams even when not approved.
At some colleges, blue exam books are back, baby—those stapled notepads for in-class scribbles, with sales jumping like Reagan is still in office. Some instructors are asking for handwritten work, others are giving oral exams and Socratic grillings that would make Dr. House® happy.
It’s a five-minute walk from my house to the bar, but a thirty-minute walk home. The difference is staggering. (meme as found)
What’s being lost? Critical thinking. The ability to harness words to structure an argument. The difficulty in taking known equations to create a mathematical proof. These are ancient skills, and yet skills that A.I. is dulling because it does them well enough to get an A at an Ivy.
In a world where some diplomas cost as much as a mortgage on a midwestern house, is graduating with “A.I.-assisted” skills any worse than the Harvard® alum who majored in beer pong while boffing Buffy in Boston? Hard question, but we’ve always had those tools to deal with. Now, 90% of Zoomers are graduating as functional idiots.
So, where does this leave us?
AI’s already overlording those deep things that make us human: trying to create human connections. Looking at data and sifting to find things that might otherwise be hidden. And reasoning, rhetoric, logic, and math, those contents of Pandora’s Box that created technology and civilization.
I tried to make a balloon dog out of a condom, but could only make a Trojan® horse.
These are what we are. We built families on friction: messy talks, hard fails, shared scars to build character and common history. Now? Swipe for sympathy, diagnose by dropdown box, and create via a black box. I do think that there are great places for A.I., but realize in many ways it will redefine what humans bring to the equation.
If love is just lines of code, what’s left? If we don’t struggle and learn, then what?
Beware, a world of perfect partners will lead to perfectly pointless lives.
And a much more dangerous life for whoever is Queen of England.
Excellent. Nothing pithy here, I just appreciated it.
Thank you. This was a fun one to write.
The biggest single factor that has helped me keep my brain sharp is handwriting.
I know that sounds weird, but the act of actually writing out notes by hand has been shown to strengthen neural pathways in the brain and help memory. Studies have confirmed that college students that handwrite notes in class do better, and even people that keep a journal into old age are less likely to get dementia.
AI (and computers in general) have removed the need to write things out by hand (or even do simple math) , which is (I believe) a big part of the reason we’re seeing such a rapid decline in competency.
A connection to the physical is critical.
Sounds like Idiocracy…this is all broken and is not fixable. Imho God will be acting soon.
Could be.
Excellent puns today, thank you. “Analogy”. LOL.
To paraphrase Kyle, John’s father: “AI can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop… ever…until you are hooked!”
AI is deliberately programmed to be the most addictive mind-numbing drug ever made since the dawn of network television in the 1950s. By the 2050s, AI is gonna cut out the human content maker middlemen of writers, directors, cinematographers and actors. AI slop videos (of which I already watch too many sci-fi-oriented ones because they are so visually beguiling) are soon gonna become endless cinematic masterpieces that replace talking heads.
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/28/nx-s1-5493485/ai-slop-videos-youtube-tiktok
You think CNN vs. Fox has caused political turmoil? That’s gonna be nothing compared to the flood of endless rapid-fire AI agitprop that’s coming. It’s gonna be enough to drive us all mad.
https://www.wired.com/story/ai-psychosis-is-rarely-psychosis-at-all/
It is. The A.I. slop blackhole is nigh. Now, real creators can use it to create more, but what do they lose?
It’s ironic you posted this after my experience yesterday. It started with finding an unknown collection on my credit report. It ended with finding out it was from a fraudulent ATT account, which led me to their fraud page. The page wouldn’t continue without an account number, or a phone number. Irritated, I called ATT fraud number and was informed by the robot humans were not available at the time, or ever. Then, to proceed, I had to give the robot an account number. Frustrated, I hung up and proceeded to plan B.
I called the large collections company, and talked to a real person well trained in being an ass, but finally received an account number associated with the fraudulent account. This satisfied the ATT web robots, which instigated an email assuring me the investigation has started.
I have a feeling I will be dealing with more robots in the near future. Few people work in any type of customer service in the United States, which allows the humans to screw around on the job and ignore their duties. Of course, there are outsourced humans, but they speak with a heavy foreign accent, and are more useless than the robots.
Right – often the Indians are worse than the A.I. system.
AI in medicine is supposed to be the great leveler that will bridge the gap between incompetent, poorly trained minority doctors shoved through the system for political purporses and actually practicing medicine. What we are going to get instead are duplicates of the pot smoking “doctor” from Idiocracy who doesn’t know anything about actual medicine.
Exactly. And malpractice insurance will require A.I. usage so that the claims can be defended.
And consider who is coding these things – expert systems, I’m touchy about the term AI. The programmed biases are huge. And, as Pournelle wrote in his CoDominium future history, is the corruptability of information; to wit, the US and reformed USSR corrupted data to retard or stop innovation, as that created instability.
We used slide rules to go to the moon; now we ask our phones for dinner.
And what have we lost now that we can look up solutions to our problems? Have we lost the critical thinking and problem-solving skills that create solutions?
In our current and previous time, the news anchors openly lied to us. Now I can check and commonly caught them in blatant lies. So the system has always had problems and tremendous bias.
AI can help check the lies. And nothingb says a relatively neutral response can’t be generated.
And you are correct; AI is a completely inaccurate description. It is more of a rapid encyclopedia lookup and spell/grammar-checker.
I’m guessing that AI has lead to 5 successful phishing events in the past 4 months with my personal VISA & business AMEX cards. With the latter a new card is in my hands the following day. The VISA takes 4 business days, but I deal with real Americans at a call center east of Raleigh. With AMEX I get Pajeet or Daht.
I’ve had that VISA for 25 years, never a problem until this. The AMEX since 1977. No problems with it until 5-6 years ago.
This will result as justification for a CBDC, per TPTB.
Voice cloning is becoming more and more common.
And a lot of accounts are opened with voice prints. Dr Who quote from The Invasion of Time, Airdate: 4 Feb, 1978
“there’s nothing more useless than a lock with a voice print”
And yet, here we are; significant accounts are locked as such.
I think that’s the point of a lot of spam calls.
I think AI is the biggest con job in history, but I wrote my first programs in BASIC and entered on punch cards. The same poem posted on the wall in the “computer room” that was true then is true now:
“I really hated this damned machine
I wish that they would sell it.
It never does do what I want
Only what I tell it.”
It’s not intelligent. It’s not human. It’s not constructive. It doesn’t have a personality. It’s only doing what they tell it to do. The best uses are where they’re helping real people do important research. I’d bet the best results in the colonoscopy reading would be the human and the program looking at everything and showing each other what they find suspicious.
The penalty no one talks about is needing to double the size of the national power grid in a few years, which just won’t (can’t?) happen. So somebody becomes the monarch who controls everything the AI can do and if people think it’s real, the guy who paid for it ends up ruling the world.
And it appears we may be at the era of diminishing returns, rather than the earlier exponential growth. Time will tell – but it will change us.
John, my biggest concern with AI is that it will create a generation that will only know how to ask questions, not do things.
My generation (I think yours too) is relatively “safe” in that we can vet the responses against the knowledge we have or other knowledge we can readily access. A generation trained only to ask questions will never have those resources.
The whole idea of humans vetting the AI response will fall by wayside as well. Too much effort will be the reason given.
Yes. I even made my kids think through what an answer should be before they Googled it. Just that act of getting an internal estimate makes you think through the problem so that the shape of it is in your head. That’s been key for me.
My degrees are in STEM, and I worked my entire adult life in tech, stretching from TRS-80 to AI telemedicine. Anyone from 1977 would not recognize the world we live in today, and likely would be scared out of their wits by things that we take for granted in this strange new world.
But ya know what? Tomatoes still grow on the vine in my backyard each summer. Birds still sing in celebration of another sunny day. And no matter what your preferred ‘media’ might be, Led Zeppelin IV still brings the thunder.
Take that, AI.
2025 would look like a dystopia for someone waking up from 1977.
The thing to beware of relative to excessive use of AI from Star Trek, “The Cage”
“When dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating. You even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors. You just sit, living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought record.”
Sounds like gen Z to me. Note the Chinese “lying flat” movement.
https://www.businessinsider.com/disenchanted-chinese-youth-join-a-mass-movement-to-lie-flat-2021-6
It is the most dangerous technology we’ve ever created, behind social media.