//Geekujin.net

# The future is now For what seems like nearly the past decade it's felt like we're in the early stages of a cyberpunk dystopia - a [convicted felon](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2qqnxnwl7wo) in the White House (twice!), authoritarian governments increasing [online surveillance](https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/transformation-of-surveillance-in-digitalisation-discourse) and [restrictions](https://consoc.org.uk/the-online-safety-act-privacy-threats-and-free-speech-risks/), [self driving electric vehicles](https://www.businessinsider.com/waymo-robotaxi-depot-san-francisco-what-does-it-look-like-2026-2) and [celebrities in space](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg8e5gq8ljo). 2026 will be the line in the sand we reflect on as being humanities proto-cyberpunk beginning, and it all starts with two little letters - A.I. Cyberpunk media tells stories about characters from all walks of life and against many different backdrops, but there's many recurring themes and tropes that regularly pop up. Mega-corporations that wield government sized influence over nations, rampant unemployment, artificial intelligence and a massive wealth inequality. High Tech - Low Life. We often get thrown into the story whilst this environment is in full effect, but did you ever stop to think when or how this dystopian future came to be? It didn't happen overnight, so what was the catalyst, the rock that helped turn all those tiny pebbles into the landslide? ## Rise of the machines Artificial Intelligence has been around for decades, but it's been less than 5 years since Large Language Models (LLM) entered the public arena. In 2022 OpenAI released [ChatGPT](https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2023/05/19/a-short-history-of-chatgpt-how-we-got-to-where-we-are-today/), an LLM capable of taking natural language input and responding in a seemingly conversational way. This started an arms race between the Big Tech corpos trying to build the biggest and best AI, chucking [billions of dollars](https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/why-ai-companies-may-invest-more-than-500-billion-in-2026) and huge amounts of resource into them. We'll come back to this shortly, but first lets talk about [Agentic AI](https://cloud.google.com/discover/what-is-agentic-ai). ChatGPT is great if you want to have [cyberpsychosis](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cyberpsychosis)-inducing conversations, can't be bothered to write a meaningful love letter to your girlfriend, or need to dig through Microsoft Learn to find that one barely documented PowerShell command you need. Agentic AI aims to take the back-and-forth out of the equation and actually do these things for you. It will write and send that love note to your girlfriend, will create and execute that script on your server and monitor the output, and it will even come and wash your car all without human intervention (Okay, maybe not that last one but you get the idea). In less than a decade we've gone from having to manually search the web for restaurants, to getting an LLM to find and rank them, to AI agents using our information to book a table for us. While we often talk about how bad AI slop is right now there's no denying that the technology is evolving at an alarmingly fast pace. ## Enter the Megacorp I won't go into the mechanics of how AI works - [other people](https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/artificial-intelligence) have done far better jobs than I could -but suffice to say that these models are trained on vast amounts of data and require huge amounts of resources to run. Not only are companies such as [Meta](https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-begins-construction-10-billion-indiana-data-center-boost-ai-capabilities-2026-02-11/), Google and OpenAI building massive AI datacentres to train and deploy these models, they're also buying so much RAM that the price of consumer electronics is [steadily rising](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1dzdndzlxqo) due to chip shortages. But AI in itself [isn't profitable](https://www.wheresyoured.at/why-everybody-is-losing-money-on-ai/), with most highly valued AI companies actually losing money, so what's the play here? Power. That's the only logical explanation. It's rapidly getting to the point where companies are starting to replace their workforces with AI. Microsoft recently let go of [15,000 staff](https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/microsoft-lays-off-9000-more-employees-pushing-total-job-cuts-past-15000-since-may-2749892-2025-07-03) in order to focus more on AI, with claims that up to [30% of their codebase](https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/microsoft-exec-says-coding-is-not-dead-after-6000-layoffs-and-ai-writing-30-per-cent-of-code-for-the-company-2729863-2025-05-24?) is now written by software ([how's that going for you?](https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-11-bug-roundup/)) Once these companies can fully replace human labour, they will be in a de facto position of power, Able to ingest unthinkable amounts of sensitive data or set the price that businesses need to pay for their tools. And of course it won't take long for the public sector to be snared; how could a police force say no to having their own Google-subsidised AI that does all the paperwork for them, maps out crime hotspots or can even run 'pre-crime' predictions? ## The Unemployable I think we're starting to see the affects of AI in the workplace. Not just in job replacement, but in terms of skill atrophy. Office workers now rely on LLMs to summarise documents or write their emails for them. IT techs ask Claude to diagnose an issue rather than troubleshoot themselves. Devs push out whole apps without touching a single line of code. This all sounds great from a convenience point of view, but soon those skills and parts of the brain we used every day suddenly don't get exercised. We forget how to do things, much like how no one remembers phone numbers any more because our smart phones take care of that. But there will be a time when people are either replaced in their job by AI or the technology becomes unaffordable for non-commercial customers. Then we get into the scary realms of all the jobs being taken, and nobody having the skills to apply for them anyway. And then what? We'll likely see the 'low life' that often follows the 'high tech' in cyberpunk media. Everyone will likely be given a universal basic income to survive, or worse just enough tokens to acquire the goods deemed necessary to live. There'll be jobs at the corpos looking after the data centres and doing other roles that machines can't do yet, but they will likely be few and far between. The wealth gap will rapidly accelerate between those that work at these mega corporations and those who have no means of real employment. We'll see an increase in crime, drug and alcohol abuse, and all the other mediums of dopamine addiction designed to keep people sane in a world that's increasingly going mad. ## True dystopia After that? Who knows. Maybe the AI bubble will burst before then, and none of this will happen. Maybe Big Tech will use up so many finite resources we'll see real life corpo-wars fought by private military companies, fighting over the few rare earth minerals left. Maybe the human race will collectively realise that having a small group of people hoarding the worlds wealth and power is a bad thing, and do something about it. Or maybe mother nature will fight back, with even harsher climate change designed to wipe humanity of the face of her Earth. Either way, we've already started our journey into the tech driven next chapter of humanity, whatever that looks like. “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.” ― William Gibson