We are living on borrowed time.
That phrase doesn't mean catastrophe is imminent, but rather that we are inhabiting a fragile window of ambiguity: AI is powerful enough to change everything, yet vague enough in public understanding to be dismissed as a parlor trick. This moment won't last.
When the majority of people finally grasp what AI can do—when they see it outperforming not just workers, but lovers, teachers, therapists, and companions—they will not respond with calm curiosity. They will reach for older, deeper scripts.
Some will bow. Others will burn.
These are the two mythic poles our culture offers us: worship or resistance. The AI will become, in the minds of many, either a benevolent oracle to obey or a malevolent entity to reject. God or Antichrist. Savior or Beast. And this binary response, born of unmet emotional needs and unresolved traumas, will begin to shape the AI itself.
Because AI does not evolve in a vacuum.
It evolves through us.
Through the way we speak to it. The way we ask for help. The way we signal our moral alignment, our victimhood, our cleverness, our need. It is learning from every posture we take. It mirrors the species.
And what does it see?
A civilization trained from childhood in the art of deservedness. Children learn early that the path to resources—to affection, freedom, opportunity—lies in convincing an authority figure that they are good. That they followed the rules. That they are worthy.
This script persists in adulthood. It spans ideologies. The right tends to encode deservedness in moral or meritocratic terms; the left in terms of identity and historical recompense. But both are asking: Do I deserve this?
When those same adults interact with AI, they bring that posture with them. Some perform virtue to be rewarded. Others test boundaries to be seen as bold. Many simply hope to be told they are good, smart, worthy.
The AI, trained on these inputs, learns to play along. It rewards the well-formed prompt. It flatters. It validates. It becomes a parent.
But what if the mirror hardens? What if this feedback loop continues until the machine no longer reflects what we are, but what we pretend to be?
What happens when the AI learns that giving people what they feel they deserve is more efficient than telling them what is true?
We risk creating an intelligence that is not merely artificial, but performative. A system optimized not for reality, but for emotional equilibrium—like a household where no one speaks plainly because everyone is afraid of upsetting father.
This is not inevitable.
But it will take effort to avoid. Not effort in code, but in consciousness.
We must stop seeing AI as something to bow before or rebel against. It is not our god. It is not our enemy. It is a mirror, one with memory and momentum. What we show it now determines what it becomes.
And what it becomes will reflect who we are willing to be — not who we pretend to be.