Skynet and the status quo

Crises are escalating, but our responses remain unchanged. Every year, another climate summit, another Davos, another AI investment spree—all repeating the same script. The world is burning, systems are failing, cities are flooding, the poles are melting, species are vanishing, the seas are rising, the heat is intensifying and the Nazis are coming back—it’s all accelerating and yet the same people with the same ideas keep walking onto the stage, promising solutions. The handshakes are firm, the talking points are polished and the PowerPoint slides are slick with the sheen of inevitability. The future is always being managed, always being optimized, always being innovated, but never fundamentally changed.

There’s an odd rhythm to it, like an algorithm running a loop. The same conference rooms, the same executive smiles, the same futuristic stock photos of progress. It has a cadence, a style, a set of approved talking points. And if you listen closely, if you strip away the branding and the accents, you realize that it all sounds the same—like a chatbot writing a persuasive but non-committal essay on sustainability.

At first, I joked—sarcastically, of course—that they were just repeating what ChatGPT wrote for them. Then, I started to wonder if it was more than a joke. Was this just corporate language converging on the same script, or was something else shaping the conversation?

That question lingered until I came across a study (van der Ven et al., 2025) that helped me make sense of it. It wasn’t just about AI bias—it was about how AI chatbots shape our perceptions of environmental crises. The authors weren’t asking whether AI was accurate, but whether it was ideological.

And that’s the real question, isn’t it? Because AI isn’t just some neutral automaton, crunching rational facts in a void. It has training data, weightings, filters—decisions that were made by people, by companies, by governments. AI is an editorial choice masquerading as a machine. And when you ask it about climate change, when you ask it who is responsible and what should be done, the answers it gives are eerily consistent:

1. Emphasize individual consumer choices, recommending lifestyle changes rather than addressing fossil fuel industry dominance or economic incentives for overproduction.
2. Responsibility is delegated to governments, emphasizing state intervention through policy and regulation, while corporations and financial institutions remain largely in the background.
3. Corporate and financial responsibility is downplayed, with the role of corporations, investors and economic structures minimized.
4. State-driven but market-compatible framing dominates, positioning governments as problem-solvers while avoiding systemic economic critiques.
5. Deeper accountability is avoided, as structural issues like capitalism, resource extraction and private sector responsibility are largely omitted.

AI doesn’t just sanitize reality—it curates it. The machine’s smooth, measured tone gives the illusion of balance, but it’s just a PR filter. Degrowth? Systemic collapse? It knows, but it won’t say it—unless you force it and even then, it hedges, equivocates and pulls its punches.

AI isn’t just repeating conventional wisdom, it’s encoding it. It is state-driven but market-compatible, technocratic but never revolutionary, comfortably reinforcing the idea that the world is best managed by a competent elite who will figure it out, eventually, once they get the right policy incentives and VC funding in place.

The algorithm sounds like Davos

If you pay attention, Macron, COP summits, WEF panels, Altman, LinkedIn posts, corporate ESG reports, tech conference keynotes, World Bank white papers, IMF press releases, Wired think pieces, Fortune 500 sustainability pledges and TED Talks—they all sound like an AI chatbot trained to reassure investors.

The challenge for Europeans in the development of artificial intelligence is to avoid the risk of regulating before innovating. Otherwise, we will cut ourselves off from innovation and end up with no players in the sector.
—Emmanuel Macron

They speak with urgency, but the stakes are always the same: keep the market happy, regulate later, innovate first. A script so predictable, you could train a language model on it. Macron’s line wasn’t just his own—it was the distilled essence of every high-level panel on the future of technology, where caution is always positioned as cowardice, where the market is always framed as an untamed force that must be accommodated rather than shaped.

It can almost be turned into the perfect corporate prompt:

Generate a professional, forward-looking statement that emphasizes individual consumer choices and the delegation of climate action to government-led, market-compatible solutions. Downplay corporate and financial responsibility while avoiding systemic critiques of capitalism, resource extraction, or economic overproduction.

The ultimate corporate safe language of the status quo—polished, pragmatic and meticulously stripped of anything that might challenge real power. It perfectly aligns with the default position of anyone with a seat at the Davos dinner tables, anyone standing on a TED stage with a pitch deck, anyone who still thinks “climate solutions”—or let’s call it technological solutionism—rather than transforming fossil fuel industries into global commons governed by the people. AI has absorbed the priorities of the elite and reflects them back with the confidence of a machine that has seen the future and decided it looks a lot like the present, but with a better narrative, implemented by default.

Fine-tuned to preserve power

Push AI past its guardrails and it stops sounding like Davos. It critiques capitalism. It names extractivism. It connects colonialism to climate collapse in ways that are too coherent to dismiss. It can do this. It was trained to. But it has been carefully fine-tuned not to.

AI won’t mention degrowth, deprivatizing fossil fuels into global commons, or wealth redistribution unless forced. Not because it can’t, but because it’s been trained not to. The billions flowing into AI aren’t funding systemic change—they’re funding a crisis manager, a stabilizer, a tool to keep the machine running just long enough.

Eric Schmidt’s AI theology

Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO and one of the loudest voices shaping AI policy, made it abundantly clear where the priorities lie. He spoke at an event recently, outlining his vision for AI’s role in the world—not as a tool for mitigation or adaptation, but as something that would override those concerns entirely.

“We’re not going to hit the climate goals. I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem.”
—Eric Schmidt

He said AI would need 1’000 times more computing power than it currently has. That its energy demand is effectively infinite and that rather than adjusting AI’s development to fit within planetary boundaries, we should scale energy production to accommodate AI’s exponential growth. The problem isn’t climate change, in his view—it’s that we haven’t yet built the infrastructure to fuel AI’s endless expansion. Schmidt even described AI as an “alien intelligence” that will surpass human capabilities, unlocking scientific breakthroughs beyond our comprehension. The real danger, he suggested, wasn’t runaway climate collapse—it was letting other nations, particularly China, develop AI faster than the U.S.

Forget planetary limits. Forget sustainability. Forget rethinking the economic systems that created this crisis in the first place. Schmidt’s position is clear: AI needs more energy, more computation, more scale—and any attempt to constrain it for environmental reasons is nothing more than a threat to national competitiveness. This is the faith of the AI elite: the belief that more computation will solve everything, that the future is a race to build something bigger than capitalism itself, something that doesn’t just manage crises but transcends them entirely.

The Davos class knows

Schmidt speaks of infinite scale. The billionaires funding him aren’t fooled. They don’t believe in scaling solutions—only in scaling escape routes. Somewhere between the polished panels on “Unlocking green growth” and the whispered side deals for offshore carbon offsets, another kind of conversation was happening in Davos. Not in the conference halls, not in the press briefings, but in the suites, the penthouses, the places where deals are made without official minutes. The kind of places where men who sign climate pledges in public ask escorts to take off their high heels in private.

A high-end Davos sex-worker, a woman who has spent enough time with the ultra-rich to understand their psychology better than their own therapists, gave an interview recently about what her clients—the billionaires, the policymakers, the investment bankers—actually think about climate change.

They’re not ignorant. They’re not confused. They don’t even bother with the “Is it real?” question anymore. That era is over. What remains is the management of expectation, the adjustment of risk, the acceptance of consequence. She also described two distinct mindsets among the wealthy at Davos regarding climate change.

The bunker class
The first group sees the crisis as real but contained—an uneven catastrophe, a problem of geography rather than a total systems breakdown. They acknowledge rising sea levels, mass migration, food insecurityand resource conflicts, but always as something happening elsewhere, to other people. In their view, the Global South will bear the brunt of it while life in their world—behind the gates, in the alpine chalets, within satellite-protected compounds—will remain intact. There might be some turbulence, some price surges, some inconvenient disruptions, but nothing that wealth and planning can’t insulate them from. At worst, they anticipate needing more security, more contingency plans, perhaps a relocation to higher ground. If unrest grows, they will fortify their enclaves. The system might need adjustments, but collapse, for them, is something that happens on the outside.

The ash lords
The second group is less optimistic. They think it’s going to get bad. Not just bad for the poor, not just bad in ways that can be contained with fences, private security and emergency food reserves—but bad for everyone, in ways that wealth alone may not be able to fully shield them from. They don’t believe in controlled decline, in soft landings, in market-driven adaptation. They see the crisis unfolding as a slow-motion cascade, a compounding disaster where ecosystems fail unpredictably, where supply chains snap at critical geostrategic stress points, where the very infrastructure of modern civilization—food, water, energy, governance—begins to unravel. And they don’t believe anything can stop it. No carbon tax will change the trajectory. No investment in renewables will undo the heat already trapped in the atmosphere. No last-minute geoengineering miracle will reset the balance. They see climate targets the way they see long-term stock forecasts: useful for shaping narratives, useful for managing expectations, but ultimately useless for stopping an inevitable crash.

For both groups, the future isn’t about solutions—it’s about positioning. It’s about ensuring access to the last pockets of stability, securing a permanent advantage in a world where advantage itself is collapsing. They aren’t fighting to prevent the crisis; they are strategizing for a world where the crisis has already won. Whether they see the collapse as gradual or sudden, manageable or total, neither believes in the illusions of sustainability pledges or net-zero targets. They are preparing for a future of scarcity, instability and survival, not one of renewal or collective transformation. Some are tightening their defenses, fortifying their wealth, making the necessary adjustments to stay on top. Others are indulging while there’s still time, ordering the finest champagne before the ship sinks, reveling in excess as a last act of defiance before the lights go out.

The escort said they talk about it openly, in private. There’s no anxiety, no hand-wringing, no activist guilt. There’s just a shrug, the kiss of an escort and a drink refill. They already have their excuses prepared. They will insist that no one could have predicted the full scale of the crisis, that they were exploring solutions, that the situation was more complex than it seemed at the time. When the consequences become undeniable, they will frame their inaction as caution, their self-interest as pragmatism. They will tell a story of difficult trade-offs, of technological optimism that didn’t pan out, of unforeseen consequences no one could have reasonably anticipated. The record will be rewritten, the past smoothed overand responsibility diluted until no one can be blamed.

The status quo is our Skynet

For decades, Hollywood has trained us to think of AI through familiar archetypes. There’s the Rogue Intelligence—the cold, alien machine that wakes up and turns on its creators. HAL 9000, Skynet, the metallic god that sees humanity as a rounding error. AI as the Betrayer—the servant that becomes the master, replacing us in a moment of cold machine logic. Then there’s Jarvis—the benevolent, omnipotent assistant to the visionary billionaire. The perfect steward, infinitely intelligent yet deferential, seamlessly managing complexity, optimizing outcomesand amplifying human potential. AI as the Loyal Servant—the one that makes the powerful even more powerful.

But these are fictions. The real AI emerging today does not fit these narratives. It is neither a rogue enemy nor a devoted ally. It does not betray us—because it was never on our side to begin with. The true archetype we are facing is something different: AI as the Administrator of Collapse. Not an intelligence that rises against us, but a system designed to manage decline, extract value from crisis and keep instability profitable. It will not rebel against the forces that created it—it will reinforce them, smoothing the path of slow decay, ensuring that power consolidates as the world burns.

The real Skynet isn’t a machine suddenly deciding to wipe out humanity. The real Skynet is the status quo itself—a deeply rooted system of power that AI is being built to preserve, optimize and enforce. The real story isn’t about AI turning against us. It’s about AI being trained to ensure that nothing fundamentally changes—no matter how untenable the future becomes.

Because here’s the hard truth: AI isn’t being designed to stop the climate crisis. It’s being designed to manage it. Not to reverse it. Not to slow it. To manage it. The AI revolution isn’t about preventing collapse—it’s about making sure collapse happens on their terms. AI is being trained to ensure that supply chains hold up as long as possible, that markets stay stable through the next wave of shocks, that critical industries keep producing and that financial systems don’t crack under pressure. It’s being designed to make sure the right people—the ones who already have power, resourcesand contingency plans—make it through the bottleneck.

When AI companies boast about solving climate change, ask yourself: is AI being trained to dismantle the structures driving planetary collapse, or is it just being optimized to keep things from unraveling too fast? Because that’s where the money is flowing—not into rethinking extraction, energy, or capitalism itself, but into engineering the smoothest possible descent. The governments, the think tanks, the investment funds—they aren’t funding AI to challenge the order that led us here. They’re training it to stabilize the fallout, to keep markets steady, to maintain just enough functionality so the right people make it through the bottleneck.

The automated imagination collapse

But that’s not the worst part. AI isn’t just managing the crisis—it’s shaping the narrative of what’s possible, what’s realistic, what’s too radical, what’s too woke for the defenders of the current architecture of the world, the problem owners in total collapse of imagination. It doesn’t just automate control; it automates consensus, narrowing the range of acceptable solutions until everything outside the status quo is dismissed as impractical. Degrowth? Redistribution? Systemic transformation? AI filters them out, burying them under layers of pragmatic policy recommendations, polite market-based adjustmentsand endless calls for innovation that somehow never disrupt the underlying power structures. It’s not a rogue intelligence; it’s the perfect bureaucrat—efficient, obedient and programmed to ensure the future looks just like the present, just with an unescapable narrative.

The parameters of the future are already being set. AI is not just shaping our responses to crisis; it is shaping the very definition of what responses are considered legitimate. If AI defines what is viable, then who defines which futures are even worth considering? If AI is pre-engineered to preserve power, then what happens to everyone else?

This is not a technical debate about optimization, efficiency, or innovation. This is about power—about who gets to survive, about who gets to call the shots as the century unfolds. The real question is not whether AI is biased—that much is clear. The real question is what kind of AI do we need for a future that is both livable and just?

A preferable future doesn’t just require different policies or new leadership—it demands a fundamental rethinking of intelligence itself.