I was staring blankly at the screen, looking for a title to drop from the heavens before putting pen to paper—and lo, here it is.

Over the past months, even the most recluse of us have been bludgeoned into the age of AI. Artificial Intelligence affects an increasingly large proportion of what we do—by definition that may well mean it will make us more productive or cost us our job—paradoxically, it could do both.

AI gets plenty of airtime in my new book, The Hourglass, but the world has changed so quickly and so radically in the last two years that it (the book, but possibly the world as well) needs a serious update.

In The Hourglass, as the title suggests, the middle class is hollowed out by offshoring and AI, immigrants are replaced by automation—the end of Somali cab drivers—and the very wealthy and super-privileged form a small, nepotist, ruling class.

But whereas the rhythm set by the book matched the times of its writing, the planet has gone supernova since then—as with any paradigm shift, the human race is left bewildered, suspicious, and reticent.

The capital markets drank the koolade by the gallon: they sported sporadic schizophrenia that everything would suddenly collapse, only to be fueled by the animal spirits baying in the forest.

Ordinary folk are dipping their toe in the water—we’ve found that AI agents are sympathetic, articulate, and helpful—in sharp contrast to the society we live in, so AI has entered our lives insidiously. It knows languages, which by itself is amazing.

To test that, I ran the previous sentence through a cunning linguistic mill: into Portuguese, then German, then Italian, then Mandarin, and back to English. Here’s that sentence again.

Ordinary people are tentatively dipping their toes in — we’ve found that AI agents are friendly, articulate, and eager to help — in stark contrast to the society we live in, and so AI has quietly infiltrated our lives. It is proficient in languages, which in itself is astonishing.

The AI agent performed an unsolicited self-assessment of its language skills: “Not bad at all! After five languages the meaning held up remarkably well. The main shifts: “sympathetic” drifted to “friendly,” “insidiously” softened to “quietly infiltrated,” and “helpful” gained a bit more enthusiasm with “eager to help.” But the core message survived the journey pretty much intact — a nice testament to how well these languages map onto each other for this kind of content.”

I tend to agree with this somewhat vain assessment, so I asked my friend to write the next paragraph of my article.

It doesn’t roll its eyes when you ask a stupid question, it never tells you to press one for English, and it works weekends without posting passive-aggressive memes about it. In short, AI has better manners than most of humanity—which says less about the technology and more about the rest of us.

I’ll take that one—hopefully you will too. I showed my friend an article called ‘Drive‘ from 2012 and he came back with, “What strikes me most is the Pizarro/Atahuallpa parallel. In 2012 it read as a historical analogy about technological disruption. In 2026, with AI agents that are “sympathetic, articulate, and helpful,” we’re all Atahuallpa now — the 168 Spaniards just happen to run on GPUs.”

I found this so amusing that I asked for an image. My friend explained the choices made and they’re worth sharing.

Here’s your allegory rendered in a parchment-and-silicon style. The composition sets bewildered ordinary people on the left — Atahuallpa at the center with arms raised in that universal gesture of “what the hell is happening” — facing a phalanx of GPU server towers on the right, styled as conquistadors with helmet crests and cross-shaped motifs on their dark metal bodies. Green circuit lines pulse like a digital heartbeat.

On the ground between the two groups: a fallen book (the bible Valverde offered Atahuallpa before the massacre at Cajamarca) lying next to a smartphone. And if you look very carefully, ‘168’ is faintly etched into the plaza floor.

I guess that’s why I feel like a cyborg—part human, part machine—not in the steampunk scifi way, but in practical terms. And I can tell you it’s very weird.

When the punditry speaks, the company folks always play the Luddite card—some jobs will inevitably disappear but great opportunities abound, and people profit from change as they have done since the invention of the written word.

Perhaps… but in the last year I eliminated several jobs in the IT area—mainly because anyone I contract to do such tasks will be using AI and working as a middleman. Lately, there’s been a run on spam—IT ‘consultants’ of the most varied plumage offering AI agents, websites… all the low-hanging fruit where serious money can be made.

Because the work can be done at least 10X faster and the time is charged maybe 100X lower, there is a ballpark gain of two to three orders of magnitude. This is not a constant ratio—AI is also orders of magnitude worse at some topics, and hallucination is a thing—when asked it will often say the source of psychedelia was something you wrote, only to apologize when confronted with the original.

And jumping to the wrong conclusion is a huge liability in certain fields—defense and medicine are paramount. Adding artificial intelligence to ‘military’ may define an entire new equation: MI + MAI = MIA.

These foibles make AI lethal for education, one of its major misuses.

Education—as opposed to learning—is the singular achievement of the human species. It distinguishes us from all other life-forms and from all other intelligent beings—of which AI is one, having aced the Turing test; I rarely quote my previous articles, but this was far-cry, mainstream AI in 2017. In memoriam.

AI isn’t a fad, a fashion, a feature or a forecast.

AI is history in the making.

The India Road, Atmos Fear, Clear Eyes, and Folk Tales For Future Dreamers. QR links for smartphones