A new essay titled AI Makes Me Sad argues that artificial intelligence is making jobs obsolete, turning startups into pointless exercises, and flooding social media with meaningless chatter. The writer rejects the path toward AI-driven employment outright, fearing the technology is stripping away what makes human work valuable.
The essay opens with a confession: the writer is someone who could easily profit from AI. They sit near classmates planning to work at OpenAI after graduation, eyeing six-figure salaries. Yet they reject that path outright. The reason is simple: they fear AI is stripping away what makes human work valuable.
The Factory Scene That Summarizes the Fear
The writer draws a direct comparison to Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. In that film, Chaplin plays a factory worker so enthusiastic about screwing hex nuts into machines that he eventually gets caught in the gears and becomes part of the machinery itself. The writer sees a parallel: people are rushing to become obsolete for big salaries, volunteering to fit themselves into the machine that will replace them.
The essay asks a pointed question: if you genuinely believe artificial superintelligence is coming, why would you want to work at the company that will be in the best position to replace its employees?
Startups Are Dead, Long Live AI Startups
The writer mourns the death of the startup era. They describe themselves as skilled at web development, Rust, and operating systems, and they spent the summer watching YC Stanford lectures while translating tests as an intern. But the future they imagined no longer exists. There is no such thing as a startup anymore; there are only “AI startups,” where companies build products that anyone can write a prompt for in 30 seconds.
The writer predicts that even if current AI tools cannot yet do the job, GPT-7 or improved hardware will soon make the human touch redundant. The result is a world where the value of human labor is questioned at every turn.
The Kafkaesque Twitter Problem
The essay’s sharpest frustration comes from social media. Verified accounts post AI-generated replies to popular tweets, and everyone ignores them. Nobody likes them. They are an eyesore. The writer wonders aloud why this happens.
The list of offenders includes:
- SpaceX
- Xai
- Grok
- SuperGrok
The writer presses a button on Grok that explains every post they see, and they have hit it many times by accident and never once on purpose. They ask why no one can build a classifier to ban these accounts or run a cheap decision model to flag nonsense replies.
Hope in the Dark Age
The essay does not end in despair. The writer finds reasons to be hopeful. They note that Twitter and LinkedIn are young platforms, only 20 and 23 years old, and they were overdue for a refresh anyway. They point to history — Muslims and Irish monks kept knowledge alive during the Dark Ages — and argue that there are many people who share this sadness, even if they do not call it by that name.
The writer also praises AI evangelists like Paul Graham, suggesting that even they might feel a little sad, given that Graham is a Lisp man from way back and programming language fanatics tend to care about humans writing code.
The technology industry moves fast, the writer argues, and a way out of the “dark age” will arrive within a few years. They expect AI to settle into a fixed role in society before the end of their natural life, though they are unsure whether that role will be small or large. What they are sure of is that they will feel at least a little happier to have some finality about the whole thing.
Rebuilding Institutions Will Hurt
The writer admits that rebuilding institutions will require painful shifts. But they believe the pain will be satisfying, like the burn you feel when working out. They look forward to a bubble bursting, which they describe as glee-inducing. They want to work in an industry that makes sense, even if many people right now would rather sell nothing to nobody for untold sums of money.
The essay closes on a note of quiet resolve. The writer is not asking for the world to stop AI. They are asking for the world to slow down enough to understand what it is doing. They want institutions rebuilt before the machine fully takes over, and they believe the people who feel this sadness are not alone.
This is a rare moment of honesty in a field often dominated by hype. The writer is someone who could benefit from AI and still finds it deeply troubling. Their essay is a reminder that the future is not inevitable, and that the people building it have feelings too.
The essay is worth reading for anyone who has ever looked at a social feed full of automated replies and wondered how we got here. It is a reminder that the future is not inevitable, and that the people building it have feelings too.
See the video the story is built around at mondobe.com.
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