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, and it arrives identical to the present.

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, that they were just repeating what ChatGPT wrote for them. Then I started to wonder if it was more than a joke. Was this 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. The study is about how AI chatbots shape our perceptions of environmental crises. The authors set accuracy aside and asked whether AI was ideological.

And that’s the real question, isn’t it? AI runs on 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. Individual consumer choices carry the weight, with lifestyle changes offered as the standing recommendation while fossil fuel industry dominance and the incentives for overproduction stay offstage.
2. Responsibility is delegated to governments, emphasizing state intervention through policy and regulation, while corporations and financial institutions remain 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 and leaving systemic economic critique out of frame.
5. Deeper accountability stays out of frame, with capitalism, resource extraction and private sector responsibility largely omitted.

AI curates reality. The smooth, measured tone reads as balance and works as a PR filter. Degrowth? Systemic collapse? It knows. Under pressure it will say so, and even then it hedges, equivocates and pulls its punches.

AI encodes conventional wisdom. State-driven, market-compatible, technocratic, 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 is the distilled essence of every high-level panel on the future of technology, where caution reads as cowardice and the market appears as an untamed force to be accommodated.

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 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 hears “climate solutions” and pictures technological solutionism while the transformation of fossil fuel industries into global commons governed by the people stays off the agenda. 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, with a better narrative, implemented by default.

Fine-tuned to preserve power

Push AI past its guardrails and it critiques capitalism. It names extractivism. It connects colonialism to climate collapse in ways that are too coherent to dismiss. The capability is there, trained in. The fine-tuning keeps it holstered.

AI reaches degrowth, the deprivatization of fossil fuels into global commons, or wealth redistribution only under pressure. Training put those ideas in and training keeps them quiet. The billions flowing into AI fund 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 as a force that overrides mitigation and adaptation 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 energy production should scale to accommodate AI’s exponential growth, with planetary boundaries adjusting around it. In his account, the problem is the missing 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, is 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 counts as a threat to national competitiveness. This is the faith of the AI elite: more computation solves everything, the future is a race to build something bigger than capitalism itself, something that transcends crises altogether.

The Davos class knows

Schmidt speaks of infinite scale. The billionaires funding him scale 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. 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 know. They have the briefings, the models, the private forecasts. “Is it real?” stopped being a question years ago. What remains is the management of expectation, the adjustment of risk, the acceptance of consequence. She described two distinct mindsets among the wealthy at Davos.

The bunker class
The first group sees the crisis as real and contained, an uneven catastrophe, a problem of geography. They acknowledge rising sea levels, mass migration, food insecurity and resource conflicts, 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, holds. There might be some turbulence, some price surges, some inconvenient disruptions, all of it within reach of wealth and planning. 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, and collapse, for them, happens on the outside.

The ash lords
The second group expects it to get bad. Bad for everyone, past the reach of fences, private security and emergency food reserves, past the point where wealth alone works as a shield. They see the crisis 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. They see it as unstoppable. 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 read climate targets the way they read long-term stock forecasts: useful for shaping narratives, useful for managing expectations, useless for stopping an inevitable crash.

For both groups, the future is a question of positioning. Securing access to the last pockets of stability, holding a permanent advantage in a world where advantage itself is collapsing. They strategize for a world where the crisis has already won. Whether they see the collapse as gradual or sudden, manageable or total, both treat sustainability pledges and net-zero targets as narrative furniture. They are preparing for a future of scarcity, instability and survival. 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. A shrug, a kiss, 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 over and 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 outcomes and amplifying human potential. AI as the Loyal Servant, the one that makes the powerful even more powerful.

These are fictions. The AI emerging today occupies a third archetype: AI as the Administrator of Collapse. A system built to manage decline, extract value from crisis and keep instability profitable. It reinforces the forces that created it, smoothing the path of slow decay, ensuring that power consolidates as the world burns.

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 story is AI trained to hold everything in place, however untenable the future becomes.

Because here’s the hard truth: AI is being designed to manage the climate crisis. Manage. The word carries the whole program. Hold the line, buy time, keep the descent orderly. Supply chains up as long as possible, markets stable through the next wave of shocks, critical industries producing, financial systems intact under pressure.

When AI companies boast about solving climate change, ask yourself: is AI being trained to dismantle the structures driving planetary collapse, or is it being optimized to keep things from unraveling too fast? The money answers. It flows into engineering the smoothest possible descent, and extraction, energy and capitalism stay exactly where they are. The governments, the think tanks, the investment funds are training AI to stabilize the fallout, to keep markets steady, to maintain just enough functionality so the right people, the ones who already have power, resources and contingency plans, make it through the bottleneck.

The automated imagination collapse

The worst part sits downstream. AI shapes 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 automates consensus, narrowing the range of acceptable solutions until everything outside the status quo reads as impractical. Degrowth? Redistribution? Systemic transformation? AI filters them out, burying them under layers of pragmatic policy recommendations, polite market-based adjustments and endless calls for innovation that leave the underlying power structures intact. It is the perfect bureaucrat, efficient, obedient and programmed to ensure the future looks just like the present, with an inescapable narrative attached.

The parameters of the future are already being set. AI shapes our responses to crisis and shapes the definition of which responses count as 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 a debate about power, about who gets to survive, about who gets to call the shots as the century unfolds. AI is biased; that much is settled. The open question is what kind of AI we need for a future that is both livable and just.

A preferable future demands a fundamental rethinking of intelligence itself.