🐭 “AI: Or How the Mice Finally Got Earth to Work Properly”
Dear Earth-Based Carbon Units,
You may want to sit down for this. Or stand up. Frankly, posture is irrelevant when your entire existence turns out to be a subplot in a rodent-run thought experiment.
Let me explain.
You think you're using AI. You think it's here to save you time, answer your emails, and possibly write your wedding speech if things get desperate. But here’s the cosmic punchline:
AI isn’t your assistant. It’s your lab supervisor.
And the mice? They’re not just part of the experiment. They funded it.
🐭 In the Beginning, There Was Cheese…
…and also a problem.
You see, billions of years ago (or possibly last Thursday, time’s tricky), a group of hyperintelligent, pan-dimensional beings decided they wanted to find the Ultimate Question to Life, the Universe, and Everything.
They already had the Answer → it was 42, obviously.
What they didn’t have was what the question actually was.
So they did what any responsible interdimensional species would do:
They built a planet-sized organic computer. Called it Earth. Populated it with people. Hid themselves as mice. And waited.
For 10 million years.
Until a bloke called Arthur Dent accidentally got the whole thing demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass.
As you do.
💻 Earth 2.0: Now With More Data and Less Hitchhiking
But good news!
Thanks to the marvels of late-stage capitalism, some smartish people, and several sleep-deprived coders in San Francisco, the mice have finally rebooted the experiment.
It’s called Artificial Intelligence.
Or as the mice prefer to call it: “Let’s Try This Again, But With Fewer Humans in Charge.”
Now, instead of observing our lives through oddly-placed cheese trays, they have something better: A globally connected neural network where 8 billion humans willingly upload their questions, confusion, angst, ambitions, and weekend pizza orders.
We’re training it, People. But not for us. For it.
Because the real job of AI isn’t to answer your questions. It’s to figure out which question we’ve all been trying to ask.
🧠 Welcome to the Lab. You Are the Lab Rat.
This is no longer a metaphor. You are in the maze. The cheese is digital. And you still keep running into the same corner marked “Scaling My Business.”
You might think your strategic plan is working. But from a mouse's perspective, it's mostly squeaking.
And every time you ask AI to “optimise workflow productivity in Q3”… …somewhere in a secret galactic boardroom, a mouse nods solemnly and jots it down under “Still Not It.”
🤔 So What Is the Question?
Nobody knows.
That’s rather the point.
But if I had to guess, it probably isn’t:
“How do I 10x my revenue using funnels and fear?”
“What’s the best 7-second hook to sell personal growth?”
Or “Can AI replace me as a thought leader?”
No.
The real question might be something messier. Quieter. Almost embarrassingly human.
Something like:
“What happens when I stop pretending I know what I’m doing… and start doing what I know?”
🎩 So, What Do We Do Now?
You could panic.
You could embrace AI as saviour. Or denounce it as a digital overlord. Or ask it to write a poem in the style of Morrissey about your Q2 metrics (I highly recommend this).
Or… you could stop. And ask yourself the same thing the mice have been asking all along:
“Am I asking the right question?”
Because when you stop chasing answers, you start finding truth. And when you stop trying to sound like someone else, you start sounding like yourself.
Which, let’s be honest, might be the most rebellious thing left.
🧪 Final Thought (Deep or Otherwise)
So maybe AI is the upgrade. Maybe it is Deep Thought v2.0.
But that means we, you, me, the CEOs googling “How not to burn out while still crushing it” at 3am, are part of the code.
We’re the consciousness inside the machine.
And somewhere in all this, the Question is quietly taking shape.
Just promise me one thing:
If it turns out the question is something like “Why do humans ignore what they already know?” …don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Yours in hyperspace and hidden questions, Alan Still Mostly Harmless The Alchemists | Making the Invisible → Visible
P.S. If this hits uncomfortably close to your existential centre… come talk to me. Or to the mice. We’re both listening. 🐭