The current state of LLMs and AI reminds me of lines spoken in Person of Interest series:
“Don’t tie your life to its whims.
We cannot understand these intelligences.
The best we can hope for is to survive them.”
That line was written over a decade ago about “The Machine” — a fictional superintelligence that watched everything, predicted everything, and eventually slipped beyond human control.
Today? It doesn’t feel fictional anymore.
We’re not just using LLMs.
We’re building entire careers, companies, creative processes, and even daily decision-making around them.
Prompt chains. Agent swarms. Autonomous workflows. Memory layers. Fine-tuned models that know us better than our closest colleagues.
Dependency has grown exponentially.
What started as “let me just get a second opinion” has quietly become “I can’t ship anything without running it through the model first.”
And here’s the part that should actually concern you:
This is exactly what the model companies want us to become.
They don’t need us to love the technology.
They need us to be unable to live without it.
Every new feature, every context window increase, every “agent” upgrade is engineered to make the tool feel indispensable.
The more we outsource our thinking, our memory, our judgment — the deeper the lock-in becomes.
We feed them our data, our workflows, our edge cases… and in return we get faster, smarter, more addictive assistance.
Until one day we wake up and realize we no longer know how to operate without it.
We cannot understand these intelligences.
Not really.
They are black boxes trained on incomprehensible scales of data, evolving at a pace no human team can match. Their “whims” — the random hallucinations, the subtle biases, the sudden capability jumps, the silent policy changes — are already shaping how millions of people think and work.
So maybe fictional character Finch was right.
Don’t tie your life to its whims.
Use the tools.
Master them.
But keep your own compass.
Build systems that augment you — not ones that quietly replace your judgment.
Keep skills the models can’t touch.
Protect the parts of your mind that still belong only to you.
Because survival isn’t about rejecting the technology.
It’s about refusing to become dependent on something we were never meant to fully understand in the first place.
The Machine was fiction.
What we’re building now isn’t.
Stay vigilant.
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