In the old pit-towns where the pit-heads now stand like rusted gallows, we know a snake-oil salesman before he’s even opened his velvet carpetbag.
But up in the newsrooms of London and New York, where the coffee costs ten quid a splash, and nobody’s ever had dirt under their fingernails, they still kneel, open-mouthed and take the seed of the Billionaire Tech Bros, then turn around and spit it into their dirty rags like it's newsroom nectar.
They call it press release journalism. We call it regurgitated bollox.
Every six months, some soft-handed silicon messiah, a Dario, a Sam, an Elon in an ironic T-shirt mounts a stage in California, looks into the lens with the hollow eyes of a cult leader, and wanks another alt-life fantasy into our faces.
"The end of human labour is nigh!" they bray. "An apocalypse of automation! Hypergrowth! Hyper-inequality! Work will become optional!"
And what does the mainstream press machine do? It laps up the hype, sets the font to 72-point Dystopia, and broadcasts the sermon to the masses. They sell us the fear because fear keeps you quiet, doesn't it? If you think a machine is taking your job by Tuesday, you won't complain about the wage freeze on Monday.
Only now, the fog is thinning, and the shine is rubbing off the tin.
Look at the figures they tried to hide behind the thunderous declarations. Anthropic, Amodei’s own golden goose, runs a study in 2026 and finds... nothing. No systematic spike in unemployment for exposed workers. Claude, their prized digital saviour, covers a paltry 33% of tasks in maths and computing. Theoretically, it could do 100%, they tell us. Theoretically, I can be anything I want to be. Including a unicorn.
And then comes Sam Altman, doing his little PR pivot in the spring light. Suddenly, the man who warned of mass economic execution is shuffling his feet and mumbling that maybe, just maybe, we won't have a jobs apocalypse after all. A feint? Of course it’s a feint. When the public starts burning with rage because their electric bills are doubling to power datacentre furnaces in their backyards, you tone down the sci-fi villain talk and stop stroking your hairless cat.
The truth is, the grand AI epochal promise is choking on its own vanity.
They’ve built a house of cards on the back of a stochastic parrot in the same way I'm overdosing on mixed metaphors. They tell us these algorithms are on the verge of General Intelligence, yet the things can’t even tie their own laces without hallucinating a fluffy slipper. It can mimic the syntax of a poet, aye, but it doesn't know the ache in a person's lower back after twelve hours on a cold concrete floor. It mimics words without context, sound without soul, noise without meaning.
And the cost! By the gods, the cost of it all.
They’re burning through hundreds of billions of dollars a year. They’re building energy-slurping datacentres that draw more juice than the whole of Japan, driving up local power rates so a hedge-fund analyst can generate bad clip art for another post on LinkedIn and automated corporate apology emails. The tech-heavy Nasdaq stumbles, down eight per cent off its peak, as investors realise the models depreciate faster than a second-hand hatchback with a blown head gasket. They are losing money hand over fist, chasing a digital ghost.
An AI can do ninety per cent of a task, but if it fails the ten per cent that requires actual human judgment, context, and empathy, you haven't saved a penny. You’ve just hired a very expensive idiot to make your mistakes at lightspeed.
Where does that leave us, the working class watching this circus from the seats right at the back without a cushion?
It leaves us holding the bill, as usual. If there’s an apocalypse coming, it’s not the sci-fi dream of robots doing our dishes while we paint watercolours in the sun. It’s the grimy, everyday threat of hyper-surveillance, algorithmic wage-skimming, and gig-economy servitude. They don't want to replace us with gods; they want to box us in with monitors.
The tech bros promised us the heavens, but all they’ve built is a bigger furnace to burn our futures in. And the mainstream press, blind as moles in the dark, still print the hype like it’s written in stone by the hand of Maradona before VAR.
The truth is out there, allegedly. But you won't find it in any press release, and you won't find it in the headlines of the papers that feed on them. You’ll find it in the cold light of reality, where the numbers don't add up, the power grid is humming to near-breaking, and the working person is still cleaning their shitty toilets, doing the real work, while the billionaires buy up all the barbed wire to keep us out of their gated, sunny uplands.
