THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, ARTIFICIAL.

The country that doesn't invest will be swallowed and devoured. The company that doesn't adopt it will vanish, disappear. People who insist on the thesis that AI is dumb will need to ask the faithful for forgiveness. I've been reading experts and listening to various nerds, all caught between dread and dazzlement. On one point they're unanimous: the world as we knew it is over.

The dazzled kneel before the gods of the new religion — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Jensen Huang, among a few others in the digital pantheon. These mega-entrepreneurs have invested billions of dollars in AI development. Before any results, their companies are already worth ten times more. Jensen Huang, 61, has been CEO of Nvidia for 31 years — a company unknown to most people until just a few days ago.

Born in Taiwan, Huang was merely a low-tier billionaire in 2019. Today he's a trillionaire. His company has just knocked Microsoft off the top spot. Nvidia took the position after its shares rose 3.5% on Tuesday, June 18, pushing the company to US$3.335 trillion in market value — surpassing Microsoft's US$3.317 trillion. What does Nvidia make? Chips and AI, the oil of the 21st century.

WORSE THAN CLIMATE CHANGE

The euphoric ones picture stratospheric bank accounts. The rest, frightened, picture the apocalypse. They consider AI worse than climate change.

In less than ten years, by 2030, the projection is mass unemployment. More than 80% of the workforce will be out on the streets. In their place, humanoid robots equipped with advanced AI will take over the roles of teachers, accountants, nurses, caregivers for the elderly and children, architects, doorkeepers, security guards, drivers, journalists, composers, salespeople — a multitude of professions.

Only the highly specialized will remain: psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists. There will be a tsunami of depressed, deranged, paranoid, and suicidal clients to treat. The money for these bills will come from universal basic income, an alternative increasingly under consideration and already criticized by digital activists.

UNIVERSAL INCOME, HUMILIATION!

Well-known influencer and self-proclaimed top AI expert in the country, Alan Nicolas tears into the proposal. "I will never accept this humiliating income, I will never be held hostage by governments," he said angrily in a recent livestream, as if the income were already a reality and its amount already known. Emphatically, he claims he will build his own AI to educate his children, replacing "those incompetent human teachers who sometimes don't even have kids of their own."

The guy isn't alone. His outburst echoes among millions of followers, all without the slightest notion of what's coming. In truth, no one has any notion of what's coming. However chaotic one imagines it will be, it will be worse. While we're here planning our humble routine and the week's grocery shopping, 12 conglomerates are mass-producing robots. The estimate is more than eight billion produced by 2030 — more than the planet's population.

By 2050, the projection is five times more robots than humans. At first they'll cost an arm and a leg, but soon they'll reach the price of an economy car. A little further along, the cost will drop to a few thousand reais, much like the price evolution of cell phones.

The goal is for robots to take over most functions in companies and public services.

Extremist figures suggest replacing politicians with robots — at least they won't cost fortunes to public coffers like today. They won't need pork-barrel earmarks, won't be corrupted, and won't need funds for offices, plane tickets, gas, phones, aides, and free housing in Brasília. They probably also won't have humans to represent in a world dominated by an inexorably advancing fascism. This is serious business.

In Japan, Samsung is already selling robots to play with children, toss balls around, project little films on the wall, create comics, and teach the good values of capitalism. Billionaires Bill Gates and Amanda Gates, through their benevolent foundations, plan to bring teacher-robots to poor countries in order to educate children with Christian values in their communities and villages.

The United States, desperate to escape bankruptcy, currently holds the power of AI. The physical wars are smoke screens, distractions while the real war is waged in the shadows. China is racing against time in AI development, as are Russia and India. Behind the scenes it's a free-for-all of espionage, betrayals, thefts, assassinations, and heaps of corruption money. All to guarantee capitalism a long life, reduce the human nuisance, and replace it with productive, tireless, and peaceful humanoids.