AI is not "ruining" human civilization. AI is just a major catalyst that shows what exactly has already been broken for a long time — while we keep pretending it's working as intended.

I've been looking for the right moment to write this down, and it feels like the moment has come. What follows is part sentiment, part illustration — so bear with me while I walk through a few examples before getting to what actually prompted it.

Take tax audits, for instance. Clearly, last year's models are more than capable of finding massive gaps, detecting fraud, and saving our budgets insane amounts of money. However, I very much doubt that we'll see major cuts in fraud in the next few years. Because the incentives are just too misaligned.

Or take patents. The originally advertised idea was and remains to motivate inventors to invent — since a good invention can, and should, presumably, make one well off. The brutal reality is that patents are used for many purposes, but most definitely not to protect the interests of inventors.

Or monopolies and anti-monopoly committees. They have been defunct for a long time, and we all know full well what legal entities (and what individuals) are profiting tremendously because those monopolies do exist and are far too powerful — and yet nothing is being done. Those "huge" fines are a rounding error next to how much those entities are making from the very fact that others are effectively deprived of choice.

Ah, and my long-time favorite: science. Peer reviews, scientific consensus, attribution, who gets the credit, who gets the prize. Just ... come on. We all know this facet of the world has been broken for a long, long time. It doesn't take much digging into history to learn how tobacco companies lobbied for the idea that "all opinions must be considered" when it comes to whether smoking causes lung cancer. This has cost lives — millions of lives. We know who did it, and we know who paid for it. Smoking did decline, eventually, and the settlements were paid. But the playbook itself — manufacture doubt, demand "balance" — was never retired. It is still in use today, on other topics.

This is not to mention the years Andrew Wiles spent working in secrecy. No dirty secret there, of course — but even the most notable mathematical proofs by humanity show that attribution was and remains a cornerstone problem. Incompatible with the real Socratic scientific method, to my taste, but such is life.

And today, suddenly, we are supposed to be outraged about potential misattribution of the Navier-Stokes solution. Solutions, in the plural, I should say — if any of them holds. My bet is that quite a few claims from it will hold, although practical applications of that proof remain to be seen.

I can make a broader point here, but it will be too bleak. So let me leave it as is: just don't forget that AI is not "destroying" the "fabric of our reality". AI is just showing where we chose not to look up for far too long.

And, despite being 40+, I still consider myself young enough to believe this is ultimately a good thing. Because the more we do look up, the higher the chance of us, humankind, not doing something very stupid collectively.