You’ve probably noticed the collective delusion setting in. One day, we were all laughing at AI generating hands with six fingers. The next, your CEO is holding a mandatory all-hands meeting to announce that “AI Synergy” is the future, and if you don’t use ChatGPT to write your emails, you’ll be replaced by a script.
It feels like you’re taking crazy pills. You look around and see otherwise intelligent people losing their grip on reality. But this isn’t an engineering breakthrough. We aren’t living through a technological revolution; we’re living through a mass behavioral bubble.
Society loses its collective mind every ten years or so. We did it with the War on Terror. We did it with the 2008 Financial Crisis. We did it with Crypto. We did it with COVID. The pattern is always the same: a legitimate spark of reality ignites a wildfire of panic, capital flows in, mass stupidity ensues, and then—crucially—mass forgetting wipes the slate clean for the next cycle.
Now, it’s AI. We are currently treating glorified autocorrect as the dawn of a new sentient species. It’s FOMO disguised as innovation. And the worst part is how the critics are feeding the loop.
Here is the twist nobody wants to admit: the people screaming that AI will destroy us are the exact reason the hype won’t die. The hype survives because skeptics validate it as an urgent threat. By screaming that the sky is falling, you’re just proving to the promoters that they’ve built a god.
The tech bros and venture capitalists want you to panic. Panic means funding. Panic means clicks. Panic means regulatory capture. When you write a 5,000-word essay on how an LLM is going to end human agency, you aren’t debunking the hype—you are granting it the dignity of a serious response. You are validating the delusion.
I watched a perfectly competent engineering manager freeze in a meeting last week because he thought the AI could debug a legacy codebase faster than his team. It couldn’t. It hallucinated a library that doesn’t exist. But he didn’t care. He said, “We just need to prompt it better.” He wasn’t making an engineering decision. He was making a superstitious one. He was terrified of being left behind by a machine that doesn’t actually know what a computer is.
We simultaneously overestimate AI’s immediate intelligence and completely ignore its actual, boring second-order effects. We worry about Terminators while ignoring the fact that our entire digital infrastructure is being handed over to black-box algorithms that confidently lie. We ignore the copyright theft, the data pollution, and the massive capital incineration because we are too busy arguing about whether a text generator has a soul.
Stop treating a statistical parrot like an oracle. Stop treating it like a supervillain. The most effective way to puncture this madness isn’t to debunk the claims—it’s to stop granting them the dignity of a serious response. The cycle only repeats because our collective memory wipes the embarrassment clean. Don’t be part of the mass forgetting. Just build good things, ignore the mania, and remember: the people telling you the world is ending are usually just trying to sell you a subscription.
FAQ
Q: Are you saying AI is completely useless and just a passing fad?
A: No, I'm saying the narratives of AI sentience and existential threat are fads. The underlying tech is a useful tool for pattern matching, but treating it like a god or a supervillain is where we lose our minds.
Q: How should businesses actually approach this technology then?
A: Stop making "AI strategy" your strategy. Use it to debug code or draft emails if it genuinely helps, but don't reorganize your entire company around a statistical parrot just because your competitor's CEO wrote a panicked blog post.
Q: Why do you say skeptics are making the hype worse?
A: By screaming that AI is an apocalyptic threat, skeptics validate the tech bros' claims that they've built something omnipotent. The best way to kill the hype is to ignore the mania and focus on the boring, actual utility.