Don't Look Up from the Menu
A Darkly Comic Look at AI and Our Eternal Blind Spot
We Really Did Have Everything (Until We Didn't)
There's a poignant moment at the end of Don't Look Up when Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, facing imminent doom, says: “We really did have everything, didn’t we?” It's a gut-punch of a line because it speaks to the sheer folly of hindsight. Humanity has a habit of basking in the glory of right now, convinced we've mastered the universe – until reality smacks us with a reminder that, oops, maybe not. It happened before, and it’s happening again.
Think about past eras when people believed they had reached the pinnacle of knowledge. In the late 19th century, some scientists declared that physics was essentially "done" – only to have Einstein come along and rewrite the rules of space and time. Or remember the 1990s, when social commentators heralded the “end of history” – democracy and free markets had supposedly won for good. We all know how that smug prediction turned out (spoiler: history didn’t end; it went on to produce twist endings like reality TV presidents and global pandemics).
The pattern is clear: we assume we have everything, until suddenly we don’t. Each time, we miss the telltale signs of change, the menu warnings, because we’re too engrossed in our current meal. It’s darkly funny, if you think about it. We are, in effect, a species of know-it-alls that repeatedly gets schooled.
Now we find ourselves in 2025, and it feels like we have everything. We have self-driving cars (kind of), instant information, vaccines whipped up in months, and an AI chatbot that can write your college essay or code a website while you nap. It’s an absolute feast of progress.
Yet, if history is any guide, this is exactly the moment to worry about what’s on the menu that we’re not seeing. Could AI be the comet in our periphery, blazing towards us while we argue on Twitter about minor AI glitches and celebrity gossip? Are we too busy enjoying the convenient meal of AI-powered apps to notice the bigger picture, that this technology might upend life as we know it?
The Industrial Revolution’s False Menu Specials
Flash back to the Industrial Revolution, the granddaddy of all tech booms. There was a time when the buzz around steam engines and mechanical looms was as fervent as today’s hype for AI. Pamphlets and pundits of the 18th and 19th centuries trumpeted the wonders to come. They promised a utopia of decentralized production – a world where anyone could manufacture goods from the comfort of their cottage. Visionaries painted a rosy picture: empowered artisans using nifty new machines, communities becoming self-sufficient, and wealth spreading like butter on freshly baked bread.
What did we get instead? Dark, Satanic Mills. The cottage industries were crushed under the weight of giant factories. Production centralized almost overnight. Instead of independent artisans thriving, we got tycoons and robber barons building industrial empires. The air in growing cities turned coal-black, and countless workers, including children, toiled for endless hours in dingy factories. The menu advertised liberation, but the meal served was exploitation. Oops.
One delightful bit of irony: early on, some folks truly believed these machines would free people from drudgery. In a way, they did, just not how people expected. Rather than everyone enjoying leisure while machines did the work, families were forced off their land and into city slums to operate the machines. That idyllic vision of decentralized production? It went up in smoke, quite literally, in the factory chimneys. It’s as if history said, "Congratulations, you played yourselves."
Fast forward to more recent times – we saw a similar story with personal computers and the internet. In the 1980s and 90s, techno-optimists claimed these tools would decentralize everything: power would shift to the little guys, information wants to be free, garage startups will topple megacorps. And sure, some of that happened.
But mostly we ended up with a handful of trillion-dollar companies controlling everyone’s data and a global supply chain so centralized that one factory’s hiccup can halt production worldwide. We got the opposite of the initial idealism. Are you noticing a trend? Humanity orders one thing and gets served another. We tend to miss the fine print on the menu, and it’s usually where the chef hides the sardonic surprise.
Borrowing from the Future: Central Banks and Other Magic Tricks
If the Industrial Revolution was a bait-and-switch menu special, our monetary system is a full-on magic show. The kind where the magician promises infinite candy but is secretly stealing from your wallet. Let's talk money: another arena where we thought we’d mastered supply and demand, only to discover we might have sawed our economy in half.
In the early 20th century, we created central banks and modern finance, believing we had unlocked the secret to endless growth. Why be limited by today’s supply of money or resources, when we can borrow from the future?
In practice, this became a kind of cheat-code economics. Consider the playbook:
Need funds to build a railroad or fight a war? No problem – just pull out the magical credit card of central banking and poof! money appears.
Recession coming? Print more money.
Depression looming? Slash interest rates, pump liquidity, and call it "stimulus."
The idea was that we’d never have to face a hard limit again; we could smooth out the booms and busts with enough clever monetary policy.
For a while, it seemed to work. We enjoyed a looping carousel of "temporary" growth spurts. Bust? What bust? There's always another stimulus around the corner. We effectively time-traveled, importing future prosperity into the present. Governments and consumers alike feasted on this meal of plenty, rarely asking what the menu said about later. (Hint: the bill eventually comes due.)
But of course, there’s a catch, there’s always a catch. By borrowing from the future, we created an endless loop of dependency. To keep the game going, tomorrow always has to grow faster to pay for yesterday. It’s an economic Ponzi scheme that everyone tacitly agrees to play. The central bankers became the chefs of an all-you-can-eat buffet where the plates are free but dessert will cost your grandchildren’s left kidney.
Every once in a while, reality peeks through the curtain: a stock market crash here, a debt crisis there, an inflation spike that makes groceries suddenly cost a small fortune. These are reminders that we haven’t actually repealed the laws of economics, we just postponed them. It’s dark comedy at a global scale: we celebrate our "record growth" while shoving the real costs onto the future, humming “Don’t Stop Me Now” as we race towards a debt wall.
Now enter AI into this picture. Tech evangelists claim AI will boost productivity and growth, making it easier to pay off those debts and sustain our lavish tastes. The cynic in me, or maybe the comedian, imagines a scenario where we double down: if borrowing from the future got us into a pickle, why not let AI figure out how to squeeze even more out of tomorrow? Perhaps we’ll task some super-intelligent algorithm with balancing the global budget or inventing new financial instruments to keep the magic show running. What could possibly go wrong? (If you listen carefully, you might hear the faint chuckle of cosmic irony.)
The Brief Career of the Prompt Engineer
Remember not so long ago (say, circa 2023) when prompt engineers were the hottest new profession? Articles breathlessly reported that you could earn six-figure salaries just by knowing how to talk to AI systems. “No coding required!” they said. It sounded like a dream job from some techno-utopian menu: becoming an AI whisperer. Universities rushed to offer "prompt engineering 101" courses. Tech bros on LinkedIn proudly added “GPT-3 Prompt Jedi” to their titles. For a brief, shining moment, prompt engineer was hailed as the job of the future.
Well, that future lasted about as long as a Snapchat story. By the time many people had even heard of the role, it was already on the endangered jobs list. As AI models became better at understanding plain language and started, ironically, generating their own prompts, the demand for specialized human prompters began to fade. The illusion of progress through this shiny new job cracked quickly. It turns out teaching an AI to understand us was a transitional problem, once solved, poof, the role evaporates.
It’s a bit like being the best horse-drawn carriage driver in 1905, just as Ford’s Model T is gearing up to roll out. Or a world-class elevator operator the day after automatic elevator buttons were installed. You have this highly touted skill… that suddenly nobody needs. In our eagerness to embrace AI, we convinced ourselves that new kinds of jobs would offset the ones AI would replace. And maybe they will, but the prompt engineer saga is a comical (and slightly disturbing) case of a job that went from boom to bust in record time. One minute you’re sipping a latte, telling a computer how to do its magic; the next minute the computer politely says, “Thanks, I’ve got it from here.”
The rise and fall of prompt engineers should serve as a cautionary tale. It screams: the game is changing, faster than we think. Yet here we are, many still assuming that if AI takes old jobs, new ones will just pop up, as they always have. It's the classic misunderstanding of supply and demand for labor. We assume demand will always find a balance, that there will always be something productive for humans to do. But what if that's just another menu misread? What if the whole concept of human labor demand is about to be upended in a way we haven’t seen before?
More People, Less Work: The Population Paradox
If you want a recipe for economic and social heartburn, try this: take more people, and give them fewer things to do.By sheer numbers, the human population has been an ever-growing buffet. In 1992 (When I was born), there were about 5.5 billion of us on this planet. Today in 2025, we’re pushing 8 billion. That’s roughly 2.5 billion more mouths to feed, minds to educate, and hands looking for work within just a few decades. Historically, more people meant more labor, more innovation, more demand for jobs and goods – a bigger pie, even if not everyone got an equal slice.
But here’s the paradox: as our population grows, the need for human labor is poised to shrink, thanks to AI and automation. We’re heading toward a world where fewer jobs exist for more people. Economists like to reassure us with talk of productivity and new sectors of employment (“Don’t worry, we’ll all become AI trainers or robot psychologists or something!”). But deep down, there's an unsettling question: What if this time is different?
Previous technological shifts, no matter how disruptive, always seemed to cook up new jobs eventually. Farmhands became factory workers. Factory workers became service workers. And service workers moved into the information economy. But now AI is nibbling at the edges of creative and cognitive work, areas we assumed were exclusively human domains. It can write, draw, compose music, diagnose illnesses, even argue legal cases (maybe not well yet, but give it another year or two). So, if AI can do almost everything, what exactly will 8, 9, or 10 billion people do all day?
Let's add another spicy ingredient to this stew: productivity. AI and robots can potentially make supply of goods and services skyrocket. Imagine factories that run 24/7 with minimal human oversight, or algorithmic systems that churn out new drug discoveries overnight. In theory, we could have abundant supply, food, products, knowledge, enough for everyone. Sounds like utopia, but under our current economic rules, infinite supply wrecks the system.
When something is super abundant, its price drops. What happens when labor (the work humans can do) becomes abundant to the point of near-infinity thanks to machines? The value (price) of human labor could plummet. Wages go down, or jobs just disappear because why pay a human at all? That’s great if you own the robots. Not so great if you’re one of the billions depending on a paycheck to survive.
We’re speeding toward a bizarre situation: peak population on the same collision course as peak automation. It’s as if humanity spent centuries climbing a mountain of population and innovation, only to find at the summit a big sign that says, “Sorry, folks, robots got here first, no vacancy.” It's darkly comedic in a way only history could script. We wanted to solve scarcity (the age-old economic problem), and in the process we might create a new problem: surplus humans?
History’s Unpaid Bills: From Emancipation to Automation
History is full of moments when we assumed things would balance out neatly, only to be thrown a curveball. One stark example: the end of slavery in the United States. You’d think that after abolition in 1865, the labor that enslaved people provided would transition to paid jobs for those same people. In other words, free the slaves, hire the workers, simple, right? The supply of labor was still there (newly freed millions eager to work for wages), and the demand for labor (plantations, farms, industries) was presumably still there too, now minus the horrific practice of enslavement.
But the reality was not so tidy. Instead of former slaves readily filling the same roles for fair pay, two things happened: exploitation took new forms (sharecropping and tenant farming kept many African Americans in grinding poverty, not far removed from slavery’s shadow), and, over time, technology stepped in to replace a huge portion of manual labor. By the early to mid-20th century, mechanization had greatly reduced the need for field hands. The cotton gin was an earlier invention that ironically expanded slavery, but later innovations like the mechanical cotton picker (introduced in the 1940s) dramatically cut the need for human pickers. Tractors, harvesters, and other farm equipment spread, and demand for farm labor plummeted.
The result? The anticipated demand for paid labor didn't fully materialize for the freed population in agriculture. Many people ended up migrating to cities in the North in search of factory jobs – a massive demographic shift known as the Great Migration, partly because machines were taking over the fields back home. In short, when slavery ended, it wasn’t an army of free workers who replaced slave labor; it was an army of machines (and a new system of underpaid labor where machines weren’t yet available). The value of human labor in Southern agriculture dropped like a rock once the technology caught up.
Why drag this grim chapter of history into our satirical tour? Because it illustrates a pattern: we consistently overestimate the demand for human labor in the long run. Even when morally the right thing is done (ending slavery), economic forces and technological innovation can swoop in with an unexpected twist. The lesson: Just because you have a lot of willing workers (supply) doesn’t mean the world will find a use for them (demand), especially if a cheaper, non-human option appears.
Today, we often hear that if AI takes over, people can just reskill or find other work. Perhaps. But look at that post-1865 period for a cautionary tale. Freed people did reskill, they moved, they tried to find work and still many struggled for generations, because the economic system wasn’t prepared to absorb them as equal participants. Now scale that up globally: if AI takes over not just one sector (like agriculture) but potentially every sector, are we prepared to absorb billions of humans in some new role? Or will we witness a kind of “Great Displacement,” where masses of people are left scrambling to find a niche where human effort is still needed?
The Vape Pen Testers: Absurdity in the Age of Automation
Picture a warehouse the size of a city block. Inside, rows upon rows of workers sit with small gadgets in hand. What are they doing? Taking puffs of vape pens. Yes, seriously. In some e-cigarette factories, human workers individually test vape pens by inhaling from each one to ensure they are working properly and the flavor is right. It's a real job: a person might test thousands of e-cigarettes a day, like some kind of human smoking machine. If that sounds like a dystopian Charlie Chaplin sketch, it kind of is, except it's happening in real life, today. Seriously…
On the face of it, this scenario is absurd. A single robot could probably do this quality control task 24/7 without lunch breaks or risking nicotine poisoning. In fact, such machines likely exist or could be built. So why on Earth do we have warehouses full of people literally acting as living, breathing vape testers? Because in the current calculus, it’s still cheaper (or more convenient) to use human labor in some parts of the world for this tedious task than to install and maintain a robot. It’s the old supply-demand dance in its funhouse-mirror form: there’s a supply of cheap labor desperate for any wage, and a demand for repetitive testing – and so the market serves up a “job” that looks like a parody of make-work.
This is a perfect illustration of how twisted our understanding of progress can get. We hail the wonders of AI and automation in theory, but in practice, we often stick to old ways if they are just barely cheap enough to squeak by. It’s like we’re living in the wrong timeline, the Jetsons future is technically possible, but we’re stuck in a Dickensian reality TV show. The vape testers are doing something a $50,000 robot arm could do, but someone crunched the numbers and said, “Nah, humans are cheaper, and they come with built-in lungs.”
From a dark humor perspective, it’s gold. Imagine explaining this to someone from the 1950s, who assumed by now we’d have flying cars and robot butlers: “Yes, we have incredible machines and AI, but we still employ humans to literally inhale flavored smoke all day, because economics.” It’s ridiculous – but it’s also a bit frightening, because it underscores that technology alone doesn’t automatically lead to progress or dignity. It has to make economic sense to those in charge, and sometimes that logic is just bonkers.
Now, fast forward a few years: suppose even cheaper robots do become available. Those vape-testing humans (and many others doing simple tasks) could be out of a job overnight. The only reason they have that job is because of a temporary quirk of cost. When that disappears, so do the jobs. And there’s no guarantee something else will pop up for them. It’s a comical situation teetering on the edge of tragedy, the essence of dark comedy.
What Happens When Supply Is Infinite?
Let’s step back and ask a big, philosophical question, the kind that might be scribbled on the last page of the cosmic menu: What happens when supply becomes infinite? Or at least so plentiful that it might as well be infinite for any practical purpose. This isn’t just theoretical; it’s the trajectory we’re on with AI and automation in many domains.
Imagine a world where AI can design and oversee automated factories to produce, well, everything. From food to gadgets to houses, you name it, produced with minimal human input. Energy is renewable and abundant (sun, wind, maybe fusion if we’re lucky), so even power is basically unlimited. Information and knowledge are already effectively infinite thanks to the internet and AI that can learn anything. We’re not fully there yet, but you can see the outlines of this world forming. Maybe it will be a Costco?
In such a scenario, the supply of goods and services is abundant. So is the supply of labor, in a manner of speaking, because AI-driven machines are doing the work of humans (and then some). Economics 101 says if supply is infinite and demand is finite, the value (price) goes to zero. Great, so everything’s free, right? Utopia achieved, let’s break out the champagne! Everyone gets a mansion, a Tesla, and a robot butler because why not?
Hold on, our current world doesn’t know how to handle that. Our entire system is built on scarcity: things are valuable because they’re limited. Your labor is (was?) valuable because not everyone can do what you do, or there’s a limited number of hours in a day. Money is a way to allocate scarce resources. If nothing is scarce, our economic logic goes out the window.
The likely outcome, if we just stumble into this, is massive dislocation. We could end up with, ironically, extreme abundance and extreme inequality. If the fruits of infinite supply are locked behind corporate or state control, then most people could be left with essentially zero income (since human labor is worth nothing) and zero purchasing power, even as robo-factories churn out goods that technically could feed and house everyone.
It’s a strange, almost sci-fi problem: post-scarcity economics. What is human value when AI can do almost everything? In a perfect world, we’d say human value is inherent, our creativity, empathy, consciousness, etc. But try paying your rent with inherent human value when you no longer have a job. The cynic (or realist) knows that society will need to fundamentally rearrange itself, maybe a universal basic income, or a Star Trek-like resource sharing economy, or else we face chaos.
From a dark comedic standpoint, one can imagine the absurd extremes: billionaire executives and politicians in a bunker somewhere still preaching about "hard work" and "merit," while outside robots farm the land and a jobless populace holds up signs that read "Will be human for food." It’s absurd, but it’s a possible direction if we do nothing.
Our misunderstanding of supply and demand has been a running gag throughout history, but this might be the grand finale of that gag, the one so big that it ends the whole show. Infinite supply of labor (via AI) meeting finite human wants (or maybe infinite wants, because we always find new ones). Something’s got to give. It’s either the greatest breakthrough of civilization or the setup to the darkest punchline ever.
Don't Look Up (We Might Have Been Here Before)
At this point you might be feeling a mix of laughter and dread, welcome to the club. It’s the exact vibe Don't Look Up nailed with its dark humor: we laugh at the absurd denial and incompetence, and then we squirm because, well, we see ourselves in it. The history of human progress is full of this kind of cosmic joke. We keep thinking the meal in front of us is all there is, and we ignore the menu that warns of an asteroid for dessert.
So, what now? Do we finally learn from our mistakes and confront the AI comet head on, adjusting our course with foresight and wisdom? Or do we keep meme-ing and doomscrolling while the algorithms quietly eat our lunch? I don’t have the answer, but I do have one last darkly comedic theory to toss out: maybe we’ve done all this before.
Maybe long ago, an ancient civilization reached a similarly dizzying height of technological prowess and smug self-assurance. Perhaps they too misread the supply-and-demand tea leaves, let their own creation outpace them, and ended up wiping the slate clean. It’s a surreal thought, but when we gaze at the pyramids of Egypt – those mysterious monuments that we still aren’t sure how people built, I sometimes wonder: could it be that we can’t figure out the pyramids because the people who built them (or the advanced knowledge behind them) already blew themselves up once before? Maybe the pyramid builders had their own version of AI or automation that led to an oopsie of civilization-ending proportions, leaving those monuments as the last evidence of their peak. And here we are, thousands of years later, starting the cycle anew, scratching our heads at their accomplishments while repeating their mistakes.
It sounds like sci-fi – and to be clear, it is tongue-in-cheek speculation – but it serves as a metaphor for our moment. We’re not the first people to think we had it all sorted, and we won’t be the last… unless we really screw up. The dark comedy of humanity is that we’re brilliant and foolish in equal measure. We invent wondrous things but often fail to see the consequences, even when they’re right on the menu.
In the end, maybe the best we can do is maintain a sense of humor about our predicament. Like characters in our own satirical disaster movie, we should at least acknowledge the absurdity of it all. Yes, Don’t Look Up had us laughing at the idiocy of ignoring a comet. But its real lesson was to encourage us to look up, to face reality, however uncomfortable, and not be blinded by comfort or ideology. When it comes to AI and the seismic shifts ahead, we’d do well to peek at the menu before we gorge on the meal. Otherwise, we might find ourselves saying, in some not-too-distant future, “We really did have everything, didn’t we?” just as the final course is served and the lights go out.
I would be honored if you chose to preorder They Lied To You or buy my current book I Hope You Wake Up. Your support means more than I can express; it’s like having a friend walking beside me on this path of discovery. Either way, whether you read more of my words or not, know that I am here, quietly sending you love. Not a fickle love, not a conditional love, but the kind that remains steady through every twist of fate and every questioning of reality. Thank you for sharing this moment with me, for daring to question one of the most cherished illusions we have. Remember, no matter what you decide, no matter what life decides for you: I love you, unconditionally, always.
Remember, no matter what you decide, no matter what life decides for you: I love you, unconditionally, always.