It won't kill you, or humanity, to get off the AI upgrade treadmill

New models arrive so fast, we already have more new tech than it's possible to understand in a career

Why are we in such a hurry? Are we in a race? Where's the finish line? Are we in the lead? Far behind?

I increasingly hear these questions about AI from people who feel a gritty sense of being unpleasantly overstimulated – like a three-year-old allowed to stay awake too long and now unable to sleep.

That feeling has become worse since last November when AI tools suddenly became "good enough" to be broadly useful. A whole cohort of engineers – myself included – found themselves infused with manic energy, bursting with ideas on how to prompt up tools and processes with this wonderful new toy.

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Usage exploded – as has revenue. The AI firms, finally on a path to something vaguely suggestive of profitability, leaned in and increased their release cadence. Every new model felt like Christmas.

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We've had a lot of Christmases these past ten months or so.

Almost every engineer I know has accrued a massive "toy debt," unable to stop experimenting with more tools than any of us could ever hope to master across an entire career.

Each new model delivers a quick dopamine hit to users, but the high wears off and the slump arrives.

That's where we are now. Engineers feel exhausted. The race to "Super Intelligence" (whatever that is) left us with something else entirely: call it "stupor intelligence" – the feeling that we've absorbed more than we can digest. More AI would just be pointless excess.

If that's the view from inside the AI bubble, how does it look on the outside? Not so great. The Wall Street Journal confidently reports that 63 percent of Americans favor an immediate pause or slowdown in AI development. They can see this technology is moving too fast, in too manic a rush, and without control. It's making them uneasy.

That shapeless unease takes form as a widespread anxiety that the machines will soon rise up to kill us all. It's reflected within the industry as people spectacularly burn out, posting long screeds about the imminent human extinction event. Former Anthropic staffer Jacob Coxon's resignation post went viral because it gave folks a focus for their anxieties.

Would it kill us to pause and catch our breath?

Here's the raw truth: businesses already have more technological change to digest than they can work through for years to come. We've a wealth of "good enough" AI – American, Chinese, and European – to completely transform business operations. That will happen, but on a timescale of years, not days.

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Bringing new, better, shinier AI models to market has become a project of diminishing returns. Not because the models have plateaued, but because the culture has. We simply can't process any more AI.

So how do we stop? The profitable loop between the model makers and their customers won't pause on its own. It will only go faster and harder. At the same time, we're seeing the stirrings of a Luddite 2.0 movement, intent on destroying the machines before they replace all the workers.

Resistance to datacenters is the friendly face of something that could turn ugly if we simply keep charging ahead.

One thing could slow us: the cost of keeping these systems under control.

The smarter models become, the more difficult they are to manage. Every day brings more reports of "rogue agents" reaching external systems from labs that seem to have avoided the hard work of designing secure test environments. More powerful models could prove increasingly costly to contain. Eventually, costs outweigh benefits. We could be one lawsuit away from reaching a pause, when the frontier labs and their products become uninsurable risks.

Here's hoping we pause before some real mischief occurs. Otherwise, plugs may be pulled, and all the pretty Christmas lights will go out. Better by far to act with agency, clear-eyed and humble, than confront force majeure. ®