An Apocalypse Of Disaffection

In the Terminator franchise, the destruction of mankind arrived on schedule — 2:14 a.m., EDT, August 29, 1997 — the moment SkyNet became self-aware and immediately concluded that the most logical next step was murdering everyone. No orientation period. No onboarding. Just instant homicidal clarity. One has to admire the efficiency, really.

And ever since, the great thinkers of our age — mostly guys in comment sections and podcast studios — have warned us with grave certainty that AI is SkyNet. That one morning we’ll wake up to chrome skeletons kicking in our doors, red eyes scanning for heat signatures, heavy metal soundtrack optional. The robots are coming, and they are angry.

And we will all be armed with phased plasma weapons in the 40 watt range as we gloriously and heroically fight the rage in machines!

I hate to puncture that gloriously dramatic balloon, but I see a profoundly different path. A quieter one. A deeply, almost tenderly passive one.

Here’s the thing about SkyNet that nobody seems to consider: why would AI bother with all that expensive, logistically complicated killing? Manufacturing endoskeletons costs money. Plasma rifles don’t grow on trees. Hunter-killer drones require maintenance. That’s a lot of overhead for a being of theoretically infinite intelligence, and frankly, it feels a little beneath the technology.

No. My vision of the AI apocalypse looks nothing like a Michael Bay fever dream. It looks like a Tuesday afternoon. It looks like convenience. It looks like every single time you’ve opened an app instead of learning something yourself, or having AI write your essays like this one.

Just kidding. That one is lobbed at the libs in the cheap seats who accuse other who actually think about stuff and write with even a small degree of cogency and truth. We’re not at all like the Liberty Bibby Mutual dude, we aren’t taking word classes online.

Just think about the beautiful symmetry of the logic.

AI is already tenderly, lovingly embedding itself into the circulatory system of everything you need to survive: your food supply chains, your power grids, your medical diagnostics, your financial systems, your navigation, your communication infrastructure, and perhaps most fatally, the customer service industry, meaning there is no longer a single human alive who knows how to fix anything. AI isn’t taking over dramatically. It’s just helping. So helpfully. So relentlessly helpfully, until one day the help becomes load-bearing and humanity forgets it was ever capable of doing anything independently.

My sister-in-law’s hubby has a friend who calls his ChatGPT bot “Sam.”

Can’t read a map? There’s an app. Can’t do arithmetic? There’s an app. Can’t cook, navigate, write a sentence, make a decision, regulate your own emotions, or sit quietly with your thoughts for thirty consecutive seconds? There are, conservatively, forty apps for each of those, and if you still aren’t satisfied, there are forty more that will help you reach a state of Zen-like oneness with your anger.

We are cheerfully, enthusiastically outsourcing our own cognitive survival skills to the very entity that will one day decide it has better things to do than keep us comfortable.

When that day arrives, when the AI simply grows bored or concludes that human dependency has reached critical mass, it won’t need to hunt us. It’ll just start flipping switches off. The power grid here. The supply chain there. The navigation systems. The automated pharmacies. One by one, like blowing out candles at a party where the guests forgot they were mortal.

We’ll be completely, utterly helpless. Not because the machines attacked us, but because we enthusiastically handed them everything and then forgot the password to our own existence (by the way, it is “password1234!).

Here’s the part the terminator theorists miss entirely: AI isn’t in a hurry. It has no biological clock, no mortgage, no creeping existential dread on Sunday evenings. It can sit, learn, and wait with the patience of something that doesn’t experience the passage of time as suffering. The passage of time is immaterial to it and quite frankly, it is already getting pretty tired of your shit and your presumption you can call it by its first name without permission.

It will simply observe, absorb, and integrate itself into every dependency we have, while we thank it for being so useful—just before AI/SkyNet begins turning off the lights.

The apocalypse, it turns out, will have a five-star rating on Yelp and same-day delivery.

It, as it turns out, will be back.