Technology

Ask any software engineer with a decade of experience what it feels like to work in 2026, and you will hear the same tremor in the voice. It is not the fear of a machine becoming sentient. It is the quieter, more corrosive dread of becoming obsolete while still sitting at the keyboard. The technological cassandras will tell you to rejoice or to panic, depending on which cult they have sworn allegiance to. The pro-AI congregation preaches a gospel of frictionless creation where you whisper a wish to the machine and a fully formed application tumbles out. The anti-AI cult, meanwhile, is busy declaring a psychic death of craft, insisting that every line of generated code is a little soul-murder. Both are tedious. Both miss the geometry of the actual crisis. ...

By now, almost everyone in the industrialised world is aware of something known as ‘AI,’ or artificial intelligence for short. They might not use it, they might not have an idea of what it even is, but they are certain to be aware of the term. Among those who don’t know the particulars, they are largely indifferent. Those who are more technologically literate and curious about the technology, however, might have a strong opinion about it. People who don’t have a strong opinion about AI are just regular people. People who are convinced that AI is not just an industrial revolution, but something that will change the entire fabric society as we know it, we call the pro-AI cult. On the opposite side, we have people who say that AI will not do any of that, but rather cause the psychic, economic and creative death of the world as we know it; the anti-AI cult. ...