After all that AI

Once Upon Now, Inna Etuvgi

May 2026

Summer for me, is time spent at the beach, treading a familiar trail to the broken wharf. Navigating the rocky stretch with an incoming tide, noticing how effortlessly my mind and body found its way, thinking several steps ahead, keeping my shoes dry. All the while, finding the capacity to appreciate this spacious experience - its beauty, its natural intelligence, and my own aliveness. When I stopped, it was easy to feel awe.

And then there is this drone about Artificial Intelligence and robotics. Why settle for the artificial, when the real thing is right in front of us?

Once it was said “if you could teach a chimpanzee to use a typewriter and you had enough chimps and enough typewriters and enough time, eventually they would produce the complete works of Shakespeare.”

I think the Internet has proven this not to be the case!

But the tech dream lives on …. “if you can afford enough NVIDA chips, enough power and enough water to cool them, AI would in the near future, achieve a cataclysmic superintelligence, able solve every problem going – cancer, climate change, inequality, death, etc.” Well maybe not death; it seems there is a non-zero probability that superintelligence could work out that the root cause is humanity itself. And take appropriate action.

And no doubt, mangle from their LLM’s (large language models) a complete set of new theatrical works in the style of William Shakespeare.

Has anyone told these 'tech bros' that solutions already exist, for climate change for instance. So, worsening climate change by spending trillions of dollars on ‘compute’ heating, electrical power, and then using terra-cubic-metres of water to cool it down again, in the hope of finding other solutions that would allow us to keep using the planet as some sort of ash tray, without consequence - may not be the smartest idea. Oh, that’s right, these guys have contingency plans – cryogenics, real estate in Queenstown, down payments on a slice of paradise soon to be offered on Mars.

Hmmm? Anyone read Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s A Brave New World?

I find it hard to believe these ‘tech bros’ are really driven to make the world a better place for anyone other than themselves. I'm not counting a more fulfilling life for YT (yours truly), thanks to OpenAI, Antrophic and the rest of the gang. Their deep drivers would more likely be found at the intersection of the dark triad of psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism. Am I being a cynic?

I’m not a suspicious person. But I am suspicious of all this hype around AI. Yes deeply cynical of the motives of these tech billionaires investing trillions of dollars in Nvida chips and datacentres. I’m pretty sure they’re not motivated to make my life more fulfilling. Could it be that they are only interested in acquiring more money, more power? Just a crazy thought.

By the way, I’m not talking here about all the clever AI solutions for 'particular' problems – analysis, pattern recognition, translation, automating dull repetitive tasks, etc.

It’s the hype about AGI, generative AI that I have a problem with. It’s the AI that claims to be about to achieve unimaginable superintelligence. All based on the assumption, or delusion, that everything, e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g – writing, spreadsheets, analysis, knowledge, thinking, experience, design, imagination, creativity, beauty, wisdom, all the way up to consciousness itself - can be reduced to a string of zero’s and one’s, colliding at the speed of silicon, half the speed of light. Engineers are working to speed this up!

This generative AI will be a ‘bust’ I reckon. And I’m not the only one it seems. Here’s a plausible rationale for all the hype, from Cory Doctorow in The Guardian…

“This is the paradox of the growth stock. While you are growing to domination, the market loves you, but once you achieve dominance, the market lops 75% or more off your value in a single stroke if they do not trust your pricing power.

Which is why growth-stock companies are always desperately pumping up one bubble or another, spending billions to hype the pivot to video or cryptocurrency or NFTs or the metaverse or AI.”

Full article here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur

And, when the bubble bursts, ....

On the bright side, is this AGI really just the end of reductionism? Another case of the hubris of tech overreach. A good idea that’s just taken itself too seriously, too universally, too far for anyones good.

A final proof perhaps that another AI – Actual Intelligences – might be worth deploying, cultivating.

Actual Intelligences in all their glorious forms. More on this to follow ....

In the meantime, will Artificial Intelligence make you, your teams, your organisations, humanity more intelligent?