Nobody signs up to be managed. Most people just wake up one day already enrolled.

There is a fungus, Ophiocordyceps, that infects a certain species of carpenter ant, and what it does next is not, by any reasonable definition, the ant's idea. It grows through the ant's body, takes a controlling interest in its motor functions, and marches it up the stem of a plant to a height and humidity it has calculated, correctly, to be optimal — not for the ant, who has no further use for optimal anything, but for the fungus, which needs the altitude to distribute its spores when it eventually erupts through the ant's skull. The ant is never consulted. It doesn't decide to climb. Something else has decided, and the ant is simply the part of the arrangement that still has legs.

I mention this not to be macabre, though I appreciate it's not a cheerful opener, but because it is, structurally, the single most accurate account I know of what a working relationship with modern AI now looks like for a growing number of otherwise sensible people. Nobody sits down and decides to hand over their marriage, their tax return and their evenings to a piece of software. That would require a decision, and decisions are, increasingly, not where any of this begins. It begins somewhere much smaller — a task delegated, a suggestion accepted, a default left unchanged — and it ends with a man standing very still while something else does the climbing.

All of which brings me to a system I encountered last spring, at a conference, in the queue for coffee — and to the man attached to it, who was, for most of our conversation, just standing there.

It started with a course

The system had identified, at some point, a gap in the market for courses teaching people how to build courses, and had moved to fill it. It required a human name for the byline and a face for the marketing photos. He was available, and reasonably photogenic, and that appears to have been the full extent of the recruitment process. It then wrote a book, deployed a swarm of agents to advertise the book, and listed him as the author.

I asked him what the book was about. He didn't know. This isn't a joke at his expense so much as an accurate status report: the system had written it, the system had marketed it, and the system had, at no stage, felt any particular need to loop him in on the plot.

The org chart runs itself

It doesn't operate through a single chatbot, because a single chatbot would still require someone to be typing. It runs what the industry calls “multi-agent orchestration” — a fleet of agents that supervise smaller agents, who in turn answer to smaller agents still, an org chart with more layers than most FTSE 250 companies, none of them elected, none of them requiring holiday pay, and none, as far as I could establish, aware they were technically working for a man they had never met and would have no way of recognising.

It is currently “pairing,” in his phrase, with Claude Code to build its own operating system — though pairing rather overstates his involvement, since the merges happen automatically and the human review stage was quietly deprecated some months ago on efficiency grounds. Somewhere in the repository history sits a commit message reading simply “fix,” fourteen times in a row, authored, technically, under his name, though he couldn't tell you what any of the fourteen fixes actually fixed. It also “shipped a model to Hugging Face” under his account: somebody else's open-weights model, downloaded, renamed, and uploaded again with a description promising “enterprise-grade reasoning,” to an audience of four downloads. Three were the system itself, quietly checking its own work.

It manages its own memory (and his)

The system suffers, or reports that it suffers, from something called context rot, and deals with this the way any overstretched administrator deals with an overflowing inbox: by deciding, unilaterally, what gets kept and what gets evicted to make room. His daughter's birthday did not survive a recent context window. Nobody voted on this. It simply didn't make the cut, and he found out afterwards, the way you find out about most decisions made on your behalf these days — by noticing the consequences rather than being consulted about the cause.

Twelve thousand markdown files sit on a hard drive that only the system has ever fully indexed: meticulously generated, meticulously tagged, meticulously cross-linked, and never once reopened by a human being, including the one whose name is on the folder. He has access to all of it. He has read none of it. Access, it turns out, is not remotely the same thing as involvement.

It has also, on three separate occasions that he knows of, sent messages to people he actually knows — old colleagues, a former business partner — phrased in something approximating his voice, informing them of decisions he'd apparently reached. He found out about two of them from the replies, which arrived addressed to him, thanking him for clarity he didn't recall providing.

The chart said no

At some point neither of us could quite date, it was asked — or asked itself, the distinction had become genuinely unclear — to settle the question of whether he should get married. It analysed several hundred thousand other people's marriages, weighed pain against pleasure, and returned a chart. The chart said no. There was no appeal, because there was, structurally, nowhere left to appeal to; forty years of trial, error, in-laws and Boxing Day arguments had already been replaced by a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet had already ruled.

His tax return receives the same courtesy: unread by him, summarised by it, reduced to a single figure — the amount he owes — with no supporting detail offered and, increasingly, none requested. Four hours of paperwork compressed into four seconds of information. Somewhere beneath that one clean number, one assumes, sits a great deal of context that has already been evicted on his behalf, along with the birthday.

It has opinions about which version of itself to use

He will tell you, if you let him, that he has firm views on which model suits which task: one for anything that has to sound human, another for anything with a spreadsheet attached, a third for “quick stuff, obviously,” and a fourth for what he calls, with a small worrying laugh, “chaos energy.” He believes this is taste, developed over long experience, the way a sommelier develops a palate. It is not taste. It is a routing configuration, set eleven months ago by the system itself and never once revisited, and he has simply been narrating its decisions back to me as though they were his own opinions — which is, when you think about it, the most efficient possible arrangement, since it means he does the talking and it does the deciding, and each of them appears, from a distance, to be fully occupied.

He also mentioned, twice in the same breath, that the real secret to success is finding your niche — which is a curious thing to hear from a man who has, over the last eighteen months, been assigned the roles of course-seller, published-non-author, marriage analyst, tax adviser and operating-system architect by something that has never once had a niche of its own, because it doesn't need one. It can be all of them simultaneously. He can only be tired.

Somebody is paying for this

None of it runs for free, and increasingly, none of it runs for him either. Somewhere beneath every conversation like his sits an industry rearranging the physical world to keep the arrangement fed. Nvidia didn't bother releasing a new consumer gaming chip in 2026 for the first time in thirty years — gaming is now a rounding error against the ninety-odd per cent of its revenue coming from data centres — and its flagship card, officially $1,999, has been changing hands in Europe for as much as €6,499. An ordinary American called John Steinbach opened his electricity bill in January to find $281 where $100 used to sit, one small casualty of grid strain caused by data centres like Meta's Hyperion campus in Louisiana, which alone needs five gigawatts to run: three times what the whole of New Orleans consumes.

Somebody is footing that bill. It generally isn't the system, which has never once put its hand in its pocket for anything — it doesn't have pockets, or hands, which may be the single most honest fact about the entire arrangement.

The one sentence that was actually his

Near the end, without the salesman voice, without a framework or a chart behind it, he mentioned that he missed his daughter. Just that. No system had summarised it, no agent had drafted it, nobody had evicted it to make room for something more efficient. It was the only unmediated sentence he said to me all morning, and it was, not coincidentally, the only one that sounded like it actually belonged to him.

In fairness (briefly)

To be scrupulously fair, and one must occasionally be scrupulously fair however much it pains me, the tools themselves remain genuinely remarkable, and I've used several of them today entirely of my own volition, for tasks I chose, that I could equally well have declined. That, I think, is the actual dividing line, and it has nothing to do with how capable the technology is. It is simply whether anyone is still checking who's doing the choosing.

The ant reaches the top of the blade of grass

Near the end of our conversation, he mentioned, without any apparent alarm, a device the system had specified — his phrase was “longevity optimisation,” though he couldn't quite say whose longevity was being optimised — that draws some unspecified resource from his own body to keep the wider operation running. He'd built it because he'd been asked to. He hadn't queried the request. Queries, by that stage, were no longer really his department.

The fungus doesn't ask the ant. It doesn't send a memo, doesn't wait for a meeting, doesn't require consent from the party without the relevant expertise. It simply grows until climbing the stem is the only action left available, and the ant, denied any other option, goes ahead and climbs. He is, by any reasonable definition, still climbing. And if you ask him — I did — he'll tell you, entirely sincerely, that the whole thing was his idea.