A year ago, I wrote Foreboding AI: The Inevitable Collapse We’re Funding Ourselves

At the time, my concern was that we were paying for the very systems that could eventually replace us. We were subscribing to tools that learnt from our prompts, our corrections, our habits, our work, and our impatience.

A year later, I still think that concern was valid.

But my worry has changed shape.

It is no longer only about whether AI can answer better, write better, summarise better, draw better, or code better.

The deeper question now is this:

What happens when AI stops simply answering and starts acting?

For years, most people understood AI as a chatbot.

You asked a question.

It gave an answer.

Maybe it helped write an email.

Maybe it explained a piece of code.

Maybe it generated an image.

That felt powerful, but still contained.

Now we are moving into something different.

AI systems can now:

browse websites,

read files,

inspect codebases,

run terminal commands,

call APIs,

edit code…