American pop culture has given us many takes on the AI apocalypse: Skynet in The Terminator, the Machines in The Matrix, and the Butlerian Jihad in Dune. In the real world, as the pace of LLM advancement accelerates, I posit that current AIs will not bring about a Hollywood-style apocalypse, but could instead lead to a stagnant world ruled by those who control the models.
The capitalists don't think you're a real person. They will throw you, your friends, your family—anyone you've ever known—into the furnace to keep the machine running, and they will do anything to stay in control.
Ancient Hebrews believed the sky was a solid dome—a barrier called the firmament. Four hundred years after Galileo, the United States Department of Defense is attempting to build a real Firmament with the help of Elon Musk.
Rolling Stone published an article about the 44 Fort Bragg soldiers who died stateside between 2020 and 2021. Several of these deaths were homicides, and many are connected to drug trafficking and overdose coverups.
The Black Iron Prison is a concept I borrowed from Philip K. Dick's 1981 novel, VALIS—a system of social control that obscures the true nature of reality and surrounds everyone within invisible iron walls.