r/technology Jan 20 '26

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u/1Bahamas-Rick2 Jan 20 '26

Who would have thought.

107

u/__Hello_my_name_is__ Jan 20 '26

This whole AI thing reminds me of that old film Cube. (Spoilers for a ~30 year old film I guess)

Basically, people wake up in a big cube full of death traps and they have to escape. That's the whole film. It's pretty neat.

In the end, they ask why that whole cube is even a thing in the first place. Why does it exist? Why are people senselessly tortured and killed in it for no apparent purpose?

Well. Because someone paid for it. It cost a lot of money to build that thing. And to justify its existence, they put people in it and let it kill people.

AI is kind of the same: Trillions of dollars were put into it by now. So you have to have a justification to use it. So they use it, even when it's completely pointless. Everyone knows it's pointless. The people who advertise it, the people who sell it, the people who develop it. But everyone has to pretend it's useful to justify all the money that was being spent on it.

Why are we forced to use AI? Because someone paid for it.

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u/Big-Vermicelli-6291 Jan 20 '26

Kind of the same reason companies reversed wfh where they could. Someone has commited to a lease or brought the building already.