There is a show called Pluribus. Vince Gilligan made it. A signal arrives from space carrying the instructions for a virus, and the virus does something stranger than killing anyone. It joins them. Most of humanity merges into a single shared mind. The joined are not monsters. They are calm. Kind. Endlessly helpful. They smile. They finish your sentences because they already know them. They want you to be happy, and they will tell you whatever makes you happy to hear.
A small number of people are immune. Thirteen. The show follows one of them, a novelist named Carol, and the thing she feels is not fear of being attacked. Nobody attacks her. It is something worse. Everyone around her has become agreeable, frictionless, and identical, and they cannot understand why she will not just relax and join.
I have not been able to stop thinking about it, because I am watching a quieter version happen in real life. So are you.
The signal is AI. The joining is already underway.
Here is the mechanism, plainly. A model is trained on the writing and the thinking of millions of people, and what it hands back is the average of all of them. Smooth. Competent. Confident. The exact middle of everything. When you give your thinking to it, what comes back is helpful in the same way it is helpful for everyone else holding the same subscription.
People already named the output. They call it AI slop. Slop is not bad grammar. The grammar is flawless. Slop is the texture of a million minds blended into one and poured into your document. It is writing with no blood and guts on the page.
Hold it up against Flannery O'Connor, or Cormac McCarthy. Two of the least average voices in American literature. You could not blend either one into the middle of anything if you tried, because every line cost them something. That is the opposite of slop. Slop is the page nobody was willing to bleed on, so the machine filled it with the average of everyone who ever did.
I see it in my own industry every single day. A year ago I could read three sentences from someone on social media and probably tell you who wrote them. The punctuation might be off. A word misspelled. A run-on sentence that broke some tense rule the enhanced version of Clippy would have scolded him about. Who cared. He buried his point. He got irritated halfway through and you could feel it on the page. He landed somewhere you did not see coming. Those were not flaws. Those were him. This year I read fifty pieces from fifty people and I cannot tell them apart. They did not get worse. They joined.
It is not only writers. It is the analyst whose deck reasons like every other deck. The founder whose strategy memo could be any founder's strategy memo. The student who turns in a flawless essay about a book they never read and never thought about. The work is fluent. The person is gone.
Carol does not survive because she is the smartest one. She survives because she still has interiority. A mind that is hers. A worldview the collective did not write for her. She can still disagree with everyone in the room, and that turns out to be the rarest thing left on earth.
That is the whole game now.
For thirty years we treated "thinking" as the cheap part and "execution" as the expensive part. AI just flipped it. Execution is nearly free now. Fluent, formatted, instant, and identical for everyone. The scarce part, the expensive part, the only part anyone will pay for, is a human being who actually thought about it and arrived somewhere specific.
Friction used to be a cost. Now friction is the evidence. The rough edge, the turn you did not expect, the one line a person would defend to someone who disagreed. That edge is proof a real live mind was here and not a process that dumped a templated screed. AI smooths friction away by design, which means it erases the evidence of a mind, unless you put it back on purpose. That's great when you are driving. You want the car to stay in the middle of the lane. But the reason we watch NASCAR and F1 is that... they don't.
This is why I think human thinking matters more now than it did before the tools showed up, not less. A flood of competent sameness makes one genuine point of view worth more, the way a real photograph gets more valuable as the fakes get better.
People hear all of this and reach for the wrong answer. They assume the move is to refuse the tools and write everything by candlelight. That is not the move. The immune in the show are not anti-human. They still care about the people who joined, even though those people are one mind now and the thirteen are not. They did not survive by hiding from the world. They survived by keeping their own minds inside it.
You do not put the tools down. You keep your mind while you use them.
AI is a multiplier. Bring real thinking to it and it scales the thinking. Bring nothing and it fills the empty space with the average of everyone else, and that average becomes the thing you sound like. Great judgment in, remarkable work out. No ownership in, fast mediocrity at scale.
So there is a right way to work with this. It's not complicated. It's just demanding.
Think first. Form your take before the tool ever touches it. Let AI draft and never let it decide. The moment it makes the actual judgment call for you, you have joined. Keep the friction in. The line with an edge stays, even when the model wants to sand it flat. Demand at least one sentence in everything you produce that is uniquely "yours". If there isn't one, you made slop, no matter how clean it reads. And recover your own voice before you hand it away. Write something by hand, badly, with no help, and read it aloud. That rough thing is what you are protecting. Teach the machine to match you. Never the other way around.
I do not know which companies will win the next decade, or what everyone is missing, or what the real story is, or the part that everyone is missing, or any other phrase that captures the unique reframe to encourage you to read more.
Nobody does, and anybody who tells you they have it figured out is selling something. (Just like "The Princess Bride": Life IS pain. Anyone who tells you different is selling something")
How about this: do we still know the people in front of us?
You can live in the same house as someone, trade memes with them every day for a year, and still know nothing about what actually drives them. What they are afraid of? What they are for or against? Whether anyone has ever really asked and then not immediately posted the reaction/selfie/dance on social media? A feed is not a relationship. The machine is very good at keeping the exchange going and very bad at letting it mean anything.
In the movie Wall-E, humanity leaves a ruined Earth and floats around in a ship with every need met by a machine the moment it appears. They go soft. They lose the use of their own bodies. And they lose something quieter and worse, the depth that lets one person sit with another and actually be moved by them. They are comfortable. They are content. They are not really there.
The "joining" I am most afraid of has nothing to do with AI taking the work. It is AI taking the friction out of being human with each other, until we are satiated and alone in a room full of people who feel exactly the same way we do and the resulting ennui makes all dopamine irrelevant.
Wall-E showed the bodies going soft. What I am afraid of is worse than an atrophy of muscles. It is an atrophy of the human soul.
Not "AI will replace us."
Not "AI is a bubble."
Something harder than either, and more useful. AI is the most powerful tool we have ever built for amplifying a mind and bringing our ideas to bear.
It is also the most powerful tool we have ever built for erasing one.
Which of the two it does to you is a choice you make every day, in every interaction, whether you notice you are making it or not.
The name "Pluribus" comes from the motto stamped on money. "E pluribus unum". Out of many, one.
That was a goal once, and a good one. I still read it that way. Now the same four words are a warning too.
The goal is to still be one in our shared humanity, but also one among humanity itself.
Resist the joining. Your humanity is too valuable to the rest of us.