When the System Fails, AI Just Fails Faster

It’s become trendy to fear artificial intelligence. People call it faceless, inhuman, dangerous—like it’s some rogue intelligence slouching toward Bethlehem to be born, as Yeats might put it, but coded in Python. The usual suspects line up on podcasts and headlines: AI is unaccountable, AI is opaque, AI is going to destroy us. But here’s the dirty secret no one really wants to touch: the real fear isn’t AI. It’s the system that birthed it.

Because AI isn’t doing anything new.

It’s just doing the old injustices faster.

It’s the tech support call that goes nowhere. The customer complaint that dies in a CRM purgatory. It’s every email that ended in “Unfortunately, we cannot assist you further.” That dead-eyed chatbot that loops you back to the same useless FAQ page. It’s Comcast, but with a neural net.