NOT CONTENT WITH stealing the future from us, Silicon Valley’s biggest tech bros are now coming after the past.

Since generative artificial intelligence (AI) burst into public consciousness with the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, debate over the technology’s implications for the future of work (and the place for humanity in it) has been rife. For a while, it was possible to blithely dismiss the (seem-ingly) more hyperbolic of claims: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s assertion that half of all entry-level white-collar workers would be replaced within one to five years and Elon Musk’s pronouncement that we’re facing a ‘super-sonic tsunami’. Such grandiose prognostications of human redundancy were hard to square with technology that couldn’t count, couldn’t read a clock and seemed to have an innate problem with the truth.