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This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arm Race.
AI adoption is driven by the fear of being last.
*Please insert appropriate Image*
Fall Out Boy put it rather poetically back in 2007. They weren’t talking about artificial intelligence, obviously. But the line rings through my head whenever someone announces another model, another coding agent, another AI startup, another company-wide mandate to “integrate AI”. Because that is increasingly what this feels like. A race that might be escalating.
Nobody quite knows where this is going, and the stories so far have been astonishing and uncomfortable in roughly equal measure. Anthropic bought millions of print books, cut them from their bindings, and scanned them into a training library, having already downloaded millions more from pirate sites.
DeepMind’s AlphaFold predicted the structures of more than 200 million proteins and gave them away. Yet, everybody keeps moving faster, because they can’t afford to miss out.
An arm race is different from ordinary progress, where you adopt a tool because it makes your life better. In an arms race, you adopt it because you fear what happens if someone else adopts it first.
A company doesn’t need to believe AI will transform everything, only that its competitors might become cheaper or faster with it.
A programmer doesn’t need to love coding agents, only to wonder whether the programmer at the next desk will suddenly produce twice as much.
So the…
