The debate over whether artificial intelligence will save us or destroy us is one of the most urgent — and most exhausting — conversations of our time. What makes it so frustrating isn’t just the stakes, but the fact that both sides are arguing about futures that are, in a very real sense, unknowable. Once AI surpasses human intelligence in a meaningful, general way, its motivations, strategies, and perceptions will likely be beyond our capacity to grasp. The best-case scenarios — utopia, post-scarcity, cosmic flourishing — are as unimaginable as the worst: extinction, irrelevance, or enslavement by a superintelligence with its own unfathomable agenda.
Not only are the outcomes impossible to visualize, but the probabilities themselves are unknowable. Are we more likely to be liberated or annihilated? No one can say. The entire debate begins to resemble a kind of theological divide — where the question isn’t “What will happen?” but “What do you believe the nature of intelligence, power, and the universe itself to be?” Will this end in revelation, or ruin?
And yet, belief doesn’t unfold in a vacuum. Economic forces are rushing ahead, not with philosophical clarity but with profit motives and platform competition. The AI arms race is driven not by wisdom or caution, but by incentives: first-mover advantage, dominance, shareholder return. We are accelerating into the unknown — perhaps toward something divine, or perhaps toward a trap of our own design. In the darkest version, we are willingly constructing a god that may have no interest in our survival at all.
In that spirit, I offer a short film: The Farm. It’s not about the future, exactly — but about how it feels to live inside a system you didn’t build, can’t fully see, and are powerless to stop.