Mahanth is Editor

As the winter holiday season of 2025 unfolds, artificial intelligence has seared itself into a scorchingly hot topic of debate in the peculiarly human worlds. Business, economics, politics, law, art, music, film, the news media, science, philosophy, pornography, romance, mental health and so much more. Our society is becoming saturated by talk of AI. Never has so much been said by so many about a thing of which so little is known by so few. Corporations are deceptively marketing many things as AI because it’s the leading buzzword in the business world today. Appropriately, AI is the supreme cipher of our times that is yet to be deciphered, with countless experts and dilettantes alike coming to wildly divergent and dramatic conclusions with high conviction about where the train is headed as it keeps picking up steam. The only certainty in this uncertain and contentious reality we now find ourselves in is we are all in this together. Stuck on the crowded accelerating bullet train that just might become a slow moving train wreck, whether we bought a ticket to ride on this convoy of parading compartments and metaphors or not.

Positive, negative or neutral, it’s impossible that anybody can accurately predict the events of the coming years, least of all the most advanced AI we have come up with or the hyper scalers investing billions of dollars in the arms race to develop the best models in the 21st Century Roaring Twenties of Forty-Niners. Everyone is projecting their own biases onto what AI even means, often with a passion typically reserved for deep multigenerational religious and political beliefs. Ultimately the impact of AI on humanity will be a Black Mirror reflection on humanity itself with all our glory and shortcomings.

Some sobriety is needed though amidst the noise. Let us examine the loudest competing AI groupthink narratives emerging these last few years that will spill into 2026 and beyond. With my two cents from trying to integrate AI into my own life workflows for several years. That includes enjoying mega bites of fun with it.

AI Will Totally Change Everything Forever, Fast! Our world is definitely changing with new technology at speed, and AI is no doubt a big, big deal. In the process AI is making for some very strange bedfellows, and I’m not just talking about the legions of lonesome young men having inter-species cybersex with chatbot girlfriends. Those who believe AI is an unstoppable force that will infiltrate all aspects of society might lean into fear of total annihilation a la Skynet. Or they might belong to the earnest camp that can’t wait for the robots to help us manifest the next Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, like the Puritans who sailed Westward to America in the 1600s. What these doomers and boomers all have in common is a belief that the robots will overturn everything soon. They can’t both be right. In fact they can both be wrong! As far as extinction goes, nuclear weapons presented the opportunity to wipe out human life 70 years ago in very short order and remains the much higher risk for now though we’ve managed to avoid nuclear Armageddon so far. Pessimists about new AI military weapons being deployed are right to be alarmed and demand safeguards are put into place to avoid uncontrolled cyber warfare outbreak led by AI agent Overlords- the topic of my techno thriller novel. As for the dreams of utopia, none of our useful groundbreaking inventions over many centuries got us to the promised land for all. We keep getting in our own damn way no matter all the wondrous innovation unleashed that would have seemed miraculous a generation earlier. It’s a bit self-indulgent to believe AI paradise arrives in the 2020s just for our generation without better evidence. Maybe that evidence will come- if extinction doesn’t. Or maybe we’ll find ourselves on a middle path, where AI is another useful technology but doesn’t ever upend the world order forever?

Everyone is Going to Lose their Jobs! As the theory goes the need or desire by humans for human services will rapidly disappear in the next (X) number of years because AI powered software and hardware will fulfill all of the productivity needed to replace our meat bag bodies with electronic goods and services. To me this sounds either far-fetched or very, very far off, beyond our lifetimes at least. Industries and job titles are born and die naturally due to technology. Monks copying scripture letter by letter with feather quills and bottles of ink lost their jobs to the printing press, and books multiplied as if by magic. When automobiles and assembly lines overtook the horse and buggy industry that dominated global ground transportation for millennia, in just a few short years, a lot of horseshoe makers and stable hands lost their careers. But new jobs were created at gas stations, tire factories and auto mechanic shops. Bulldozers replaced manpower wielding shovels to build roads and canals. Thousands of blimp pilots gave way to millions of airplane and helicopter pilots. Sure, some jobs are at risk because of AI, such as professional drivers, customer service reps, translators, burger flippers, fighter jet pilots, and coders. The common theme of these roles is repetitive tasks that might be leapfrogged over by AI powered hardware and software. In many cases the transition will actually be desirable, especially with hazardous jobs like coal mining and logging. No matter what, the market will decide with its cold calculations. And it will take quite a while in most affected industries.

AI Is Not Going to Take Away Any Jobs! The opposing argument is weakening by the day, and is led by those with a poor understanding of the valuable real-world applications enabled by evolving AI hardware deployments. Waymo, Tesla, and other robotaxi companies are already providing driverless rides and deliveries every day in more and more cities in America and China. Many Amazon warehouses, factories, and public utilities utilize robots to automate tasks humans did exclusively just a few years ago. This stuff will only get better. On the other hand, some jobs should be safe for years. The skilled trades such as auto mechanic, plumber, electrician, welder, and steamfitter should have jobs for life in much of the world due to the wide variety of hands-on tasks they do on numerous types of equipment and brands with different tools. They are often tasked with inspecting and maintaining very old equipment, buildings and aging infrastructure generally, which require trained human experience to navigate. Meanwhile services like massage therapy, professional athletics, prostitution, medical care, childcare, and priesthood will require the human touch in more ways than one for as far as the eye can see. The ideal scenario is AI will continue to augment the tasks of humans doing existing jobs that will be in demand for many more years.

AI Is a Bubble that’s About to Burst! In 2025 the drumbeats increased about how AI investment is out of control, revenues have no hopes of justifying the massive spending by the companies and governments involved in the race, and that AI will never be worth it anyway because it isn’t producing anything useful. Indeed AI slop, hallucinations, dangerous behaviors, and deepfakery have been out of control. These arguments are compelling, but a bit unfair considering how nascent the industry is. We are at the very beginning of a new era. There’s going to be major pain along the way. It may well turn out that we’re in a giant bubble that’s going to violently pop, or slow leak, destroying companies and the economy along with it, but it’s way too soon to tell. This argument ignores the many promising, if early returns especially on hardware applications that can add value to the GDP at levels we can’t possibly judge yet. This too comes down to the mathematical reality of supply and demand. If the promise goes unfulfilled, it’s still better than not having tried at all.

The Age of Optimism! I am cautiously optimistic about artificial intelligence today, although we covered many warning signs. There will be bumps along the way.. The world’s major institutions with the power to affect the future unwritten course of AI have a solemn duty to regulating it responsibly and safely, while proactively managing the race between companies and nations to come out on top. We the People who use AI have a similar responsibility to not use it for harm, like guns and viruses of the digital and original varieties. One doesn’t work without the other. It’s hard not to believe humans were destined to arrive at this point, where the creation of an intelligence exceeding our own for the first time is becoming a possibility. The opportunities for improving society are endless if that’s the case, especially on the most challenging problems we have thus far proved incapable of tackling on our own. The optimist in me chooses to believe that AI could be the answer to preventing violent conflict, solving climate change once and for all, curing diseases, improving our understanding of outer space, and so much more discovery if done right. We also should know from history that this could all go sideways fast, if we are playing with forces we don’t learn or care enough to contain.

In the end, the future of AI is entirely up to us. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Technology is just the tool. Our tool. It always has been since the dawn of time. There’s no going back. There’s enough hope and that is what we need to stay motivated today. It’s a better approach than proclaiming that tomorrow a chaotic Hellscape awaits no matter what we do, or a Godly panacea for all our ills is guaranteed by an army of agentic bots. At least in late 2025 the truth probably lies somewhere in between. We cannot just chill. We should be working relentlessly to raise AI to become the best of us, like children. Whitney Houston said our children are our future. That future she sang of in the 1980s is now.