Monday ramblings: WTF happened?

Monday ramblings: WTF happened?
When did ML start calling itself AI?

Machine Learning was supposed to be the intern.
Fetch the data.
Run the numbers.
Don’t talk to customers.
Definitely don’t rename the company.

Artificial Intelligence was the dangerous idea we swore we’d get to after the fundamentals, the thing you only discussed late at night or in philosophy electives you never turned up to.

Then GPUs got cheap.
Cloud credits rained from the sky.
VCs developed a mild allergy to nuance.

And somehow the intern unionized, promoted itself to management, and updated the org chart while everyone was watching the demo.

Now the intern runs strategy.

Somewhere around GPU abundance and VC-induced psychosis, we stopped pretending there was a difference.

Linear regression, now with belief.
Gradient descent, now with intent.
Autocomplete, now with a messiah complex.

We took statistics, starved it of context, force-fed it data, locked it in a warehouse full of GPUs, and then demanded it explain us to ourselves. When it mumbled back something fluent and unsettling, we crowned it intelligent and quietly fired the philosophy department for “not scaling.”

ML is optimization.
AI was agency.

But agency implies responsibility, so we rebranded optimization as agency, because responsibility looks great in pitch decks and absolutely terrible in ethics reviews.

GPUs became the real protagonists.
Silicon heat, humming away, burning capital and meaning at equal rates.
Every generation faster, louder, hungrier - not smarter, just more confident.

Now we argue about whether models are conscious
while deploying systems that don’t even know why they’re right,
only that they usually are,
until they aren’t,
at scale.

The machines didn’t wake up.
They didn’t need to.

We anesthetized ourselves.
We outsourced judgment, then curiosity, then accountability; and called it progress because latency went down.

AI isn’t thinking.
It’s reflecting us back… noisily, confidently, statistically averaged, and without remorse.

⚠️ Warning: prolonged exposure may cause hallucinations of intelligence, false feelings of control, and the belief that prediction is the same thing as understanding.

And somehow, that was enough…

Until it’s not…

Scottg/out