The New YOLO

What does one do when a life-ending, civilization-annihilating disaster seems imminent?

Muster the courage to fight back, even when efforts seem futile? Dive into desperate hedonism until the end? Unspool our most honest truths kept buried by fear? Maintain the status quo in a bubble of denial?

1990s blockbusters, from Independence Day to The Day After Tomorrow, have cashed in by taking us on this journey because it touches on a human universal fear. In a memorable scene from Don’t Look Up, family and friends gather around the dinner table as an asteroid hurtles toward impact. Fully aware their lives will cease in seconds, seeking to savor the warmth of that most fleeting, essential, and poignant of human connections. The simple joy of gathering and being present with others, family and strangers alike, before it all ends.

Many (myself included) often see flavors of these scenarios in our dreams. A towering wave approaching a defenseless shore, equally awesome in its beauty as hopelessly ruthless in its destructive power. A fall from a high perch, at once exhilarating and mortifying as we accelerate toward some unknown outcome. Often in nightmares, we desperately attempt to escape, to fight, to run. But in a different genre of dream, we can recognize we’re powerless to influence events, and simply bask in the fleeting aesthetic enormity of the moment.

As self-reflective mortals, we’re right to dwell on hypothetical endings to life as we know it in our art, our dreams, and our rational practices of thought. This is true on both the individual and collective levels. As stoics emphasize, contemplating death and potential negative outcomes for us individually can drive renewed appreciation for present life, which is hopefully absent the most imminent or sinister dangers. When contemplating global collective risks, climate scientists, anti-nuclear proliferation activists, and now a chorus of so-called “AI doomers” will tell you that only by considering a host of negative eventualities can we begin to take cohesive action to mitigate their likelihood.

The worst case scenario can and should galvanize actions toward anything but itself.

In today’s AI discourse, we are exhausted by the binary of “doomer” vs. “optimist.” The reality is more “centrist”: a shared sense that everything is possible, but nothing is certain.

Rightly, the most useful debates primarily surround time horizons, likelihoods, and techniques to manage the momentous changes most recognize to be inevitable. Very few technologists, economists or even philosophers dispute the premise that machine intelligences — when paired with our own minds, or left to their own devices — will entirely remake society. The genie is out of the bottle, and across markets, global geopolitical competitiveness demands that nations progress capabilities as matters of national defense.

“Alignment” of AI with values, while a recognized field with its own moral and technical dimensions, remains an afterthought. The long pole of the tent for it is not engineering, but the speed of collective education about risk, and the glacial pace of moral consensus-building, both exponentially slower than the rate of model advancement. Any casual observer can grasp the time-warped inertia that has taken hold, orders-of-magnitude greater than past technological revolutions. There’s a crude irony to comparing the rate of “evolution” in AI to the rate of biological evolution of the brains that birthed it. The hare of technology leaves in the dirt the tortoise of our collective ethical frameworks, and individual mental abilities to grasp the scenarios we’re ushering in. Urgent and effective transnational policy on climate change has proven hard enough; mobilizing anything like a shared global framework for “responsibly” developing and fielding AI tools seems folly, when we live in a world of resource scarcity and economic motivation.

The limits of adaptation

Is there a limit to how much humans can and should adapt to novel circumstances our technologies create? Tales of those who have taken a leave from a desk job to work on a farm for months sans the comforts of much modern technology remind us that perhaps our evolved biology is better suited to moving about throughout the day, doing hard “honest” work, than it is sitting in front of screens typing into keyboards for half the day. Technological advancement is not always progress when it comes to the well-being of humans. Though we are highly adaptable creatures, clever enough to make our environments more livable, to minimize our physical labor and cognitive effort levels, should we continue to do so?

Many have proclaimed the death of homework for kids with the advent of AI. But of course, the existence of a shortcut to the answer to an assignment does not mean that there is no value in the more “pedestrian” modes of solving a math problem, those which involve our limited brains stretching their capacities, making new connections and acquiring new knowledge and know-how. The same applies to inexperienced Claude Code users who may bypass years of foundational learning, potentially never developing the senior-level “taste” or knowledge required to effectively guide an agent.

“More time to be strategic” sounds nice, but are we throwing in the towel on our own cognitive abilities? Will thinking for yourself be the equivalent of going to the gym? Something we do to feel better, stay “in shape”, live longer? Or will we become synonymous with sloth and gluttony, with every need accommodated?

On an individual level, what does the accelerating pace of AI mean for what we do today? Our health? Our naive, cute notions of savings for our children’s college education? Our career choices, where no field is seemingly safe from massive AI-fueled contraction? Regardless of where you stand on AI utopianism or doomerism, it’s tempting to want to throw your hands up and contemplate: what’s the point in pretending that seismically disruptive changes WON’T happen? What constants can I even bet on as I plan for the future? What wild theories do I need to concoct to give me the best chance to thrive in this hyperdynamic, uncertain future? Is “YOLO” (You Only Live Once) now more of a “you only live like this for a few more years” mantra?

The synthetic mother bird

When I first drafted this post in 2023 and never published it, I asked AI for help in editing and organizing my thoughts. At the time, every time I reviewed the feedback, I found it to be a little off. I felt like it was extracting thoughts out of my head and into its neural network and regurgitating them to me like a synthetic mother bird. The results were not appetizing.

When I resurfaced this in 2026, I found the AI critiques to be surprisingly helpful, and I made a few minor edits based on its feedback. But in the process, I felt something slipping away. I could no longer ignore its power to do this very task, the one I have always enjoyed for its difficulty and the thought-process it requires.

If the AI can mimic my voice, extract my thoughts, and “improve” my reflections, we have to ask: what happens to the value of a “gift” or a “strength” I thought I had?

We are entering an era of cognitive leveling. When the delta between mediocre and great writers, between junior coders and senior architects, is nearly bridged by a good prompt, the traditional meritocracy begins to dissolve. If everyone can produce “excellence” via the machine, then excellence becomes the new baseline, and therefore, it becomes invisible. We are left with a strange paradox: our technology bounds ahead, yet our biology remains stagnant. Our plastic minds can learn new tools, but they cannot evolve fast enough to process the sheer volume of agency we are creating, and subsequently handing over.

We are the bottleneck in our own revolution.

Human-in-the-loop, by design

In my own work developing AI products for clinical users, I reckon with this tension daily. It is a design choice to decide where the machine ends and the human begins. We focus on building ‘human-in-the-loop’ systems — not as a placeholder until full automation arrives, but as a fundamental commitment to keeping clinical judgment and human accountability at the heart of the care process. Our goal is to use AI to strip away the administrative burden that creates vital data stores, but is not the reason healthcare professionals get up in the morning. By automating documentation and coordination, we aren’t trying to replace the surgeon’s hands or the nurse’s intuition, but to clear the static so they can reclaim the agency that made them pursue medicine in the first place.

This realization brings us back to the scale of what is transpiring around us. Beyond my job, as an observer of the world today, I fear several things are happening on a fractal scale:

• The deeply personal rise and fall of career paths that no longer exist.
• The community-level decline of professions, and regional economic centers, whose primary industries were “solved” by AI.
• The geopolitical sand shifting as power structures are remade by access to compute.

Change is the only constant in mortal life, yet the fissures emerging in the continuity of our current daily experience show just how thin the ice has become. We’ve always said that “youth is wasted on the young,” a nod to the tragedy of having vitality without the wisdom to use it. But today, we face a new version: Is human agency being wasted on the automated?

If we are submitting to a higher power of our own creation, superintelligences that make our savings accounts, degrees, and career ladders look like quaint relics of a simpler time, then “YOLO” isn’t just a meme. It’s a rational response.

When the future becomes unplannable, the only logical move is to return to the dinner table from Don’t Look Up. To find the most honest truths kept buried by fear. Perhaps our last act of true rebellion is to stay sharp, to keep going “the gym” of analog, original thought, and to savor the fleeting glory of being human while the hare of technology still allows the tortoise a view of the race.

We are building a new form of higher intelligence. The least we can do is look it in the eye before we hand over the keys.

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This post represents my personal reflections on AI as a user, observer of the industry, and professional working to develop humanistic, useful, and trustworthy healthcare AI products.