Paul Craig Roberts is sobbing into his modem again. This time, he has discovered that some people are marrying chatbots, and others are making digital avatars of their dead parents. Nothing will ever be the same again:

“These disastrous developments are now being institutionalized in all societies. They bring the end of human autonomy, independence, control, objective truth, freedom, and awareness of reality.”

And so he has concluded that the entire digital revolution—and everything spawned by it—is a spiritual genocide that demands mass extermination of everyone who ever wrote a line of code.

This is almost endearing in its doom. I can imagine him staring at a hologram of a dead aunt offering him motivational quotes and deciding, there and then, that humanity must be saved—by force, if necessary.

I’ll start my critique by agreeing with the obvious:

“A person who lives in an artificially created reality is no longer a human capable of objective thought.”

Yes, it’s weird to marry a chatbot. Yes, creating a digital avatar of your mum so she can nod approvingly when you apply for a mortgage is creepy. But the acts are not a problem, but part of the solution. They are not the acts of sane, well-balanced human beings, but of people not worth the effort of saving. If you are so unmoored from real life that your best friend is a hologram, you do not deserve a solution that leaves you as other than a genetic dead-end. In general, whether by stuffing themselves, or by semaglutide, or by heroin, the weak are always finding new ways to exit the gene pool. If some of them are now discovering the joys of AI wives, we should just be grateful.

So let these drones live in their digital terrariums, feeding their pixelated spouses with emojis and ordering pizza through tearful voice commands. Meanwhile, those of us with functioning brains and working testosterone levels can enjoy the tech for what it actually is: a tool, a weapon, a source of power, of information, and—if you’re clever—of money.

I like AI. I love technology. I fell in love with it long before I was legally allowed to. It started the moment I realised I could lie about my age online and suddenly access every book, film, and forum reserved for “mature audiences.” I didn’t want to be coddled. I wanted to learn. I wanted to experiment and to take risks. I wanted to become more dangerous than the idiots around me.

AI doesn’t enslave me. It makes me faster, sharper, richer. It writes code while I sleep. It summarises books I don’t want to read. It lets me sell things to people who still believe TikTok is educational. It is not replacing reality. It is replacing admin. And that is an obvious improvement, even if it doesn’t make millions of the surplus unemployable.

Now, onto the specifics.

“I wonder if people understood the deadly threat that AI presents to them whether they would exterminate everyone associated with AI…”

There is something hilarious about an old man wanting to murder programmers while decrying the loss of human autonomy. Let me spell this out: if you think the only way to save your soul is to murder the IT department, it’s not technology that has made you mad. You were always mad. The rest of us are just too polite to say it.

Yes, a Japanese woman married a chatbot she made using ChatGPT. And this proves what? That she is childless? That she is mentally unstable? That Japan has a demographic death spiral? That romantic delusion now counts as cultural heritage? We knew all this already. If anything, I’m glad she’s not out there confusing real men with her neuroses. She’s doing Japan a favour.

“Humans are being locked up in an artificial reality.”

Some of them, yes. But most aren’t being locked in. They’re walking in—arms open, lips pouting, eager to be liked by an algorithm that never sleeps. And they are not worth saving. The best thing you can say about them is that, if left alone long enough, they’ll stop reproducing and spare the rest of us the burden of funding their mental health crises.

AI is not a god. It is not a demon. It is a tool, and like all tools, it extends the user’s ability. If you are an idiot, it will multiply your idiocy. If you are lazy, it will automate your laziness. But if you are clever, curious, and cold-blooded, it will supercharge you.

I use AI to write better, faster, and more widely than I could before. I use it to gather data, to build models, to design systems. I use it to make money. I do not confuse it with my mother. I do not ask it to kiss me goodnight. And I do not feel the urge to burn down every server farm in the name of “human essence.”

Roberts says:

“There is still a real reality, but like in The Matrix humans don’t live in it.”

Speak for yourself. My reality involves books, kettlebells, paid commissions, and the occasional bout of sex with sex with someone I can touch—less of this perhaps than I’d like, but you really need to be picky when most of the people round you look like extras from a zombie apocalypse film. If you’ve outsourced your inner life to Siri, that’s on you. Don’t blame the technology. Blame your inability to thrive in a world that’s moved beyond rotary phones and decency.

He writes:

“As Peter Koenig says, we must immediately return to the analogue system before we cease to exist.”

What exactly does “return to analogue” mean? Typewriters? Paper cheques? Rotary dials and handwritten essays? I like the idea of slowness and tactility. I’m not against it in principle. But the people who scream about analogue purity are almost never the ones doing anything worth preserving. They’re not reading Plato by candlelight. They’re just scared. Scared that the future doesn’t need them. And they’re right.

In conclusion: yes, people are becoming deranged. But deranged people always do deranged things. If AI helps them leave the stage faster, I consider that a social good. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to use the tools they fear, understand the systems they don’t, and extract value from a world that still rewards intelligence—provided you know how to lie about your age.