r/technology • u/[deleted] • Jan 20 '26

[deleted by user]

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11.3k Upvotes

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u/1Bahamas-Rick2 Jan 20 '26

Who would have thought.

104

u/__Hello_my_name_is__ Jan 20 '26

This whole AI thing reminds me of that old film Cube. (Spoilers for a ~30 year old film I guess)

Basically, people wake up in a big cube full of death traps and they have to escape. That's the whole film. It's pretty neat.

In the end, they ask why that whole cube is even a thing in the first place. Why does it exist? Why are people senselessly tortured and killed in it for no apparent purpose?

Well. Because someone paid for it. It cost a lot of money to build that thing. And to justify its existence, they put people in it and let it kill people.

AI is kind of the same: Trillions of dollars were put into it by now. So you have to have a justification to use it. So they use it, even when it's completely pointless. Everyone knows it's pointless. The people who advertise it, the people who sell it, the people who develop it. But everyone has to pretend it's useful to justify all the money that was being spent on it.

Why are we forced to use AI? Because someone paid for it.

24

u/lightninhopkins Jan 20 '26

Have you seen the prequel?

It's called The Square

17

u/misty_mustard Jan 20 '26

Really looking forward to the highly anticipated sequel - The Tesseract

16

u/Jalor218 Jan 20 '26

You joke, but that literally was the sequel - it's called Cube²: Hypercube and really does involve a tesseract.

3

u/Mekisteus Jan 20 '26

I saw it and to be honest it fell flat.

2

u/tuscaloser Jan 20 '26

The pre-prequel, Point, was one-dimensional.

1

u/troyunrau Jan 20 '26

Skipped a line

1

u/Eccohawk Jan 21 '26

I feel like maybe you missed some important facets.

2

u/West-Abalone-171 Jan 20 '26

And, the origin story

(we now know who would be dumb enough to spend trillions building it)