AI's Going to Make Things Get Weirder & Weirder & Weirder & Weirder
An unprecedented amount of energy is hurtling towards AI without guardrails, shackles or security... what could possibly go wrong?
The first month of 2025 has already wrought a radical sweep of the power from the U.S. government into the hands of Big Tech…
Musk has strolled into the U.S. treasury, his team of “engineers” at hand to block and observe payments, including to his own competitors, installing hard drives, gaining access to all the payments of the trillion dollar, taxpayer-fueled system. The insane rate of innovative disruptions has become casual news to us. All over the world, the digital industry is becoming entrenched in economic structures, namely in the form of AI, cryptocurrency, and the Internet of things.
Woe to us once wary of Big Tech harvesting our data, for it only took them cozying up to the Trump administration before a cabal of tech creeps took major liberties over the federal government. How quickly the U.S. is moving towards the model of technocracy in China. Still, the concentration of powers regardless of whose hands also decrees where investment and growth emerge. In this case, the yearning, or perhaps greed, for the space, digital, and crypto industries, has created a fascinating but scary subgroup within Conservative America. They are anti-immigrant but pro-Mars, some fearing AGI while lauding the Big Tech elite who attended the Trump inauguration. Now these other fringe groups across the world, especially in Europe and Asia, as well as parts of South America, following similar patterns. We will have a look at them later, but first, we have to dive into the rabbit hole. What is happening now is a pivot point, a moment of total upheaval. Things are moving so fast while also breaking. Soon there will be very little of the natural environment left available to us, instead, only a landscape of simulacra, AI-generated copies of something that never existed.
What AI’s really about is labour. The more measurable labour is, the easier it becomes to plan and manage. With the ability to measure the cost and performance of an AI service or agent, businesses stand to benefit from using AI more and more for large-scale operations. As we’ll get into later, many workers feel like AI has increased their workload. This is because there are higher expectations of their output given their use of the tool. At the same time, others do not get even superficial value from AI in their roles and many will lose their jobs entirely because of it. Black box algorithms sit at the crux of core decisions; everything from insurance, recruitment, surveillance and criminal profiling. Economy has shifted away from labour-centricity into a fixation on financial and technological capital.
While workers’ rights and wealth inequality get a lot worse, political parties around the world know how to stir the pot while offering some kind of vision of technology used to create a dystopic future. Since the parties controlling the growth and development of AI (or deregulating it, for that matter), are the same ones tapping into the most divisive of social media content, fanning the flames of trolls, incels, and hate speech. We don’t even need an AGI or superintelligent AI to destroy us all: just any old AI used for critical infrastructure trained on sufficiently hateful data.
In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has aligned itself with claims of digital sovereignty, AI investment, and crypto adoption, all while maintaining hardline anti-immigration views. German tech entrepreneurs, disillusioned with EU regulations, see AfD as a potential vehicle for a Silicon Reich, a digitally empowered Germany unshackled from Brussels’ control. Some AfD thinkers have even proposed using AI to automate border control and surveillance. Meanwhile in France, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) once railed against Silicon Valley’s power but is now courting nationalist-aligned tech investors. AI startups with French-first policies are thriving under Le Pen-aligned networks. French conservative leadership aspires towards AI-automated resource extraction on the Moon and Mars—yet they oppose earthly migration to France.
Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has merged big tech nationalism with authoritarian digital control, building out AI research, quantum computing, and state-backed cryptocurrency initiatives. Orbán plays both sides—criticizing globalist tech monopolies while welcoming Chinese AI investment to make Hungary the Silicon Valley of Central Europe. He envisions a Hungary where AI strengthens border security and predictive policing, all while denouncing AGI as a "globalist threat."
Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has weaponized AI and digital governance, creating a paradox: India is a tech powerhouse yet maintains strict citizenship controls. Crypto-billionaires and tech elites cozy up to Modi, much like Musk with Trump. India’s space ambitions under ISRO’s privatization push have attracted Hindu nationalist narratives—pro-space, anti-immigrant, and skeptical of AI’s unchecked power. Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) champions robotics, AI, and digital self-sufficiency, yet immigration remains tightly controlled. The tech elite in Japan sees automation as the solution to labor shortages, not migration. Japanese space expansionists believe in AI-managed interplanetary colonization, yet balk at the idea of foreign workers "colonizing" Japan itself.
In Latin America, a new pattern of tech-libertarian authoritarianism has emerged, led by Argentina's President Javier Milei, who champions Bitcoin while denouncing central banks and expressing admiration for tech moguls like Musk. Brazil’s Bolsonaro movement consists of conservative crypto investors, while maintaining strict opposition to leftist immigration from Venezuela, alongside ambitious space development plans through the Alcântara Launch Center's privatization. El Salvador's Nayib Bukele, self-styled as the "world's coolest dictator," has taken this fusion furthest by transforming his country into a Bitcoin-powered state, implementing AI-driven policing and blockchain governance while maintaining a strong nationalist "law and order" stance. Bukele's experiment has turned El Salvador into a testing ground for blockchain governance (and using a volcano to power the systems), earning praise from tech libertarians in Musk's circle.
Without going too far into the realm of conspiracy theory, there are “cults”, loosely organized groups who form networks, who have been talking about this shift since the 70s. The preachings of the Order of the Nine Angles come to mind. They claim to be “Satanic” and are essentially a left-hand path militant, occultist, and terrorist organization. According to the Order, a new social order is necessary in order for a galactic civilization to form, in which "Aryan" society will colonize the Milky Way. Somehow this resonates with the times of today where extremists are endorsing Big Tech, harping on their ambitions for space travel, all while turning up the heat, intolerance, and aggression against immigrants, women, LGBTQIA+ and minority ethnicities. Although the O9A is large (and active) there is no evidence that such cults have actual power or representation. Instead it seems that many subcultures and fringe groups align with these far-right parties taking the center stage.
Values bleed into the things we design and the people we interact with. The world reflects what we think. That’s how political, cultural and moral beliefs are embedded into AI, in both the data and the processes that enable the AI to exist from a technological lens. Never has it been so important to align your actions and thoughts with your behaviours, with both how you use AI and how you shape the environment as a being-in-the-world.
Part of this is recognizing mistakes. A couple of years ago, I wrote an article with the very naive suggestion that developing countries stand to grow from data curation roles. This turned out to be dead wrong, but you can still take a look at my well-intentioned piece here.
AI companies in the Global South frequently outsource tasks such as data filtering, classification, annotation, and labeling to low-wage workers, sometimes earning as little as $100 per month. Chinese AI firms take a different approach by keeping data work within their own country. China has established large-scale data annotation hubs in economically disadvantaged "low-tier cities," leveraging local labor. While some of these hubs stem from poverty alleviation initiatives, they often result in a competitive downward pressure on wages and working conditions. The Chinese government has actively supported this industry, implementing policies between 2023-2024 to expand the sector by 20%. These measures include tax incentives, direct subsidies, and "data vouchers" to stimulate domestic data annotation work.
Meanwhile, low wages and rough working conditions are available to Kenyans, if they agree to work in OpenAI’s content moderation team. It’s strange to contemplate how we still require this. In 2019, Kenya launched the Digital Literacy Program, an initiative aimed at introducing digital technology to primary school students, regardless of their socioeconomic background. This program serves as a blueprint for promoting digital inclusion, preparing future generations for the AI-driven world. kind of work to be done by people in order to fuel so called ‘artificial intelligence’.
Upwork's Research Institute found that 77% of employees using AI tools reported an increase in their workload, with 39% spending more time reviewing or moderating AI-generated content. Additionally, 47% of these employees expressed uncertainty about how to achieve the anticipated productivity gains from AI.
AI annoys many users to no end, myself included. It has a way of sucking attention when being frustratingly unresponsive. ChatGPT auto-suggestions have been shown to interrupt users' main tasks, with programmers referring to Copilot auto-suggestions as interrupting their thoughts, intrusive and messing up thought process. When verifying the correctness of AI-generated code, some programmers reported skimming through the output rather than reading and evaluating the code rigorously.
This fits McLuhan’s concept of the “tetrad." He proposed that every technology 1) enhances something, 2) makes something obsolete, 3) retrieves something from the past, and 4) when pushed to its limits, reverses into something else. Using new tools in practice, many users, such as programmers, report increased cognitive load, frustration, and time spent on the tasks that GenAI is intended to support. The capability of LLMs to manage a wide range of tasks has been thoroughly validated in real-world settings. This shift from production to evaluation, the resultant reduced situational awareness, and additional workload can result in complacency, over-reliance on systems, and increased errors.
The challenge of monitoring automation is further exacerbated by systems' unreliability... evaluation of GenAI outputs is likewise exacerbated by the non-determinism of GenAI models, which can produce different outputs for the same input. Still, AI is not just a tool for productivity. Now the role of AI in every aspect of our humanity brings unexpected questions out. What happens next is a shift in industry and economy, in the form of more personal and anthropomorphic AI systems.
The Henn-na Hotel in Japan, renowned for its extensive use of robotic staff, initially employed 243 robots, including dinosaur-shaped receptionists and in-room assistants. However, the hotel reduced its robotic workforce by more than half due to performance issues. Many robots were ineffective, causing additional workloads for human staff. These dinobots are just the beginning, by the way, because soon AI is going to become really fun.
The history of animatronics and robotics is marked by numerous incidents where machines have malfunctioned, sometimes with dangerous consequences. One of the most famous examples is the Rock-afire Explosion, an animatronic band that performed in Showbiz Pizza Place restaurants during the 1980s. As these machines aged, they began to malfunction—jerky movements, freezing in place, and even continuing to operate after being turned off. While these malfunctions were mostly harmless, they illustrate the potential for eerie and unpredictable behavior in animatronics.
Similarly, Disney theme parks, which use highly sophisticated animatronics, have experienced their share of malfunctions. Then in 2015, a worker at a Volkswagen plant in Germany was killed when a robot arm grabbed him and crushed him against a metal plate. Disney World has seen many accident from animatronic parts falling onto children. How long before they start using LLM-driven animatronics?
As the creators of the real animatronics used in the Five Nights at Freddy's movie adaptation, Jim Henson's Creature Shop plays a crucial role in bringing the lifelike and eerie qualities of the characters to the physical world. These animatronics are complex machines, designed to mimic the unsettling behavior of their in-game counterparts. This reveals a lot about the market today. The Muppets production company now makes children's horror, ironically more similar to the kind of tension induced by Henson’s earlier work
Combining the demand for these animatronics in real life demos or sets with AI trained on the Internet could be catastrophic: it knows exactly what a monster like Freddy should act like, because the franchise is extremely popular over the Internet and therefore significantly represented in training data. Across the many games in the FNAF universe, hundreds of millions of copies have been purchased. The film grossed approximately $300 million, and the franchise has accumulated over 6.3 million hours of Twitch viewership, along with hundreds of millions of views on YouTube, representing something rather frightening about the younger generations.
Across Germany, Japan and some states in the U.S., robobrothels are emerging. These represent only a fraction of the AI adult content market, but that’s a story for another a time.
Forgetting about all the unsettling things we just toured, there is a reason for all this. The untethering of AI from earthly desires, addictions, in other words, the worst of our base instincts, frees us and frees AI too.
Whether we are dancing in the fire in the madhouse at the end of time, or sitting back in the moment of highest entropy, let no one say that we are living in a boring time. An indefatigable beam of energy is moving towards AI without guardrails, shackles or security. What could possibly go wrong? While change is a given, the rate of change has just moved towards lightspeed. It really is going to get weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder. Read on to learn more about the destiny wound within each of us in the cataclysm of a golden dawn.
Or watch this video of McKenna sharing some prescient insights about how strange the future is going to be leading up to a paradigm shift in technology and perception.