17th June

Walking the tightrope

The age of artificial intelligence has dawned not with a bang but with a ripple; an encroaching tide of quiet, shimmering waves that slowly erode the shores beneath our feet. And it is not just tech bro’s who are suckling at the teat. Designers, nurses, warehouse workers, and even lawyers are participants in this unravelling and reweaving of human labour.

The AI revolution doesn't look like we imagined. There are no chrome-plated humanoids stalking down the avenues of power. Instead, the transformation is inked into contracts, slipped into product updates, and whispered by voice assistants who listen better than they speak. It's a revolution without smoke, fire, or a single raised fist; just a reshuffling of organs behind the skin of the world.

The ghost in the machine

AI was meant to be our tool, like the wheel, the loom, the printing press. But as these systems increasingly write code, summarise court cases, generate images, and mimic voices, the line between instrument and interlocutor blurs. A designer feeding prompts to an image generator is no longer wielding a brush but conjuring ghosts through a mirror. The canvas has been replaced by a seance.

Creative workers, long seen as the last bastion of irreplaceable human intuition, now find themselves in the same precarious boat as truck drivers and call centre workers. The promise that “AI will free us for more creative work” rings hollow when the machine is also the one doing the painting, the composing, the joke-telling. We are told to move up the value chain, but the staircase keeps retracting just as our foot lands on it.

Cloud empires and data baronies

Beneath the slick interfaces of modern AI lie oceans of scraped data; text, art, music, dreams. This is harvested from the public commons and recombined without consent. This is the logic of empire: to gather the raw materials of human expression, process them at scale, and sell the derivative commodities back to us. It is enclosure, not innovation.

The big tech firms: OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta; are no longer just companies; they are sovereign actors, floating above regulation like castles tethered to the earth by fibre-optic vines. Their competition is framed as war, but it's a war like sport: meant to entertain, never to end, and always reinforcing the central narrative that only a few deserve to shape the future.

A thousand small automations

While doomsayers fixate on the singularity; the real displacement is slower and more granular. It’s in the automation of meeting notes, the drafting of emails, the triaging of patients. Each micro-efficiency chips away at the space where humans once dwelled. The workplace becomes a tunnel of frictionless tasks, each decision assisted, each interaction filtered, until it is no longer clear where we begin and the system ends.

This is not liberation; it is liquefaction. We become the data that trains the next model. We are the past feeding the present's predictive hunger.

Displacement as default

The new world of AI is not one of post-scarcity abundance, but of intensified competition. Institutions adapt not to protect their people but to remain legible to the algorithmic regimes that now govern relevance, efficiency, and funding. The university restructures for "AI-enhanced learning." The hospital retools for predictive diagnostics. Even the poem, that most intimate human breath, is now optimised for virality by language models with perfect recall and no soul.

To live in this world is to be constantly out of place. To write and wonder whether your words are yours. To create and question whether the act itself still matters. We are like gardeners tending to digital soil, only to find synthetic roots already growing beneath our feet.

The narrow gate

Still, a choice remains. We can build a life that centres the social, not just the computational. We can demand slowness, transparency, repair. We can insist that not every process be made efficient, not every artefact optimised, not every moment mediated. But that path is narrow, and growing narrower. It will not be chosen by default or discovered through inertia. It must be fought for locally, collectively, with friction and refusal.

We must learn to see again: to recognise not just what is made possible by these systems, but what is made impossible, because when the world is remade by invisible hands, to notice is itself an act of resistance.