How Artificial Intelligence Is Devouring Our Lives

There is a deep and hungry thing being born, and it clashes with an old and simple wisdom. That wisdom, a grandmother’s rule made into law from Brussels to Brazil, is this: take only what you need. Use it for its purpose. Then, let it go. It is a principle of leaving things be, of respecting the quiet corners of a life.

A tidiness of the soul. But this new machine, this infant god of code, was born with a hunger that knows no memory of fullness. It doesn't want a single, well-prepared meal. It wants the entire pantry, the fields where the food was grown, the memories of every meal ever eaten. It wants the bones and the marrow.

This machine’s appetite is why they say the well is running dry.

The great scraping is nearly done. They have dredged the rivers of our forgotten conversations, siphoned the oceans of our public thoughts. A photograph from a forgotten blog. A recipe commented on in 2008. A bitter argument in a forum about a television show long since canceled. A love letter to a stranger. A child's first word, captioned. A diagnosis, whispered into a search bar.

All of it has been harvested, processed, and fed to the ghost in the machine with a hollow belly. Now, the scramble is for the last remaining morsels, the walled gardens of our chatter. That is why a company paid sixty million dollars for the raw, human noise of Reddit—for the arguments and the jokes, the confessions and the casual lies, the earnest pleas for help.

Our daily talk has become a commodity, its value soaring because the machine must be fed to grow.

Some hope for a gentler path. They speak of clean, well-lit rooms of information, of data carefully curated and scrubbed of our names, our faces, our living breath. They believe this new intelligence can learn from the shape of our lives without devouring our lives whole.

But others see the glint of the market, the frantic race to build the next, the best, the biggest mind. In that race, the grandmother’s rule feels like a quaint suggestion, an impediment to progress. The fear is that our privacy, the very idea that some things are ours alone, will not be a right to be protected, but a resource to be mined.

Every click a morsel, every post a seasoning. The conflict is not between man and machine, but between a machine’s insatiable hunger and our simple, human need to be left, sometimes, alone.