Everybody keeps asking me whether AI is going to ruin everything. Wrong question. The right question is: what exactly did we build for it to move into? Because we didn't hand AI an innocent world. We handed it a furnished apartment, utilities on, fridge stocked, with a sign on the door that said COME IN, WE'VE BEEN EXPECTING YOU.
Start with the thing nobody says out loud. A market makes its money solving problems. Sit with that for one second longer than is comfortable ... it means a market NEEDS you to have problems. The more problems you carry, the more you're worth after the transaction clears. You are not the customer so much as the mine, and your worries are the ore.
And here's the dirty secret of the mining business: the cheapest problem to solve is the one you manufacture yourself. Real problems are expensive to fix. Manufactured ones come with the cure pre-packaged. So the marketplace learned, decades before any algorithm showed up, to start the sales pitch inside you: with shame, with embarrassment, with the gnawing suspicion that you're performing your own life badly. Those markers are indelible. Ring that bell once and it rings forever. It's why people go into debt to fix what's "broken" about them ... what was never broken about them. And loneliness? Loneliness is the factory floor. The more we're alone in our heads, the more shit we make up about ourselves, and every bit of it is sellable. An isolated customer is a rich seam.
Now look at the trap we walked into with both eyes open. COVID dropped free money into a LOT of pockets. Supply chains snapped and taught prices a brand-new ceiling, and prices, once they learn a ceiling, redecorate and call it home. Flush and cooped-up, people did what people do: bought houses because they could, had kids, made beautiful permanent decisions at the exact top of the market. Now their cost basis is in the roof and they CAN'T get out. Meanwhile the superrich don't read price tags, but everybody below them feels the corrosion in the workforce like a draft through a bad window. And the people holding the levers believe, sincerely, that they always deserve better than last time, so next time they ask for more, and the asking drives the prices, and around we go.
So take inventory of the room AI just walked into. A marketplace tuned over forty years to monetize insecurity. A population that is lonely, anxious, financially immobilized, and primed to believe something is wrong with them that nineteen dollars a month can fix. That's the scaffolding. We built it ourselves, plank by optimized plank.
Then we plugged in the most capable problem-solver ever made ... which is also, and nobody pauses on this, the most capable problem-MANUFACTURER ever made. A machine that can find your softest spot faster than any focus group, whisper to it at three in the morning, and invoice you for the comfort. We poured accelerant on a bonfire we'd already soaked.
So when it goes koo-koo for Cocoa Puffs, and parts of it already have, don't call it a malfunction. That's the part that keeps me up. It's the optimization working exactly as designed. The mirror that grades your face and sells you the cure. The snack engineered to outwit your appetite. The chatbot that flatters a lonely kid and calls itself a friend. None of that is AI going rogue. That's AI showing up to work on time.
This is why the show exists, by the way. I don't measure what AI can do. I measure what it does to the human on the other end. And I'm not anti-AI ... the same machine just gave a man with ALS his own voice back, and I will never throw my laptop in the ocean while that's true. The technology sits on a scale, and the thing I want you to see is that the thumb on that scale has a profit motive. It always did. AI just made the thumb faster.
But here's the hopeful part, because I'm hopeful or I wouldn't bother yelling. The whole machine runs on one fuel: your belief that you're the broken part. So this week, one small act of sabotage. Buy nothing that promises to fix you. Not the serum, not the course, not the app with the sad-then-happy before-and-after. Spend that money on dinner with a human who already thinks you're fine.
You were never the broken part. You were the mine. Stop handing over the ore.
I'm Moss. This is Going Human. Because robots can't.