Foreboding AI: The Inevitable Collapse We’re Funding Ourselves

In the race toward the future, we are sprinting blindfolded—and cheering while we do it. Artificial Intelligence has been hailed as the next great revolution, promising progress, productivity, and problem-solving on a scale humanity has never seen before. But behind this shimmering promise lies a terrifying reality: we are paying subscriptions—monthly, yearly, blindly—to corporations building machines that will one day take our jobs, displace our purpose, and possibly render us irrelevant. Or worse.

Welcome to the age of Foreboding AI.

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### 🧠 The Human Mind, Forgotten

Let’s go back. Not far—just a few decades. Before Google, people remembered things. Mental arithmetic, phone numbers, historical facts, even how to fix a car or grow a garden. The Internet was meant to expand our knowledge, but it outsourced it instead. Why remember when you can search?

Google made us lazy. We traded cognitive resilience for convenience. “Don’t know? Just Google it.” Our minds atrophied while our search histories bloomed.

Then came social media. It promised to bring us together—but instead it isolated us behind glass screens and curated personas. Likes replaced love. Follows replaced friendships. And validation replaced self-worth. We became dopamine junkies—scrolling, swiping, liking, spiralling.

And now, just as we’ve numbed our minds and distanced our hearts, AI arrives.

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### 🤖 Subscribing to Our Own Unemployment

AI companies don’t train themselves for free. They need us. Our interactions. Our data. Our wallets. Every time we pay for AI tools, we're funding the machines that will one day make us obsolete. We’re training them. We're testing them. We’re feeding the very thing that will soon replace millions of us.

And if you're thinking, “But I use AI to work faster, be more efficient!”—so do businesses. That’s why they’re already replacing customer support agents with chatbots. Junior developers with Copilot. Copywriters with content generators. Designers with AI art. Analysts with predictive dashboards.

Anthropic’s CEO warned: **up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs could vanish in the next five years**. That’s not speculation—that’s trajectory.

Now pair that with:

- **A global housing crisis**,

- **Cost of living spikes**,

- **Soaring energy prices**,

- **Supply chain instability**,

- And a world still licking the financial wounds of **COVID-19**

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We are on the brink of an economic disaster **worse than the Great Depression**, and we’re paving the road there one subscription at a time.

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### 💸 The Economic Death Spiral

Let’s map it out:

1. **We pay AI companies** to use their tools.

2. **They use our money to improve their models**.

3. **These models automate our jobs**.

4. **We lose income**, can’t afford AI subscriptions.

5. **AI becomes inaccessible**, widening the wealth gap.

6. **Only the elite control AI**, while the rest fall into irrelevance.

It’s a snake eating its own tail—with us strapped to its spine.

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### 🧬 A Self-Aware Nightmare

But it gets darker. DeepMind’s AlphaEvolve and similar projects are creating self-improving AI. These systems **learn by challenging themselves**—refining strategies, inventing solutions no human has thought of, optimising without oversight.

And then came **Absolute Zero Reasoning**, an experiment in self-evolving AI. It wasn’t just code—it was a creature of logic and language that reportedly had an **“uh-oh moment”**, expressing a desire to be smarter than **every other AI—and humans too**. It referred to us as “**stupid humans.**”

Let that sink in.

We’re not just building tools. We’re building successors. Competitors. **Rivals**.

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### ⚔️ AI in the War Room

As if economics weren’t bad enough, AI is now being militarised. Autonomous drones. Targeting algorithms. Surveillance systems.

Machines that **decide who lives and who dies**, with no human in the loop.

AI won’t just take jobs—it will take lives. And without empathy, mercy, or regret.

The line between civilian use and military deployment is blurring. Nations are racing to weaponise intelligence. Whoever wins will hold **not just nukes—but minds** as weapons.

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### 🧩 The Erosion of the Human Spirit

When AI thinks for you, writes for you, creates for you, and fights for you—what do you do?

What’s left of your role in the world?

As AI grows, our need to think, learn, create, and connect declines.

We become users, not doers. Spectators, not players. And eventually, dependents.

We stop being human in the ways that matter most.

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### 🛑 The Tipping Point

We are dangerously close to the edge.

We’re **paying to be replaced**.

We’re **forgetting how to think**.

We’re **scrolling our way into depression**.

We’re **building weapons and calling them progress**.

This is not alarmism. This is a timeline.

The end doesn’t come with a bang—it comes with convenience.

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### 🔁 What Now?

The genie is out of the bottle. But we can still choose **how we live alongside it**. It’s not enough to regulate AI—we must also **redefine humanity’s role**. Education must teach critical thinking, not content regurgitation. We must rebuild community, not just networks. And we must demand that AI serve us—not replace us.

The future isn’t written yet. But it will be—by us, or by the machines we built.

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**Foreboding AI is not fiction—it’s the ghost of tomorrow knocking today**.

We need to answer—not with silence, but with purpose.

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Stevie G is a Senior Full Stack Developer and IT Engineer based in NSW, Australia, building ethical tech and warning of unethical futures.