Here we go is software dead, or should we call it soft-limbo-ware?

Lately, widespread discussions have broken out over whether the software business will even survive, or if there will be any need for it at all. Will we just use AI to write whatever programs we need ourselves? It feels too early to say for sure, but let’s think it through.

First of all, even if AI can generate code and make final products, far from everyone knows how to write the right prompt for it, even if it's just to clone an existing app. And besides, not all the apps we might find useful actually exist yet for us to copy. Making a good, useful application used to be hard. You needed a large, competent team that understood both what needed to be built and how to build it. That team had to be paid a lot of money, which required a business model to bring that money in. Even in the case of free and open-source software, it's still a model. All of this was complicated, so relatively few complex, well-developed applications ever got made. As a result, they were either for very common problems, or for very narrow, high-stakes ones.

But now, for example, we’re seeing a literal flood of free and often even open-source apps cloning Adobe products like Photoshop. Soon, plenty of people will be able to spin up multiple copies of Photoshop and other Adobe tools. Perhaps not just anyone could do it with a single simple prompt. But people who know how to whip up those kinds of prompts may well be willing to spend the time and tokens chatting with large language models, walking them through how to implement the necessary features, building a clone of some popular app, and releasing it for free.

In the near term, I think that’s exactly what will happen with big products like Adobe Creative Suite or Microsoft Office, and with popular software in general that lots of people need and that used to be very expensive, like the aforementioned Photoshop. It will take vastly less effort than it used to. Still, not everyone will bother doing it, and not everyone will be able to. Meanwhile, people’s appetite for all sorts of different tools will grow significantly, and thus the sheer number of possible applications will explode. I am cranking out applications for my own needs all the time now, mostly because what I needed did not exist. For example, I made Podcast Track Cleaner, which does exactly what I want and how I want it. Nothing like that is on the market, but now I have it, I use it, and it's awesome.

I thought of an analogy for this. Imagine a rare, unusual dish that was only served in a few high-end restaurants, and almost no one knew the exact recipe. Now there’s no special secret to it, so supposedly anyone can go and make it. Well, for starters, not everyone is a chef or even knows how to cook. Even with the recipe in hand, a person might just not want to cook it themselves. There are more recipes out there now than ever before, and yet most people still don’t want to cook. However, the range of what can be easily prepared will get much wider, and more people who actually enjoy cooking will do it. Small restaurants might find things noticeably easier. Consequently, more affordable alternatives to expensive restaurants will pop up. Dishes that used to be a rarity will be available at almost any spot, and in many cases for much less. But that doesn’t mean restaurants will disappear altogether, or that every single one of them will suddenly become dirt cheap.

Software as a whole will go through the exact same kind of massive shift without disappearing. What will change dramatically are the business models, namely how it’s all structured and how people actually use it. New types of aggregators will emerge to help people find all these new apps and figure out what a given piece of software is even for.

Maybe the restaurant analogy isn’t the best one. Possibly it’ll look more like what happened to legacy media and print publications when the internet arrived. Newspapers lost their local value and shrank in number, and news as a business, or even the whole phenomenon itself, transformed. Software might go that way. On top of that, a huge chunk of software only existed to handle routine tasks, the kinds of things AI can now do directly. And that’s a much bigger issue. If you can do it all with AI and no longer need the tools you used to buy, there’s no point in building those tools anymore. Which means all the people who built them are no longer needed, and neither is all the software they used. At the same time, we will need plenty of new things. This will reshape society beyond recognition. Huge changes are coming, though that doesn’t mean AI will be able to do literally everything anytime soon, not even build all the software, and especially not on its own.

Still, I don’t think the business of building commercial apps, programs, platforms, and so on will just die out in the next couple of years. Nevertheless, earth-shattering changes are on the way, whether we want them or not.

First, legacy business models are obviously going to start creaking like a submarine descending past its crush depth. Some companies will implode from the pressure, at some point almost instantaneously. Others will have it so rough they’ll end up laying off most of their staff. And for some, things will be fine or even better than ever. Just because AI can automate a lot doesn’t mean you can simply replace masses of people. It means that across everyone's daily tasks, a large percentage of their time can be handed over to agents. Existing companies have a hard time integrating this effectively, but new companies will emerge where the entire team’s workflow is built from day one around massive automation and the use of agents. They will do more, and they will do it faster. They will still need people, but the specializations, the roles, and most importantly the ratios of who makes up the team will transform completely. These new companies will eclipse the old ones.

Second, there will be a massive boom in personal apps and platforms. A lot of people are already starting to build their own things, and while maybe a small fraction of that can be monetized, most of it probably won’t be. Selling is hard, as it brings an extra layer of complexity and responsibility, making it infinitely easier to just build things for yourself and your friends. The main thing that will change here is that many people, and eventually almost anyone, will be able to whip up the exact apps they need for themselves. Not everyone, and not for everything, but a lot. And it will be easy. The analogy here is creating a social media account. To us today, that feels trivial, whereas to people from the pre-internet era, it would look monumental, almost like owning a personal publishing house with global printing and distribution. This will become commonplace, and creating something that used to take entire departments and months of work will feel akin to putting together a web page for a kid’s birthday party invitation.

Third, the very concept of the interface is going to change. Right now, apps and websites play a central role in so many ways, and they all share a familiar type of interface. Over the last few decades, that has predominantly been the GUI. On computers, that’s WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus/Mice, Pointers), and later on smartphones, touch, i.e., Post-WIMP or a Natural User Interface (NUI), which is more convenient in some ways and less so in others. These familiar, graphically manipulated interfaces have prevailed for a long time, but they are going to give up that central role, and we might barely even use the interfaces we rely on today. The metaphor here is kind of like how kings or presidents use technology. They don’t need to install Photoshop, or Instagram, or anything more complicated. They just give requests to their subordinates: "do this, show me that." And so people show them, or get it done. They don’t care how it was made or what app is being used to display it. They just ask for it, and it gets done in whatever way makes the most sense for the task. Often by voice, often they’ll be shown something visual, and sometimes it’ll just be an action, like closing the blinds or ordering a pizza. Let’s call it Post-Post-WIMP, or a Request-Result-Contextual-Interface (RRCI).

None of this will happen overnight, but we are starting to see all three trends unfold right now. Software won't die, it’s just going to become something completely different.

I wanted to pitch in a bit regarding the recent massive wave of discussions that has resurfaced again about the dangers of AI, specifically that it will rebel on its own and wipe us all out. First I actually think that this is pretty much an engineered campaign, that is not about safe or alignment, but about mass regulation that will benefit market leaders and bureaucrats.

Besides that I want to capture a couple of my own thoughts on this. If only so that down the road, I can look back and laugh at just how wrong I was about everything.

1. AI definitely poses a danger. But it seems to me that almost everyone across the board misses one simple dynamic. The danger stems from the fact that AI is an ultra-powerful tool, that it will likely become even more powerful soon, and that humanity might not be able to stand against it. But the real question is who’s actually calling the shots at that point? The creators of the AI (or their bosses), or a self-aware AI itself? I believe that by the time AI reaches that genuinely dangerous level, it won't yet have self-awareness and thus any desire to view humanity as an enemy. That dangerous threshold will arrive sooner, meaning there will still be a small circle of plain old humans pulling the strings. The unprecedented power handed to them is where the primary threat lies. The danger comes from them—the proverbial monkey with a grenade—not from the grenade itself.

2. Acknowledging a threat, even if correctly identified, doesn’t mean the proposed solutions will improve the situation, let alone resolve it. A visual metaphor comes to mind: imagine an isolated island tribe learning that a modern amphibious assault ship is heading straight for their shores. From rumors, they know it's dangerous. So they hold a council to figure out what to do. Some think they should just pray. Others insist on sacrificing seven virgins is required, others blame a witch who must be burned. Some propose building the right kind of idol or a statue and someone suggests laying a circle of yellow seashells around the village for protection. Obviously, you can guess how well that's going to work. A modern person might be able to advise them on how to avoid dying in a futile battle and resolve things peacefully, even if it meant upending their way of life, with some things turning out worse, but many potentially better. But either way, their current proposed solutions are utterly ridiculous.

I don't know how things will go, but somehow I still have faith in humanity and our ability to figure things out, including the alignment. Let's sort ourselves, that's the key, and AGI will learn from us.

Jean Raspail — The Camp of the Saints (Le Camp des Saints) is a 1973 novel written by Jean Raspail. He was French, had a lifelong passion for global travel from an early age, and wrote stories about various oppressed indigenous peoples, such as Native Americans. He was quite conservative, even religious, but also a former Boy Scout leader and in many ways a minimalist. And then he wrote this highly controversial novel, The Camp of the Saints (the title is a biblical reference to the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, where the faithful face the forces of evil in a final apocalyptic battle).

The plot is fairly straightforward: the story takes place in a vague future—essentially "our present," or rather the late 20th century, which was the future to him at the time. It’s amusing that the Soviet Union is still around and apartheid still exists in South Africa. The premise is that crushing poverty in India drives a million desperate people to assemble a massive makeshift armada and sail toward France as refugees. The entire world watches intently, waiting to see what happens. Inside France itself, the prospect naturally sparks an intense reaction—and for the majority, it is one of elation. They believe it is only right, that the decadent, colonial West is guilty of everything, and that France deserves to be overrun by these migrants (referred to in the book as the "Ganges," as in people from the Ganges River). A small fraction of the French population opposes this, but they are an absolute minority. The armada arrives, meeting virtually zero resistance. Inspired by this, similar waves head toward other developed nations: the US, Australia, Britain.

Without question, the book describes these migrants in a deeply snobbish, repulsive manner—depicting them as foul-smelling, dirty, monstrous, and hostile. One could argue about harsh realities, but by any standard, the language used is blatantly racist. Paradoxically, much of what was depicted back then—which likely seemed unimaginable at the time, dismissed as groundless scaremongering—has played out in the modern day. The massive waves of migrants flowing into Europe from third-world nations, the response of a predominantly left-leaning media, and the general public's failure to grasp what is actually unfolding. In a way, it feels remarkably prescient and more relevant than ever; as toxic and taboo as the book seemed back then, the reality today is unfolding on a vastly larger scale.

That being said, purely as literature, the novel is extremely weak. The characters are wooden and theatrical, and everything is exaggerated and oversimplified to the extreme. From the perspective of critics of these fears, the portrayal is caricatured and offensively chauvinistic; from the perspective of its supporters, it feels strangely limp and didactic. Looking back from today’s vantage point, knowing this is no longer mere speculation but reality, you can see how such an outcome is plausible without stretching the imagination. I wanted to look into this myself, especially given how aggressively the book was banned and deplatformed at various points. The direction of the narrative is also quite unusual.

Modern pop culture constantly forecasts a bleak future, but those dystopias tend to be one-dimensional. In The Camp of the Saints, the future is equally grim, but in a way fundamentally different from typical apocalyptic tropes, which makes it fascinating in its own right. It is just unfortunate that the premise wasn't handled better—it would have been compelling to see a setup like this executed with genuine literary craftsmanship.

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What I realized here is that before the internet, well not even just the internet, but the era when almost all information started flowing mainly from it, and even for some time after that began, I used to discover new things in this kind of intricate way I privately called “by recommendations from fascinating authors.” For example, music or straight-up musicians, films or entire directors, books, writers, artists — I would often find them through already loved compositions, books and films, or from various stories and interviews of the authors themselves.

I started doing this a very long time ago. One moment stuck with me: when I was a teenager, I was listening to the band Alisa on a vinyl record, and there’s a song called Meloman where the lyrics list a bunch of different bands. I liked Alisa a lot at that moment, so of course I immediately went looking for those bands. And it went like that for many years, until the internet revolution happened — and it didn’t just happen, it gradually changed the world, and specifically the “smart” recommendations and algorithms. On the one hand they’re great, of course. But it’s a lazy approach that replaces real searching by feeding you a generally not-bad option. And that generally not-bad option then leads somewhere other than where my curiosity used to rush.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t use anything the internet recommends. No, you can actually find things there that work the same way it used to work for me. But it’s important to avoid the soullessness made just for content success in the age of algorithms. I noticed this a long time ago with blogs, when I saw that if a blog post title has numbers in it — it’s usually filler, meaning it’s made like the music in a shopping mall or an elevator. Somebody makes money off it because it’s not terrible, and sometimes it’s convenient for us to entertain ourselves that way. But all these “3 best ways to something,” “5 best of those people,” or “7 main mistakes you need to avoid” — that’s most likely crap, optimized for clicks and view counts.

You yourselves have probably noticed all this a long time ago. But somehow it hit me hard when I was watching one little YouTube video. I love cinema, not any cinema — I have my own rather well-formed own taste in it. And somehow a very long time ago I found the channel Every Frame a Painting, where this guy Tony talks about interesting aspects of cinematography. I really liked his channel, but at some point he left YouTube. And then many, many years later he came back and is delighting us again. So I was watching one of his videos where films aren’t presented as some kind of list, but the material itself is the foundation of the story. And there, like in the best dream of a recommendation seeker, the things mentioned fall into two categories: the ones you already know and like, and the ones you don’t know but that intrigue you. That’s what the best recommendations are — that’s how I love discovering new things. Maybe you too.

In a Nazi prison in 1943, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer formulated a unique understanding of stupidity. He believed that stupidity is the most dangerous phenomenon in society, far more dangerous than blatant evil.

However, his concept of human stupidity is quite specific. For him, the kind of stupidity he was writing about didn't include isolated silly actions, poor mental abilities, or even ignorance (well, except for willful ignorance, but that's crucial). One might ask, what's left in the "stupid" category after throwing out those three big usual suspects?

What he called stupidity, I'd personally label a bit differently, maybe "stupefaction" or "dumbing down," but let's try to figure out the best word for it as we go.

For Bonhoeffer, stupidity isn't about intellectual capacity, but about the refusal to use it, often due to a rather unthinking adherence to a dogma or dominant ideology, or simply by submitting to authority and, usually, to the general mass of a stupefied society. In other words, it's largely a surrender of personal responsibility over many important matters in one's own life, the life of one's family, city, and society at large. It turns out to be more of a moral weakness than a mental one.

Even highly intellectual, well-educated people, who might otherwise have kind hearts and deep compassion, are sometimes willing to shield themselves from an unbiased analysis of reality, or even from simply knowing what is actually happening. It's no surprise: during the time he lived, this was happening left and right in almost every country. Apparently, this happens today too, though it's harder for us to spot in our own time than in the past, where we already know how things turned out. He was executed in a concentration camp in 1945 just a few short weeks before liberation, and we know about his ideas through his letters.

This made a big impression on me. A little while back, I was reading up on what Aristotle wrote about the structure of society, which is also really interesting. He saw three correct forms of government in society: monarchy, aristocracy, and polity, provided these forms serve the good of the entire society. But if they start serving only themselves, they pervert into distorted forms: tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. It's important to note here that democracy back then and democracy today are very different concepts, which is why people nowadays use the term "ochlocracy" (rule of the mob) to avoid confusion. The key takeaway for Aristotle was also that the right form of power must serve society. To me, this resonates strongly with the resistance to stupidity that Bonhoeffer wrote about, which is actually how I stumbled upon him in the first place, and it really clicked with me. By the way, after searching around, I found a pretty good video about him.

So, what do we do about this "stupefaction"? Once a person has surrendered their moral responsibility mechanism to a higher authority or a certain ideology, it becomes virtually impossible to persuade them with logical arguments. There are no "right words" that can pull them out of that state. Aristotle wrote extensively about rhetoric—how to debate properly, how to spot fallacies and sophistry. But even all of that falls short here. Bonhoeffer believed you have to act in two stages: first, free the person from the yoke of the ideology keeping them in that stupefied state, for example, by changing their environment, or through charisma and friendly trust. Only after that can you present a different picture for their consideration. And even then, it doesn't always work. Because taking on responsibility, especially moral responsibility, is extremely energy-draining. Without focus, it's easier for a person to simply slide right into another identical ideology or become a faithful follower of the next authoritarian system.

Either way, one of the most vital qualities is critical thinking. I'd also add an intolerance for voluntary ignorance, though there's a lot more to it. But that, perhaps, is the main thing.

I came to an understanding a long time ago that for a company, a product, a business, a service, or whatever else to succeed, you need an idea, resources, and a team. And in the team you need at least three representatives of three different directions. If there are fewer, it means someone is doing two roles, or that one person is doing everything for everyone. That's possible at a small scale, but it doesn't work with success and growth, there you need three.

These are the representatives of the consumer, the representatives of the producer, and the ones who will make it all profitable, or in some cases there can be other goals instead of profit, but one way or another these are the ones who keep the balance, so the wolves are fed and the sheep are safe, and the shepherd is alive too. But joking aside, these are the ones who will watch that the first two don't pull too much toward themselves, and that the whole idea makes sense. Let's say, roughly, a designer, an engineer, and a salesperson, though of course that's an excessive simplification. But profit is somehow too narrow. I like the Walt Disney quote, paraphrased it's about how they don't make movies to make money, they make money so they can keep making movies. Something like that.

But now I'm realizing this is broader. These are three directions of thinking about how problems get solved in general. It's how people approach everything in life. And there are more than three here, because not everyone thinks in terms of solutions and approaches at all. For example, some people don't want to solve anything, they want to do what they've been told. There are others who see everything as a game of chance, where you have to guess what's lying around loose and where. And in general there are a lot of different behavioral directions, I won't take it on myself to discuss them all.

We, of course, being complex and many-sided personalities, contain all of these types at once. But when we run into a task that has to be solved, often creatively, one of these approaches wakes up in us and starts to prevail. I explained it to myself as: everything around is a design problem and at the same time an engineering problem, and everything has to make sense and work long-term, or at scale. For example, would it be good if everyone did it this way. And of course you absolutely need the one who will actually do it all, because sometimes what's needed most is persistence and diligence.

I find myself thinking more and more about economic self-sufficiency on the scale of countries or conglomerates.

For a long time, the world stubbornly moved toward an increasingly pervasive globalization. But eventually, the side effects it brought created, first of all, a demand among large segments of the population for some kind of pushback. This, in turn, added fuel to the fire of populism (not just this, of course, but it was clearly a factor). Moreover, it led to an excessive concentration of key manufacturing, technology, and even resources in the hands of a very small number of players, making everyone else vulnerable.

It is worth unpacking what vulnerability means in this context. A single person cannot do everything themselves; specialization is necessary. And the broader and deeper this specialization, the greater the difference in the quality and quantity of what is produced between the specialist and everyone else, and, at the same time, the greater the dependence on them. When there is dependence, any emergency will result in at least a disruption. This is true at the level of a village in the ancient world, and it is just as true at the level of the modern global economy. Overconcentration is usually called a monopoly, but that is not always the case. "Monopoly," as it turns out, is too narrow a term, because there are also oligopolies, cartels, guilds, and, as a new techno-economic phenomenon, aggregators.

Modern technologies are so complex that developing and scaling a critical, sophisticated product or production process often requires years and the best minds from all over the world. And even that is barely enough. Simply put, though the world is massive, we want so many complex things that we are running out of people. There is a genuine shortage of specialists. On top of that, birth rates are falling, which hits this specific demographic hardest. This is further exacerbated by the fact that more and more people are employed in non-productive jobs. As a result, a technological leader emerges, or maybe two or three. It is unrealistic for others to catch up. This is not because the leader is some kind of evil monopolist — competitors simply do not have competent specialists. Training new ones takes years, while the leader will not stand still. In any semi-free market, they will vacuum up every newly trained semi-expert, simply because they can train them further and employ them more effectively.

This is one side of the coin: let's call it chain complexity. The second is fragility. If an accident, a war, a natural disaster, or anything else happens and something breaks on the leader's end, it leaves the entire world hanging. The complexity of these chains means they are incredibly hard to rebuild, repair, or hand over to someone else, even if everyone wants to and all the necessary funds are there.

Then there are the not-so-friendly players. We can debate politics all we want, but we are undeniably in a situation where some countries are now in a position to blackmail others. Authoritarian regimes generally pull this off a bit better: while any blackmail hurts one's own people too, authoritarian states find it exponentially easier to sacrifice the welfare and interests of their citizens and businesses. Unfortunately, the modern world has poorly learned the lesson of the paradox of tolerance.

So, what is the bottom line?

We can try to do more ourselves. This in itself is already highly complex, slow, and expensive. First of all, who exactly is "us"? Dividing the world into the Collective West and the Global South feels like the bare minimum, yet even here, achieving noticeable progress is incredibly difficult. But even if this succeeds completely, there is no unity within either camp. Isolationists are ready to abandon formerly partner countries, and not without reason, as many of those partners do not act partner-like, or fail to behave rationally and responsibly. And we must remember that attempts to redistribute specialization usually lead to a slowdown, though not always. Sometimes, on the contrary, they create competition, which is highly stimulating.

And this brings me (smoothly) to a key point. I still believe that you cannot do everything yourself. It is inefficient, unprofitable, and, at this stage, outright unrealistic. But it is vital to handle the essentials. A simple thought, perhaps, but a crucial one. And whatever you do not make yourself, you need to stockpile. This is easier said than done. During the Cold War, the "second world" (the West being the first, various developing countries the third, and the USSR and its allies the second) tried to be self-sufficient. It was tough. In their case, it was difficult primarily due to an inefficient economic model. During World War II, Germany and its allies were also self-sufficient, and we know how hard that made things for them. More importantly, all of that was a very long time ago. Technology has advanced so much that the self-sufficiency of that era is simply impossible today.

Therefore, alongside attempts to build self-sufficiency, we must establish a proper dialogue that clearly demonstrates to the other side where deglobalization leads. The Collective West is doing a very poor job at this. Yet achieving this is even more critical than full self-sufficiency. Years of comfortable living have led to a complete collapse of political responsibility in the vast majority of developed nations, alongside a decline in the personal responsibility and awareness of ordinary citizens. It is going to be tough.

There is a famous statistics puzzle called the Monty Hall Problem. The puzzle is quite old, of course, but it has gained popularity in our time because it frequently stumps smart and educated people. There was a mathematician named Steve Selvin who sent it to a journal in 1975. He framed it into a simple and relatable scenario based on a game show hosted by Monty Hall himself.

There are three doors. Behind one of them is a prize, a car, and behind the other two are goats. The player chooses one of the doors, but before they are told if they guessed correctly or not, the host, Monty, opens another door that they did not choose, and there is a goat behind it. And here is the question! At this moment, the host offers you to change your choice. Should you switch?

From a statistical perspective, everything is elementary here. Of course you should. But why does this stump so many people who start arguing that you shouldn't or that it doesn't matter to switch, claiming that the remaining odds are now 50/50 anyway? I think this is a modern problem for smart people. Woe from wit, so to speak. Doubts create so much noise that they interfere with calculations.

First, let me explain why the answer is more or less obvious. When a door is chosen at the beginning, the probability of guessing right is 1/3. So far, so logical. This means the probability that the prize is in the other section, behind the doors you didn't choose, is 2/3.

At this point, you can mentally divide these doors into two groups. In the second group, the probability is twice as high as in the first, and there are twice as many doors there, which seemingly balances the probabilities. But now, when the host opens one of those two doors in the second group, the number of unopened doors there decreases. It turns out we still have two groups, but in the first one, the probability is one-third, and in the second, it is two-thirds. But now we know for sure that there is only one door left in the second group. Therefore, by changing your choice at this moment, you double your probability from one-third to two-thirds. And that is exactly why you need to switch.

But the world is complex. The first doubt that might arise is that the host knows where the prize is and is deliberately tricking you. Life teaches us this. There is always a catch in such games. Why would he offer something good? They clearly want to fool you. The answer to this is that, according to the rules of the problem, the host will offer you to switch doors regardless of whether you guessed correctly or not. If you guessed right, he doesn't care which door to open. But if you guessed wrong, he is strictly obligated to open only the one with the goat. The probability that he doesn't care is one-third. In principle, this is a valid concern, but you can ask a question about it. And they will assure you that it doesn't matter whether you guessed right or not, they will still offer you to switch doors.

It might also seem that since you don't know yet, it doesn't matter which of the remaining two closed doors to choose, claiming the chance is 50/50. And your intuition to be on alert and wary of scammers will push you not to change your choice, since it is 50/50 anyway. But it is not 50/50, because the host did actually open a door and didn't just offer to change your choice. And he didn't open a random door, but the one where he knew there was no prize.

All these doubts stump people, making them hesitate and stop thinking about statistics. This is especially true since most people are already so bad at math that it is socially acceptable to brag about being bad at basic arithmetic, let alone puzzles like this. This is sabotage and a failure of the education and upbringing system. At the same time, humanities-minded people can easily shame you for messing up some grammatical rule that is not logical at all, doesn't really affect the meaning, and simply needs to be memorized.

Overall, this is a puzzle where the simple, correct answer is deliberately hidden behind the bushes of our social fears. But it is only hidden for tech-minded people who can calculate but have issues specifically with this social aspect. For others, it is hidden behind deep ignorance and gaps in basic education. And it is not even clear which is worse.

The ancient Greeks, of course, had a breakthrough in the development of society, one that benefited our entire civilization for thousands of years. And although, naturally, we cannot replicate direct democracy as they had it, and it is not even clear whether it is possible or desirable, those are philosophical questions.

But here is what is interesting, their democracy was destroyed not so much by enemies from the outside, but to a great degree by a disease from within. Namely, sophism.

Sophism is not simply “clever argumentation,” as it is sometimes presented. The real danger of sophism is that it separates language from truth, and then unleashes language techniques to the detriment of ideas. It teaches people not to search for what is real, what is good, what is just, but to win the argument. To dominate the conversation. To make the weaker argument appear stronger. To turn word trickery into a weapon.

At first this looks like intelligence, it even looks like education. A person learns to argue, to deconstruct, to question assumptions, to expose hidden motives. All of this can be useful, of course. But then, at some point, the mechanism becomes detached from reality. Questioning becomes a universal poison. Every moral principle is revealed to be “just a construct.” Every institution is explained as a mask for power or corruption. Every disagreement is interpreted not as a disagreement about truth, but as oppression, privilege, ideology, or bad faith.

And after that, real conversation becomes impossible. And that, of course, leads to the destruction of society, because there are only two ways to deal with conflicts, either with words or with violence.

It seems to me, actually, that the current extensive prevalence of radical-left ideology in academia and education and, really, the whole rise of neo-Marxism across many societies in the West is pretty much the fruit of sophism specifically. Not because every left-wing idea is false, and not because society has no injustices. Of course it has. But because this whole style of thinking often does not try to understand reality as it is. It tries to interpret everything through a prefabricated moral and political machine. Especially when history has shown us how pure socialist government ideas lead to tyranny, repression, and often even mass starvation, as they tend to fight wealth and make enormous efforts to eliminate first the rich, then everyone who does not want to be poor.

Their conclusion is known in advance. The language only has to produce the justification.

In this sense, sophism is a perfect fertilizer for bad ideas. The seeds may vary from identitarianism, epistemological relativism, social constructivism, and whataboutism to often just plain deception. But sophism gives them the soil in which they grow. It gives them a method. It gives them a language. It gives them the ability to avoid reality while still sounding intelligent, moral, and sophisticated.

The framing is everything there, as these ideas feed on something very real, like the natural human feeling that life is unfair. Because life is unfair. People are born with different talents, different families, different bodies, different luck, different tragedies. Any decent society should try to reduce unnecessary suffering and give people a fairer chance. A rising tide lifts all boats. But that is not the same thing as declaring war on merit, competence, hierarchy, distinction, responsibility, and achievement.

This is why sophism is so dangerous. It does not look like barbarism. It looks refined, educated, moral, even compassionate and empathetic. It comes from universities, from intellectuals, from people with good vocabularies and confident voices. But inside it there is a rot, the refusal to submit words to reality, and the feeling of superiority and knowing it all.

And when a civilization loses that habit, when it no longer demands that arguments correspond to truth, it becomes defenseless. Any absurdity can be made respectable. Any cruelty can be renamed justice. Any failure can be explained away by theory. Any opponent can be declared morally illegitimate instead of being answered.

For me sophism is one of those dangerous mental viruses that can infect an entire civilization. Incurable, like herpes, it never fully disappears. Only prevention, intellectual hygiene, and timely treatment help to contain it.

You gave me a brain, but didn't tell me what to think about.

You gave me hands, but didn't tell me what to do with them.

You gave me legs, but didn't tell me where to go.

In the 16th century, a legend emerged that in Prague, Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel—or simply the Maharal of Prague—created a powerful creature from clay and brought it to life, calling it the Golem. The Golem was strong and could perform heavy labor as well as protect the Jewish community. However, it did not possess a fully realized human soul or its own understanding of the purpose of its existence. And although it usually does not speak at all and is devoid of personality, being merely a servant and protector, it executed orders too literally and became uncontrollable. It, of course, does not actually say these three phrases—this is simply my personification of it.

In 1818, Mary Shelley, perhaps taking this legend as inspiration, writes the novel Frankenstein, which turned this image into the modern meme we all know today. A bit later, in 1920, Čapek forged the term "robot" for his artificial workers, who also, of course, began to question their purpose. Later, Asimov in the 1940s describes the famous laws of robotics and attempts to imbue intelligent beings with goals and constraints. So the topic is not new and, as we can see, highly relevant.

After all, while all indicators show that current AI is arriving like a blind monster-bulldozer, ideologically charged people, confident in their boundless righteousness and often socially vulnerable, possessing in the end a very questionable moral compass, are shouting about what it should crush next, because "it's right," hoping they can jump from under the bucket into the cab and take the wheel in time. But there won't be a wheel.

And while for most of us the problems will begin much earlier, some benefits will bring joy. Therefore, I suggest simply enjoying and using at least that. The singularity awaits us either way.