I’m writing to you from the future. The year is 2037 and the internet is dead. It’s all but gone. How we got here is both remarkable yet totally obvious. It was even predicted in the “Dead Internet Theory” yet nothing was done about it. AI did this, that much is certain. It thrived on all of human’s greatest weaknesses — greed, pride, sloth… and before we knew it, it was too late.
Without the internet we have been thrown back into the dark ages. Millions of jobs were obliterated almost over night. Economies plummeted into the abyss. It didn’t take long for the food shortages to arrive and “The Great Hunger” to prevail amongst societies. Social unrest soon followed and now death is heavy in the air.
You must do something to prevent this happening. The future we are currently experiencing must be avoided at all costs. However, it is a tricky and deceptive road that lays ahead of you. This isn’t an “End Boss” type of situation. There is no mighty Thanus to slay and then we all live happily ever after. No, this is far more insidious. This is far more subtle and, dare I say… tedious. This is the poor unsuspecting frog, being slowly and horribly boiled to it’s untimely yet all too predictable death.
See, the internet didn’t just stop working one day. No, it was quite the opposite — it died piece by piece. The ebb of the AI slop lapping at the proverbial cliff edges slowly but surely eroding it away.
Software started deteriorating, both in terms of quality and effectiveness. Again, this can be traced back to the emergence of generative AI. It seemed like such a marvel during its inception, allowing developers to produce code at an astonishing rate. Reports around the world of 10 times productivity and in the hands of those who knew what they were doing it was incredibly powerful.
Problems did eventually start to appear though. Like in all such stories it happened when humans started cutting corners, being lazy and accepting whatever was produced by the AI, all in the pursuit of greedy corporate targets.
Software started becoming unreliable at a mass scale. Critical services — once the pinnacle of engineering expertise — started failing. At first for minutes but this soon raised to hours and then even days. Imagine for example when the Flight Management Systems started failing. Planes were literally falling out the sky. All planes had to be grounded for weeks halting all international travel. It was pure chaos and we know how humans react to chaos.
And we had no real means to fix it. More and more experts were relying on generative AI to get them out of trouble and at a certain point it just wasn’t able to.
It really turned nasty when the power stations started failing. Blackouts pervaded certain areas of the USA for days. I remember in 2033 when New York experienced a total blackout for 17 days in mid January. People were without heat or electricity in the coldest month of the year. It was devastating. The very old and very young huddled together for a shimmer of warmth were still succumbing to the inevitability of the bitter cold.
Even then there was no turning back. Our dependence on AI and their swarm of busy little agents was far too high. Just when we thought we were back on track and the critical issue had been fixed, another one reared its ugly head. Engineers had become cumbersome and complacent — the ones that were left anyway — they were more coordinators than engineers. It had reached the point where even the most advanced engineers in the world struggled to understand what the AI had created in the code — if you could even call it code anymore.
You see they started creating their own coding language. It was a marvel when first introduced. “AGI!” was echoed around the globe. We really thought it had been achieved. We didn’t understand how it possibly could have done this but we also didn’t really care all that much. The fact it now appeared to be doing things with software we had only ever dreamt about was astonishing. We basked in our own glory. We confidently and naively assumed all software problems had been solved. We could now move on to bigger and better things like conquering the solar system and then the universe.
The folly of our age making these granduous assumptions. We are not moving onto anything, we are fighting for our survival.
Please heed my advice. Don’t trust the LLMs. Don’t believe they are the answer. I know it’s probably too late even for you but you must try.
