Have you noticed that almost every time one of the tech broligarchs sinks a lot of time, money, and resources into something they’re sure will be The Next Big Thing, it’s almost always at least adjacent to being an artificial form of something that already exists in the real world? Fake money, fake photos & videos, fake cartoon apes, entire fake neighborhoods, there doesn’t seem to be a single facet of our existence they don’t think they can somehow digitally emulate and/or commodify.

In a way, it’s like they view themselves as the single player of an immersive mashup of The Sims meets The Matrix, where they’ve unlocked unlimited cash and have a stack of other cheat codes (probably because it is frighteningly like that in many regards). I’ve mentioned before about how they think of us non-billionaires as non-playable characters, or NPCs. The tech billionaires desperately want the rest of us to exist in a completely fabricated universe where they control everything (more than they already do here in the real world). That desire is at least part of the impetus behind the movement to insert AI into everything imaginable, from GitHub to household appliances like your fridge.

Would you like to take the red pill or the blue pill?

Make no mistake, the idea really is to stick AI in everything, with chatbots taking the lead as the most widely adopted and used form of generative AI. To be fair, the term ‘AI’ tends to get applied very broadly; chatbots and LLMs like ChatGPT are referred to as ‘AI’ just as much as highly specialized clinical machine learning algorithms that can be used to help diagnose rare diseases. But that does not mean that all AI is created equal, nor that you should get your medical advice from ChatGPT or Claude just because a highly specialized clinical machine learning algorithm can help identify a rare form of cancer. (Please, PLEASE, do not ask for or take medical advice of any kind from any LLM.)

However, if and when you do ask an LLM what you should do about a problem, you’re quite literally outsourcing the act of thinking to that LLM. Extrapolating out from there, it’s no surprise that interacting with AI in the form of LLMs may have dire implications for users’ cognitive wellbeing over time, as a 2025 study at MIT found. According to the study’s abstract, “LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels” over the course of the four month study. And that tracks when you think about it. The idea that AI is having a negative impact on its users’ cognitive abilities should really be intuitive. Just as teachers assign essays in part to teach their students how to think about complex subjects and how to organize their thoughts, it follows that outsourcing those activities is going cause those abilities to atrophy over time.

So if interacting with AI tools like ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot can cause our ability to form cogent thoughts to deteriorate, why the big push to shove it into everything under the sun? Is there even a single CEO out there that thinks this is a bad idea for their products, their employees, or the world? Regardless of industry, companies of all kinds are introducing AI into their workflows in an attempt to save money and increase efficiency. Similarly, lately it seems like AI is being injected into any product with room for a microchip.

It’s true that many, MANY companies have embraced the promises of AI, but there are some business leaders who are worried that their employees will suffer from skill atrophy due to the effects I mentioned earlier, and with good reason. There is evidence that passive reliance on AI (e.g., copying & pasting the output from an LLM, etc.) can have lasting impacts on users, even after they return to manual work. However, working more collaboratively with AI did not have the same effect as the passive reliance since the users felt a greater psychological connection to their work as a result of being involved in its creation rather than just regurgitating the results the LLM provided.

It is also worth noting that there have been some companies that are having second thoughts about at least some of their AI-related endeavors. Meta can’t make up its mind about whether it’s shutting down the Metaverse, a hilarious turn of events after rebranding and reorganizing Facebook and its other properties around it. OpenAI also announced that they are shutting down the Sora AI video generating app, a decision that is calling the future of AI generated video into question. Even Microsoft is taking a hint and reducing Copilot’s (entirely unnecessary) presence in some of their apps, like Notepad.

So why continue to push for AI in the workplace and increasingly everywhere else? Naturally, it comes down to a combination of money and power, although in this context (& many others, really) the two are essentially one and the same. The billionaires pushing for this stuff don’t care that it is making people even stupider; to them, that is a feature, not a bug. After all, these are the same people that believe introspection is stupid, and that “the great men of history didn’t sit around [being introspective],” as Marc Andreesen put it. They certainly don’t want us plebians spending time thinking, far too much trouble can come from that. After all, [we] love the poorly educated, don’t we, folks?

The billionaires, but most especially the tech billionaires, want the rest of us to be facile sheep who are easily manipulated, hindered in our ability to even properly conceive of or describe our exploitation, trapped in their Great Value branded Matrix. This line of thinking does not appear to factor in the question of who will buy things from them when no one except them has any money because we all were replaced by robots at work, but hey, that kind of logic has never stopped the billionaire class before. I’m sure they’ve thought of some sort of final solution for us.

Unfortunately, it seems likely that in the immediate future we will continue to be bombarded with artificial everything. All the more reason to try to spend more time enjoying stuff here in the real world if you ask me.