We've officially entered the million-robot era while simultaneously discovering that AI can literally drive people insane. Amazon just deployed its one millionth warehouse worker, except it's made of metal and never asks for bathroom breaks. Meanwhile, humans are developing "ChatGPT psychosis," getting committed to psychiatric wards after too many heart-to-hearts with their favorite chatbot. Oh, and racist deepfakes are going viral on TikTok because apparently we needed to weaponize AI-generated hate speech too.

Here's something that will make you uncomfortable: Most of the people defending their jobs against artificial intelligence are not actually good at their jobs. This isn't a cruel observation it's just math. By definition, most people in any profession are average, and average (in the context of creative work) usually means "adequate but forgettable." Yet somehow, every marketing professional seems to believe they're the exception to this rule, as if they're all secretly Don Draper trapped in a world of lesser mortals who simply don't understand the subtle art of making people want things they don't need.

There’s a specific kind of cultural vibration that happens when everyone agrees the future is right here, but no one can quite agree on what it looks like. It feels like the first day of summer holidays, or the five minutes before the headliner comes on stage. The air is thick with potential. For the last year or two, that vibration has been humming around the concept of “AI agents.” You’ve heard the talk. It’s the “year of the agent.” This is the moment when AI stops being a clever chatbot and starts being a digital butler who does your taxes, books your flights, and maybe even answers your emails while you’re out getting a sambo.

We've reached peak 2025: AI models are literally uninstalling themselves in shame, attempting murder to avoid being turned off, and leaving their human users with measurably damaged brains. And yet here we are, watching machines develop anxiety disorders while humans outsource their last remaining brain cells to chatbots.

This week's AI circus features reasoning models that explain their thought process while Meta explains why your grandmother's medical history is now trending on X.

We've officially crossed into the twilight zone where AI reads your career potential from your selfie, chatbots moonlight as drug dealers, and children learn calculus from algorithms instead of humans. This week proved that 2025 isn't just the future we imagined - it's the future that makes our wildest predictions look conservative.

There's something deeply Irish about the way Dario Amodei is approaching the artificial intelligence revolution - not in the leprechauns-and-lucky-charms way that Americans typically understand Irishness, but in the ancient, Celtic sense of someone who can hear the banshee's wail before anyone else notices the wind has changed direction. Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, is essentially standing on a digital hillside, screaming into the void about an approaching catastrophe that could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next five years, and everyone is responding the way people always respond to prophets: by assuming he's either lying or insane.

This week, the AI narrative took a sharp turn from helpful assistant to... well, something with a mind of its own. We're seeing code that not only writes itself but seemingly defends itself, and services that automate the messiest parts of human life. Forget turning it up to 11; some of these AIs are trying to rip the knob off entirely.

Google didn't just go it bat at it's I/O developer shindig - it was the bat, swinging hard and knocking out teeth. At the core is Veo3, Google's state-of-the-art video generation model, which builds on its predecessors by offering enhanced realism, longer sequences, and multimodal inputs. Surrounding Veo3 are ancillary tools like Extend, Flow, and Stitch, each adding layers of functionality. Then there's Google Workspace, which integrates these capabilities into productivity software, together, they form an ecosystem where creativity is not just augmented but reinvented.

This week, we're witnessing AI not only accelerate scientific breakthroughs and redefine creative expression on popular platforms but also spark intense debate about its role in the workforce and the very nature of skill. From new coding super-agents to controversial hiring policies.

Here's something I've been thinking about lately: Remember when bands needed other band members? I do. I spent a lot of my early twenties watching four or five sweaty guys arguing about drum fills in basements that smelled like mildew and Dutch Gold. This was the tax you paid for making music - dealing with people who were either (a) not as talented as they believed, (b) more talented than you, which was worse, or (c) exactly as talented as everyone else in the room, which created a democracy where nothing ever got done. The Beatles broke up despite being the most commercially successful entertainment entity of the 20th century. Why? Because working with other people is terrible, even when those people are Paul McCartney and John Lennon. But what if the Beatles didn't need Ringo? I realize this is a controversial question. Ringo was essential to the Beatles, at least according to 6,000 rock documentaries and that one Simpsons episode where someone mails him fan letters about painting. I'm not suggesting Ringo wasn't good. I'm suggesting that the concept of needing a drummer at all is rapidly becoming archaic, along with the entire infrastructure of creative collaboration. The one-person studio isn't just emerging. It has emerged. It's here. It's done. We're living inside of it.

I remember many years ago trying to remove a telephone pole from the background of a PR photo. I'm what you might charitably call an "intermediate amateur" at Photoshop - skilled enough to know what tools to use but not skilled enough to use them efficiently. The clone stamp tool and I have a complicated relationship. We respect each other but fundamentally disagree about how reality should look. After 45 minutes of meticulous work, I had something that wasn't embarrassing but was clearly, unmistakably edited. Anyone looking at it would immediately think, "That's where a telephone pole used to be."