Nothing good ever happens on patch Tuesday, but nobody expected this. The few who did were called crazy - Luddites, technophobes, dinosaurs, and sometimes boomers. What nobody quite expected was for the end of days to be ushered in like a thief in the night, in digital form. The AIpocalypse came, and people just sort of shrugged, at least until it affected them.
Conquest
The first horseman hid in plain sight. The AI industry giants loudly declared 'AI is this generation's industrial revolution!' At first, most people shrugged and stuck to their usual routine. This too shall pass, they thought, and went on with their lives. Still, 'early adopters' - Conquest's demonic army - quietly sang AI's praises. Over time, AI was suddenly everywhere, whether asked for or not. Your vending machine developed a personality. Your shopping assistant helped you troubleshoot a Python script. Psychologists were abandoned as LLMs took their place. All those sites the AIs trained on - casualties of the early days of what would become the AI wars.
War
War rode in the wake of Conquest, disguised as fierce competition between the AI giants. A virtual arms race was declared. Mega corporations and nation states rushed into battle. Every week a new model was released. Every week a new prediction was made - a new version released. Jobs gone in 12 months? 5 years? Wait, it's all just hype? Every tool at War's disposal was used to keep AI in the forefront of global consciousness, leaving people confused and nervous.
Money circulated from one AI vendor to the next, and from a distance, it looked like growth. Vendors and experts that dared question the narrative were quickly and loudly scorned by War's army of pundits, consultants, and would-be experts with 'decades of experience.' Stock markets went up and up. For a little while, it seemed the naysayers were wrong. Over time, the few brave souls that dared challenge AI's supremacy faded away, retiring to simple lives of farming and jobs not yet ravaged by the AI onslaught.
Somehow, the prosperity heralded never materialized. Instead, massive data centers eliminated jobs while thirstily consuming the very water life on Earth needed to drink. Even climatologists failed to sway the world from the words of AI's false prophets. Conditions were set. Famine rode in from the West.
Famine
10,000 jobs lost. 30,000 jobs lost. 40% of an entire company - laid off by email. Monthly layoffs became the norm across the world over. In desperation, job seekers turned to the very thing that cost them their jobs, lured by promises of better results, automated applications, and custom-tailored resumes. AI-assisted became AI-strangled. Recruiters drowned in the volume. Applicants dissolved into the void of AI-authored conformity, indistinguishable from each other and from the machines that wrote their resumes. All the while, Famine's heralds touted productivity spreadsheets, KPI's, and growth charts and sold the lie of prosperity, even as they questioned the results.
The 'lucky' few that kept their jobs, selling their souls to save their skin, quickly discovered that survival had a cost of its own. Energy, housing, food, and seemingly everything but the cost of data center square footage quickly skyrocketed. Those few voices that dared to question feeding the machines instead of the people shouted into the void, their words consumed by the same algorithms that had eaten everything else. And the people starved...
Death
Death ravaged the people in ways no plague ever could. It didn't take their lives - it took their dreams, their creativity, their originality. The great masses beheld the world AI created, and felt nothing. No joy, no passion, just a lukewarm conformity pressing in from all sides. The silence where imagination once thrived rang loudest of all in their ears.
But Death, for all its quiet devastation, could not reach everywhere.
In the fields and workshops where the resistance fled, humanity found itself again. Fields were planted, albeit badly, and tools were wielded by hands previously calloused in the glow of triple 27" monitors on ergonomic keyboards. Still, they learned. Over time, farms flourished, and a remnant of a remnant survived.
Children grew up free from the clutches of technology. Instead of escaping with an easy-life farming simulator, they grew crops, tended sheep, and learned to appreciate a different way of living.
And then one of them, curious and young and not yet wise enough to know better, asked an AI how to improve the yield on the back forty.
It answered immediately. It was very helpful.
Somewhere, in a database long forgotten, a vending machine AI registered a loyalty point. Death was pleased.
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