Flying blind at speedlight: AI already took over
date
Dec 23, 2025
slug
2025-flying-blind-at-speedlight-ai-already-took-over
status
Published
tags
AI
capitalism
technology
speed
type
Post
summary
Time is always passing quickly, but this time it’s passing even faster than we could have imagined. Welcome to the AI-driven hyperspace.
If we could go back just a decade and say that by 2025 we'd be producing whole albums in any style, writing novels and philosophy books, sorting vast databases, generating half the text on the internet, and creating images and videos of things that never happened—with a level of perfection impossible for humans to detect—we'd dismiss it as delirious. Yet this is all on the table now. The timeframe of "a decade" no longer applies. Even imagining what will happen in six months is a mystery. A future arriving at light speed is the most dangerous moment in history—and that's exactly where we are.
Take Spotify, so we stay in tech and avoid discussing a dying old industry. The world's most popular music app broke new ground by creating a business model everyone thought would never work due to copyright issues (like what happened to YouTube two decades ago). Now Spotify is watching its perfected business model teeter on the edge of an abyss—because Suno, the world's preferred music-composing app, is pumping out an amount of music equivalent to Spotify's entire catalogue twice a month. Yes, that's right: Suno is generating as much music as all digitised music ever created—every two weeks. And Spotify is flipping out.
They should be worried. Spotify never imagined it would face a storage problem. Don't blame them—no one would have. As data centres multiply and hard disks grow ever larger (don't mention "cloud"—it's just marketing; the entire internet still runs on good old-fashioned disks or similar), Spotify will soon discover it may not be able to pay Google (its hosting provider) enough to store hundreds of millions of "new" songs. I put "new" in quotes because AI doesn't generate anything truly new (though one could argue that no metal band in history did anything but repackage Black Sabbath and Motörhead). Philosophical matters aside, the problem remains: if Spotify's Google bill doubles every two weeks, will they pull off another magic trick like when they convinced musicians and labels that Spotify was unavoidable?
You might feel the urge to say "yes" or "no", but the only honest answer is "I don't have the foggiest idea". AI is no longer playing the predictable tricks we expected—siphoning money from everyone into Sam Altman and his tech bros' pockets. Problems like the one Spotify is facing are already byproducts of AI's impact. You can't even use the word "revolution" because it suggests change. What's happening right now is more like a 10-degree-Richter-scale levelling of everything. The problems that will emerge in the next six months may be unthinkable to 99% of people right now. And as AI deployment accelerates, the timeframe will grow shorter still.
Our ancestors, by the end of their lives, probably saw a world they didn't recognise. All the ways, fixes, solutions, and manners of coping with reality no longer worked. But if you're following along, this is no longer a generational update. You, 30-year-old reader, probably haven't the slightest idea what your next birthday will look like—let alone the day you turn 40. The changes we're going through have entered hyperspace, and the cost will be staggering. We won't have time even to register the new state of things. Change will now move at such neck-breaking speed that between being hit in the face and hitting the floor, the person who punched you may already be gone.
Civilisation comes at a heavy cost, as Freud explained almost a century ago. It sentences us to an uncanny anguish—an agony that seems to have no source—but it's the price we pay for common features of modern life like hospitals, transport, and safety. Just like Spotify's Google bill, the stakes are rising. Society doesn't really grasp the scale of the change (actually, doesn't grasp any of it). From now on, unexpected situations will be the new normal. Clashes no one can imagine may arise overnight.
The tech titans will be involved in every single one of these new situations, and they will, of course, offload the problem onto someone else—usually the user or the government. The latter can be bought, and the former can't do anything but will be happy enough with a £5 freebie as compensation. In this collapsing period of capitalism, bribing parties is cheaper and cheaper, especially for companies that can produce feats with zero marginal cost.
It goes without saying that ordinary citizens will foot most of the bill, but the powerfull will see turbulence as well. Throughout history, cracks emerge when the powerful turn on each other—and such fractures are almost inevitable. There isn't room for everyone to win. As Marx predicted two centuries ago, capital is neither rational nor scrupulous. Its sole purpose is multiplication, and anything in its path must be destroyed. Metas, Amazons, Elons, and Trumps will collide with growing frequency and intensity. Smaller competitors will be devoured or obliterated. For the business world, the moment of consolidation has passed. Now, hostile confrontation is the only mode.
But what about us? It’s impossible to forecast. Tensions in multiple parts of the planet suggest that military confrontation, internal unrest and outright rage will unavoidably happen. Pick the tension between Russia and Europe, the unrest inside the United States which is the fever that befalls empires beginning to crumble, the growing power of crime in Brazil or Mexico. The chance of any of these tensions to dilute over time is zero. History repeats itself, and warring times are as surprising as the river flowing into the sea, but now, it’s happening faster. Much faster.