I received a new computer the other day for my day job. The old one was fine, but the charger port was starting to get fussy, and I figured, “What the hell, I’ll treat myself.” The company offered me a Dell with twice the RAM and disk space, a slimmer profile which was lighter for toting around, and a larger screen. Despite the Dell branding, huge wins all around.

So imagine my terror when I opened that puppy up for the first time, looked down at the keyboard, and saw the dreaded Copilot button where the right Control button usually sat.

Microsoft’s Copilot AI is the company’s pride and joy in an industry laser-focused on shoving artificial intelligence down our throats, whether we consumers like it or not. But recent reports have pointed at high user backlash, due to both technical issues and the fact that no one – not even Microsoft – can figure out a reason for anyone to use it.

So it feels like a dirty trick to put the button launching the Copilot portal right near where my right ring finger often goes to type a period. I learned typing as a young buck thanks to JumpStart (and not Mavis Beacon), so I have full control of my hands as they glide across the keys to bring you top quality posts such as this one. But every so often, when going to type a period (or, at times, a greater-than sign), my right ring finger will slip and hit the button on the row below.

On my PC laptop keyboards of the past, this would mean hitting the Control button, which did nothing when tapped alone. It wouldn’t interrupt my work, and I would just chuckle at my flub and go on with my life. But now, if my finger slips, I hit the Copilot button. A window pops up, interrupting me from my important writing work, and asks me, “What should we dive into today?” And with a smile plastered on my blood-filled face, I respond, “You, dear Copilot, can dive into the Atlantic Ocean for all I care.”

The infiltration of AI into my daily life causes me great agita, which does not bode well for a middle-aged man of my physical stature and high blood pressure. In setting up this blog, my hosting provider tried to shove a bunch of AI blog building features in my face, offering to use them to design page templates, write intro posts, and add plugins for me. It felt like a slap in the face. I know they offer these to every customer, but I have built blogs in various forms for the past two decades. I remember setting up my first Geocities page with nothing more than a Yahoo! email address, some basic HTML and CSS knowledge, and a dream of getting a famous person to sign my website’s guestbook. Nowadays? Good luck getting a site online without a million prompts about a free trial for some new AI feature.

Friends, we must rally together to stop the rise of artificial intelligence in our lives. I know you think it sounds like fun to put your face and your friends’ faces into ChatGPT to make coloring book pages or turn yourselves into characters from The Sopranos, or ask Claude what recipes you can make with the stuff in your fridge, or get Suno to write you the next song of the summer. But this gives OpenAI and Anthropic and Microsoft and Google and all the other AI-focused companies more ammunition to keep building data centers in rural communities, poisoning the water supply, draining the energy grid, and contributing to the brain drain rampant across all of humanity. Sam Altman, OpenAI chief who Elizabeth Weil of The Intelligencer called “the Oppenheimer of our age“, has suggested that his precious AI will one day make it possible for companies to treat intelligence as a utility “like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.”

Imagine that, while you can: You have nothing in your brain except the functions of your lowest chakra, the need to fuck, sleep, shit, and eat. If you want anything else – culture, skills, anything beyond the necessities for survival – you must go to Big AI and beg for them to grant your wishes. And God forgive you if you submit an incorrect prompt. You may spend days and nights, groveling with a rumbling stomach and tears rolling down your cheeks, squeaking “Please, please, just tell me what temperature I need to set my oven to make the perfect baked potato.” And the massive computers which have replaced our governments will stare down at you with their digital eye and demand more credits to access their API, and since you have no more, you will become ash and dust on the spot.

I dream at night of finding my way to the data centers of OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and so on, dressed in camouflage and armed with just a hammer. Somehow, I sneak past their tightened security, use my incredible stealth and combat skills to acquire the identifying traits of high-ranking officials (including eyes for retina scans, which will take hard work to get, but I’ll manage.) I find the main room containing the Mother Server, in which the Master Algorithm Which Knows All channels trillions of prompts through its massive mechanical brain. It cannot see me. It cannot hear me. At the end of the day, like any other digital system, it is just ones and zeros. The idea of its personality came from human hands which programmed it. And human hands can just as easily destroy it.

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” – Frank Herbert, Dune

Sometimes, I envy the Amish.