An Honest Letter to the People in Charge

On AI, empty promises, and the cost of surviving a future nobody asked for

Sci-fi got here first. And that should scare you — not inspire you. Not because science fiction is always right, but because the stories we keep telling ourselves about the future have never once shown us a world where artificial intelligence made ordinary life better for ordinary people. Not one film. Not one novel that broke through to the mainstream with a genuinely hopeful vision — and maybe a few have tried, but even then the world is broken, because that is what drives the plot. The machines rise. The systems fail. The humans revolt. We’ve been writing this warning for decades. The people building the technology either haven’t read it, or they have and they just don’t care. That tracks with every hierarchy where the people most protected from consequences are the ones making the decisions.

To be fair — there are real reasons to be hopeful. AI accelerating cancer research. Giving doctors better diagnostic tools. Making education accessible to people who’ve been locked out of it their whole lives. Bridging language barriers. Helping students in under-resourced schools actually learn at their own pace. Bringing awareness to mental health and breaking down the stigmas that have kept people suffering in silence. These aren’t small things. These are the possibilities that should be driving this conversation. Because if you’re going to argue that AI is going to change the world, that’s the world worth changing.

But making things easier to do doesn’t automatically make life easier to live. Cutting time in half doesn’t solve the problem underneath, and that’s what people are scared of, their lack of reasoning to live, the fear of dying alone for many reasons associated with this.

Look at what’s actually flooding our feeds right now.

AI-generated art. AI-written posts. Selfies smoothed and sculpted into something that was never a real face. Tutorials on how to use the latest AI feature, degrees in how to use AI. Students submitting work that was never a real thought — just a prompt and a copy-paste. A content machine running at full speed, producing more of everything… Except meaning. We were promised a future where technology would carry the weight so humans could finally do more of what matters. Instead, we got a faster way to fake it.

And here’s what nobody at the top seems to want to talk about: 

if AI is doing this much — writing, designing, calculating, optimizing — why is everything still so expensive? If automation creates efficiency, where is that efficiency actually going? Because it’s not showing up in rent. It’s not showing up in groceries. It’s not showing up in wages. The cost of living is still way too high to even think about enjoying life, let alone building one. We used to be able to buy a house on a 9-to-5. A real one. That was not that long ago.

Say we start losing our jobs to AI the way we lost them during Covid suddenly, quietly, with no real plan for what comes next. Nothing will drive the economy anymore. We’re left with AI-run businesses and a whole lot of slop — that’s actually what people are calling it now. The Mom and Pop shop you love so much, the one with the person behind the counter who knows your name? Gone. Not because it failed. Because it couldn’t compete with automation and a rising rent it never caused.

What fills the gap? 

Everyone becomes a personal brand. A business front for their homemade candles. A content creator selling their personality because it’s the only thing that can’t be automated yet. Because once those prices rose during Covid, nobody planned on bringing them back down. And they haven’t.

There are people who will read this and not worry at all… Probably because it benefits them so much that the concern doesn’t land. That’s a whole other conversation, a whole other can of worms. I can go outside and touch grass. But touching grass doesn’t pay rent. It doesn’t fix a system that extracted the most from the people with the least support and called it progress.

Technology isn’t the villain here, I love technology. But the priorities of the people steering it might be. Because right now, the loudest applications of AI are making it easier to produce without thinking, to appear without being, to optimize without ever asking — optimize for what, exactly? And for whom? Their own kind.

If you’re in the room where these decisions get made, the boardrooms, the policy tables, the research labs — I’m asking you to look up from the stats for one second. Look at what’s happening to actual people. Look at what’s being quietly hollowed out while the numbers go up. Maybe you’ll never know, but you could spy on normal people to figure it out. Maybe hire someone to wear a camera so you can get an idea and feel for how they live.

We have not accelerated as a human race to face what we’re seeing with AI, and still are run by hatred, racism and competition just like an Animal Kingdom. We are still facing indecent rights when it comes to justice in court. The same behaviours except with a new and improved update.

The worst part is you cannot control people, you can never satisfy people, you can never change their behaviours. There is not a single system in place that will satisfy all people, and there may never be at this rate.