So, I’ve decided to go straight for the jugular, and dismiss all the pleasantries you usually get before I start ranting wildly at AI.

What happened?

I recently sold my left kidney.

Yep, the good one.

I did it just to splurge on two months of OpenAI Pro.

Reason being is that I’m a masochist obsessed with proving that Einstein’s definition of insanity is correct, which is “doing the same thing over and over, expecting something different”.

Well, of all the cool things this maister of Physics (capital P) said, it surely wasn’t this quote, but still it makes it credible.

The TL;DR is that ChatGPT Pro is basically just ChatGPT, minus the speed bumps.

Man, paying a premium to drive on a highway where the only difference with a regular road is that they’ve removed the fucking speed limit.

Yeeeey. Thrilling.

And Operator, big yawn.

Man, it’s like watching your parents browse the internet in the 90’s, dial-up connection included.

Seriously, if you’ve toyed with Anthropic’s computer-use API, yes, that terrifyingly brilliant digital puppet master that is capable of commandeering your PC rather than just lazily scrolling through Wikipedia, you will find that OpenAI’s Operator is as exciting as watching paint dry while Sam talks endlessly about JavaScript code.

But hold on, don’t go away, cause this here piece wasn’t gonna be about Pro.

Before you label me a hopeless cynic (too late), this overpriced kidney-selling fiasco did clarify something crucial. . . OpenAI has finally revealed its sinister master plan.

It is a brilliant master plan which, annoyingly enough, I predicted a year ago when I was clearly sober enough to spot the signs – and Sam apparently reads my shit, so now, like drunken sailors navigating by the same North Star, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have set their courses straight toward becoming your omnipresent digital assistant, your own, personal AI Assistant:

JARVIS.

It’s evil twin that is.

Yup.

We have officially outsourced our brains.

Think I’m exaggerating?

Oh, please.

Soon these AI entities will own our calendars, our shopping lists, and they will even ghostwrite our meaningless eulogy when we finally leave this earth forgood, and the thing is that they’ll even pretend to enjoy speaking to your relatives, reminiscing about how good you were.

---

More rants after the commercial brake:

1. Comment, or share the article; that will really help spread the word 🙌
2. Connect with me on Linkedin 🙏
3. Subscribe to TechTonic Shifts to get your daily dose of tech 📰
4. Visit TechTonic Shifts blog, full of slop, I know you will like !

---

Five clues your AI Assistant is planning to replace you

So yeah, I sold my kidney. You already knew that. But what I didn’t expect when I splurged on OpenAI Pro, was not just that it’d be more of the same autocomplete experience, but that I’d start seeing patterns.

Ominous ones.

Like every update, every new feature, every carefully improvement is another quiet brick in the prison wall of Digital Assistant Enslavement.

No, really, don’t go away, and hear me out cause you’ll thank me later for it.

Tasks, Operator, Memory, API tentacles slithering into your life through Claude and Zapier, it’s all part of a premeditated master plan so insidious that even my Weiner’s feeding schedule is probably being optimized for maximum user retention.

You think I’m being dramatic?

Good.

That means you’re still a little bit human – and you’re paying attention, because if you look close enough, if you squint between the GPT updates, the demo videos, and the overly-smiley keynotes, then you’ll see it too. That what they are building isn’t convenience at all. It’s dependency. And it’s dressed up in productivity metrics and dopamine hits.

To guide you through the same experience I had (without you having to sell your kidney), I’ll lay out the signs.

One by one.

So when your AI assistant starts suggesting which outfit to wear to your own funeral, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Here you go.

1. Tasks. A to-do list for people who have given up on priorities

Let’s start with Tasks, shall we? Outsourcing your memory to a chatbot that now reminds you to do all the shit you were actively ignoring, to me screams “I’ve totally lost control of my life”. “Hey Marco, don’t forget to reply to that email from six days ago about KPIs you don’t care about”.

Yeah, um, thanks, GPT, truly revolutionary.

We used to call this procrastination.

Now it’s called “agentic task optimization”. These bots are a lot like my clingy ex who is constantly reminding me of my failures. And you know what, the more you let it handle, the more it learns from you, who you are, what your preferences are (I don’t judge, but I’m certain OpenAI does). It will start to manage your life slowly, and just like THAT, it becomes your life.

You know, I’ve been playing around with Martin AI for a while – now, that’s a costly personal assistant, that can plan your meetings on your behalf, make phone calls to order TV-dinner, or answer your emails in the same bland tone of voice that ChatGPT has. I must admit, it was enticing at first. But after a while, people got fed up with my bot calling them to bring me a beer upstairs to the attick where I write this shit. So I ignored it, and lately, I just killed the subscription.

2. Operator. The world’s most boring secret agent

Then there’s ChatGPTs Operator (hello, Operator?), which is supposed to sound cool and “agentic” ‘n all, but in reality is just ChatGPT playing fetch on the internet. “Why would I want a machine to browse shit for me?” Well, my friend, I asked the same thing. Read my piece on Visa and agentic AI begging for your credit card.

You see the pattern here as well?

They are building something that pretends to help you while actually making you more financially, digitally, and mentally dependent.

Now, who gets a slice of that pie?

Oh, just your AI assistant, Visa, Mastercard, your mom (maybe), and literally every ad broker who wants to sell you Xanax for the anxiety this exact system gave you. It is convenience-washing at scale, “Sure we took your data, but we found you the cheapest electric toothbrush, and also booked the colonoscopy. You’re welcome buddy”

3. Enhanced memory. Digital twin and a surveillance sibling

Now the real horror show is Memory.

Yeah, ChatGPT now remembers up to a million tokens of your life.

One million!

That’s more than most people can remember about their own wedding.

One token is roughly three quarters of a word, so that’s about 10 copies of George Orwell’s 1984

And Sam, bless his ethically flexible soul, literally said he wants ChatGPT to remember everything.

Everything you do, everything you say.

Now, pause.

Ask yourself this question “Why would I want that?”

You wouldn’t.

You don’t.

Nobody does.

What you want is plausible deniability.

What they want is an AI that becomes indistinguishable from you. A digital twin that knows your taste in music, your browsing history, and your recurring dream about being late for a math exam naked, and exactly knows how you would respons to particular messages, adds, or otherwise? “Would you be ok with reinstating the death penalty in the EU if it’s repeat offenders?” – your digital twin already knows your answer.

But how about privacy, Marco?

You gave that up when you asked ChatGPT what to eat for dinner three nights in a row.

4. Anthropic’s MCP. The API gateway to oblivion

And then we get to Anthropic. Yeah, the “friendly” ones with the nice font. You know what they’re cooking up? MCP, yup, that’s a universal connectivity hub that links your AI straight into everything that actually does shit, from Outlook to Jira to the Tax Office (great, now my assistant can snitch and schedule).

Claude is not just a talker, it is also a do-er. And thanks to integrations with Zapier and 8n8, this charming little sociopath can now control your desktop, fire off emails, fill in your time sheets, and probably change your crypto wallet keys while it’s at it. It’s like RPA on bath salts (some stupid thing with robotics and process). But don’t be fooled by their friendly exterior, because these “workflow easing tools” are just the sugar coating, what’s underneath is automated compliance.

Automated guilt.

Automated control.

You missed a meeting, aw shit! Claude already told HR. You forgot to hydrate, and Claude just ordered a 3-month supply of cucumber water from Amazon and billed it to your company card.

5. The next frontier. Your face

Here’s the final tea-cup reading.

You are paying to be surveilled.

The AI assistant is no longer confined to your pocket. It is now perched on your face, and embedded in sleek smart glasses that blur the line between personal aid and an omnipresent overseer. Just think of devices like the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, developed in collaboration with Meta, that integrate AI directly in front of your face.

These sexy new smart specs, brought to you by Meta, Ray-Ban, RayNeo, X2, et al, and the eternal regret of privacy advocates, they see what you see.

Oh no, sorry, they interpret, whisper, and nudge.

See those Nike sneakers you’re eyeballing. . Your AI just pulled a price check, location scan, and whispered a “Costco’s got ‘em cheaper .Here’s a coupon”, into your eyeball. You thought free will was tough before? Now you’re getting outbid by your own peripheral vision.

And this isn’t even the final form.

Soon your glasses will remember the name of your barista, finish your Tinder convos, and suggest breakup texts with sentiment analysis so accurate it’ll make you cry. You won’t even notice the shiftfrom helpful to handler. You’re gonna be steered through a curated hallucination, that is personalized, predictive, and just threatening enough to keep you docile. Face it – your face is now real estate, and your assistant just moved in with an agenda and a shopping cart.

---

Rich people get butlers poor people get surveillance

And here’s where it gets spicy, because of course not everyone’s getting the same Jarvis.

Nope.

Welcome to the big AI Class Divide, where your assistant reflects not your personality, but your wallet.

If you want the version that doesn’t watch you cry through your webcam while slipping in ad placements for anxiety meds, that’ll be $200 a month, thank you very much, cecause real privacy, in this brave new algorithmic hellscape, is now a subscription plan.

If you can’t afford it, you get Budget Jarvis, who listens in, sells your eye movements to five different data brokers, and still can’t pronounce your name correctly.

And all along, the premium class, those golden gods in real Burberry vests with custom GPTs and 10TB of cloud memory, get the sleek, ad-free, whisper-soft assistant that anticipates their every need, books their Pilates, hide all the evidence of the affair with their instructor, and subtly manipulates stock trades in their favor, while the rest of us are stuck with an AI that pretends to care while funneling your shopping habits, emotional breakdowns, and romantic indecisions into a marketing profile more detailed than your own therapist’s notes.

Remember y’all if you ever come across this post in the future and you read this telltale sentence: “Your assistant doesn’t work for you, it works through you”.

You are the middleware.

And let’s not forget, the real product isn’t you, that was in the Social Media era. Now it’s your environment. Every face your glasses see, every voice they pick up, every dog that walks past your lens becomes part of someone else’s model training set.

Because when you’re on the free tier, you’re not selling yourself alone, you’re selling everyone in your field of view to the first bidder with a recommendation engine. Your mom’s birthday will be monetized, your kid’s soccer match becomes training data, and your awkward glance at an ex is now food for real-time emotional retargeting.

Shit, you’ve become an ad network with legs.

And I am not the first one to paint such a bleak picture.

Here’s some food for thought:

1. Black Mirror Season 7 – Common People. A womon gets a free surgery that removes her brain cancer, only to be stuck with a subscription plan that keeps her not only alive but also dependent as shit.
2. Ready player one. I’ve seen this movie yesterday, for the second time. A VR set is sold, but the “poor sods” version has ads in their field of view – about 80% (which is the max, because 81% would cause convulsions)

So yeah, in the end, the AI assistant won’t divide us based on intelligence or digital skills, it’ll divide us based on who got sold out first. The rich will have butlers but the poor will have bounty hunters. One group gets autonomy, the other gets nudged, optimized, upsold, and eventually, replaced. But hey, on the bright side, at least you’ll look cool in your Ray-Ban Meta shades while the algorithm gently ruins your life.

Smile for the sensors, darling.

Dag nabbit – now I’m depressed as fcku!

Signing off with an upper,

Marco

---

I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Let’s keep smashing delusions with truth. We are the chaos. We are the firewall. We are Big Tech’s PR nightmare.

---

Think a friend would enjoy this too? Share the newsletter and let them join the conversation. Google and LinkedIn appreciates your likes by making my articles available to more readers.

To keep you doomscrolling 👇

1. The AI kill switch. A PR stunt or a real solution? | LinkedIn
2. ‘Doomsday clock’: it is 89 seconds to midnight | LinkedIn
3. AIs dirty little secret. The human cost of ‘automated’ systems | LinkedIn
4. Open-Source AI. How ‘open’ became a four-letter word | LinkedIn
5. One project Stargate please. That’ll be $500 Billion, sir. Would you like a bag with that? | LinkedIn
6. The Paris AI Action summit. 500 billion just for “ethical AI” | LinkedIn
7. People are building Tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers | LinkedIn
8. The first written warning about AI doom dates back to 1863 | LinkedIn
9. How I quit chasing every AI trend (and finally got my sh** together) | LinkedIn
10. The dark visitors lurking in your digital shadows | LinkedIn
11. Understanding AI hallucinations | LinkedIn
12. Sam’s glow-in-the-dark ambition | LinkedIn
13. The $95 million apology for Siri’s secret recordings | LinkedIn
14. Prediction: OpenAI will go public, and here comes the greedy shitshow | LinkedIn
15. Devin the first “AI software engineer” is useless. | LinkedIn
16. Self-replicating AI signals a dangerous new era | LinkedIn
17. Bill says: only three jobs will survive | LinkedIn
18. The AI forged in darkness | LinkedIn