But, now that AI is here I have a different view.
We look up at the night sky in awe. Those points of light we find so beautiful, so inspiring. What if I told you the stars above us are the graveyard of the former versions of Earth? Each a failed world now nothing more than light reaching across the void, a beautiful warning we’re too enchanted to heed. What if I told you they’re not beacons of possibility but tombstones? I believe we are wired to to self destruct like a video game where we constantly fail to advance to the next level and it's "game over."
What we call stars are former versions of Earth that faced this same crossroads and chose wrong. Each one a civilization that let its tools become its master, that prioritized innovation over wisdom, speed over sustainability, profit over people. We cherish progress. We celebrate each technological leap as humanity’s triumph, a step toward enlightenment. But what if we’ve been here before? What if those stars, we gaze at in wonder are warnings, the scattered remains of worlds that couldn’t save themselves?
The journey started decades ago with the invention of the Internet, a tool that promised to connect us all. And it did connect us, but not in the ways we imagined. We thought we were building bridges. Instead, we constructed echo chambers and battlefields where truth itself became a casualty.
Then came social media, the Internet’s heir, amplifying every impulse displaying our best and our worst. It turned conversation into performance, community into tribalism, and attention into the currency of our age. We became products, our data harvested, our behaviors predicted and manipulated. We handed over our autonomy one click at a time, too distracted by dopamine hits to notice what we were losing.
Now artificial intelligence accelerates everything. The trip to hell in a handbasket was never fast. It’s been a long, grinding descent. But AI has found the gas pedal. It can generate misinformation faster than truth can spread. It can replace human judgment with algorithmic efficiency. It can make us obsolete in ways we’re only beginning to comprehend.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth we need to face: we’ve done this before.
We’re trapped in a cosmic Groundhog Day, repeating the same pattern. Create technology. Celebrate technology. Become dependent on technology. Lose control of technology. Self-destruct.
The signs are all around us. We’re more connected than ever but lonelier. We have more information than ever but less truth. We have more tools than ever but less agency. We’re optimizing ourselves out of meaning, efficiency-ing ourselves out of humanity.
This is the moment. Right now. Not tomorrow, not after the next breakthrough or the next crisis. Now is when we must choose differently than all those dead worlds chose.
We need to put humanity first and technology second. Not as a slogan but as a principle that guides every decision. That means asking not “Can we build this?” but “Should we build this?” It means measuring progress not by technological capability but by human flourishing. It means protecting the things that make us human like creativity, connection, autonomy, meaning even when algorithms promise to do them faster and cheaper.
It means recognizing that the trip to hell has always been slow because it happens incrementally. No single decision damns us. It’s the accumulation of a thousand small surrenders each time we choose convenience over privacy, engagement over truth, power over integrity.
We stand at the precipice. Behind us, a trail of discarded Earths twinkling in the darkness. Before us, a choice. We can continue down this path, letting AI accelerate our descent until we become another beautiful cautionary tale for the next world to ignore. Or we can break the cycle by controlling AI versus the other way around.
But breaking the cycle requires something uncomfortable: limits. Restraint. The courage to say no to technological possibility in service of human necessity. It requires us to value what we might lose more than what we might gain.
Otherwise, our Earth will join the graveyard in the sky, another glittering failure for the next version of humanity to romanticize as they make the same mistakes we made.
Can we finally figure this out before it's "game over"?
Can we be the first generation of humans who go against its self-destructive behavior and do the right thing?
Maybe the next time we gaze at the night sky and spot a shooting star we should wish for this Earth to be the one finally breaking the cycle.
