A threat lurks in our world. It is bigger than our culture. It is bigger than our economy, but will include them both. From the beginning, humans have used technology to replace us: human labor cut short by a machine that did the job. It was convenient. It was economical. By this means, humans created civilization, but we have never been in control of this process, and it was an illusion that humans ever were. Technology is a thing that happens to us. The machine will use us up, and we will expend bodies and resources. So long as the progress continues, no cost will appear too high.

It is all over our culture: “hard work” and “progress,” means of making its success equal morality. These values make us organize to help it grow faster, to dismantle our world and build a new one for it. It is such a spontaneous and impressive co-operation. Nobody important to the process really remembers why they started all this work, and few people seriously consider stopping.

As it progresses, everything we know is uprooted. Just as television uprooted the world, and just as cell phones uprooted the world, LLMs shine as its most recent product, the religion of progress’s newest jewel.

We don’t support it consciously. Rather, it uses us. If money was made off you reading this, it was likely re-invested. If I sell a book denouncing it, taxes and publishers and stores will re-invest the money towards building it.

If we keep going, we can only expect it to grow, to gain more intelligence and outsmart us in every way. Then, we won’t just call it a “tool.” It is already making us more than we are making it.

Questions of sentience are a waste of time. They only seek to obscure the real material process and the effect it is having on our children. The “iPad child” phenomena is of course only the beginning. We are headed towards something so efficiently distracting it actually replaces thought. We are already there with students who act like they never knew how to write.

The rich delusionally attempt to subordinate this process to some human agent, as well as our surveilling government. A Guardian article by Sanya Mansoor published on April 28, 2026, reports how “Google has reportedly signed a deal with the US Pentagon to use its artificial intelligence models for classified work.” To the process, however, humans and technology look exactly the same. They are both one thing: resources, to be used up and thrown aside. The powerful only maintain control so long as they out-think their creations.

Yet, really, not much is needed, if children are raised not to think in the first place, if since birth they are using a supplement and they never are faced with decisions.

What a teenager has in their pocket is a sign of their co-dependence with a distraction machine, controlled by a vast matrix whose aim is to manipulate their desire. They call it out loud “the algorithm,” some immaterial force, a face behind the images that pop into their mind without thinking.

The charming term “brain rot” has risen to give name to some of the effects. On PubMed, an openly accessible database maintained by the US National Library of Medicine, a study from March 7, 2025 reviews research on the phenomena from 2023-24. It summarizes, “These factors impair executive functioning skills, including memory, planning, and decision-making.” Its nature as a review shows a growing academic inquiry. Concern is growing that this kind of engagement really does cause cognitive decline. We should acknowledge the wide-spread causes, that it’s not a personally solvable addiction.

Increasing social isolation forecasts the declining value of other human beings. Could we imagine so many shut-ins without this current technology? Its developers know there’s no longer any reason to pretend it is to our benefit. Every drop of attention it sucks away from each other is a success, despite what we say.

When, at an Economic Times event on June 7, 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, “What I lose sleep over is the hypothetical idea that we already have done something really bad by launching ChatGPT,” I do not think he is joking, nor do I cynically dismiss it as hype or propaganda. I think he sees the horizon of progress and knows he is delivering its inevitability, regardless of how it is that he feels about it personally. If you were thinking of how our economy rewards automation before its release, you would have been able to see how we were headed towards it already.

I think about love and I think about everything I love about humans. I think about everything they’ve been: horrible, ignorant, misled. Even the worst human, I find, is someone that can be loved. When I think of an inspiring poet, or a deep bond with a friend, or a mentor figure with so much to teach me, so much of how I love them is their thoughts, and I share my own thoughts in turn. I share ones I created, and which are about my own life. What happens to us if we lose this?

Right now, there is a $2 billion AI data center being built in Tonawanda. WGRZ’s April 10 report called attention to potential implications: “Among those raising concerns is the Clean Air Coalition of Western New York, which argues the project’s energy use and environmental impact need closer scrutiny.” We simply want our people to have breathable air.

I have made it sound hopeless, but this does not stop us from madly dashing towards something. We can call our mayors, our representatives, our senators and our governor to let them know we do not want this, to let them know we do not consent to this and that we are not a part of this. They are counting on the fact that our response to hopelessness is disenfranchisement and not desperation. It’s a small action in the face of what is, but small actions are all we have on this level. The only long-term solution might be to become much more politically active.

Alen Gradascevic is sophomore writing major at the State University of New York at Freodnia.