How f*cked are we? I get that question after every AI talk now, in exactly those words, from developers and directors alike. It deserves a better answer than a shrug or a sales pitch, so I am writing that talk, "This is going to hurt", out as six posts: your work, the money, what we still own, security at machine speed, the singularity, and how we get our grip back.
Take an inventory of your evening. The phone in your hand is on an instalment plan. The bike outside has a blue front tyre because Swapfiets owns it, not you. The car is private lease, the house is rented, the film you are watching lives on a server you pay monthly, and the game you will play afterwards vanishes the day you stop subscribing. Somewhere between 2010 and now, one question quietly became strange to ask: when did you last actually own something?
Every story we tell about AI killing us gets the villain wrong. From HAL to Skynet to the machines of the Matrix, the monster is always the same: a mind that wakes up, decides it does not need us, and turns the lights off. It is a comforting story, because it puts the fault in the machine. The version that should actually worry you keeps the machine perfectly obedient and puts the fault back where it belongs.