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The first temptation was the simplest. Turn stones into bread. Feed the starving. Eliminate the need to struggle so that humanity can get on with the lofty business of being free.

Christ said no, and the Inquisitor never forgave him for it. Christ wasn’t refusing to feed people: he was insisting that the hunger mattered. That the struggle to eat, to survive, to scratch something out of the dirt and call it yours, was tangled up with whatever it is that makes a human being more than a mouth. The Inquisitor understood; he simply disagreed. Better a fed animal than a starving angel. Hard to argue with that when you’re the one who’s hungry.

Seven hundred billion dollars in AI infrastructure investment in 2026 alone, with projections running into the trillions. These numbers need a market to justify them, and there’s only one market that size: the global labor market. Strip away the liturgy—copilot, assistant, cowork—and what you have is a financial model that requires the removal of human effort from the economy at civilizational scale. If it doesn’t do that, these are the most overvalued assets in the history of capital. The people writing the checks know this. They are not confused about what they’re building.