AI Is Just DOS in Disguise — And the Game Is Rigged

"In a world stripped of meaning, the only freedom is to resist." — Albert Camus
A billionaire in a golden mask watch from his tower as desperate players compete for survival in games they never chose. Meanwhile, we're told this is entertainment.
We are living in our own version of that story.
Every day, we're promised that artificial intelligence will transform everything, education, medicine, creativity, consciousness itself. A revolution is coming, they say. But before we surrender to the euphoria, let's strip away the marketing, the TED Talks, the billion-dollar venture pitches. The utopian (or dystopian) dreams of machines smarter than us, masquerading as prophecy.
Let's see AI for what it really is: not magic, not consciousness, not godlike intelligence, at its core, AI is just another evolution of DOS, the Disk Operating System that powered early computers. More complex, more powerful, but still just code, algorithms, and statistics running on infrastructure humans built, using rules humans wrote, trained on data humans created.
We're not witnessing the birth of digital gods. We're watching the systematic hijacking of humanity's most powerful tool.
The Second Coming of DOS At Warp Speed
Let’s go back.
DOS changed everything in the 1980s. It democratized computing, brought the internet to homes, enabled the web revolution of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, unlocking productivity and globalization on a scale the world had never seen.
But it didn't think, feel, or dream. It processed.
AI today follows the same pattern, it automates, synthesizes, predicts. Even the most sophisticated models are built on logic trees, optimization functions, and neural networks designed by people. The inputs, goals, reward systems, architecture, all manually crafted. We call it intelligence, but it's closer to reflection: a cracked mirror showing us remixes of our own past.
The difference? Speed. DOS took decades to evolve. AI transforms industries in months. Foundation models scale overnight. What once required years of development now happens over a weekend. This isn't just impressive, it's dangerous. Because our laws, ethics, and economic systems crawl while AI sprints, consuming data without permission, eliminating jobs without alternatives, reshaping markets while regulators draft memos.
We're not adapting. We are reacting. And usually too late, we end up casualties.
Welcome to the AI Squid Game
As I finished watching Squid Game: Season 3, the parallels hit me hard.
In the show, Ultra-wealthy puppet masters engineer deadly games for desperate people, all for profit and entertainment. The players, trapped by debt, poverty, seduced by false hope, have no choice but to compete. They are stripped of their dignity, their empathy, and sometimes their lives until only the architects win.
Today's AI landscape is our Squid Game. A system engineered by a handful of tech oligarchs, built on data harvested from billions without consent, designed to replace, reshape, and rule:
• Workers lose jobs to automated tools they never requested
• Startups crumble against foundation models they can't afford
• Artists watch their life's work become training data for machines that undercut their livelihoods
• Investors pour billions into hype while wealth concentrates in fewer hands than ever
This isn't innovation. It's exploitation wearing progress as a mask.
The Camus Moment: Lucid Rebellion
Albert Camus understood our predicament before AI existed. He described the human condition as absurd, the collision between our desperate need for meaning and a world that offers none:
"L'absurde naît de cette confrontation entre l'appel humain et le silence déraisonnable du monde." (le conflit entre le besoin humain de sens et un monde qui n’en offre pas)
"The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world."
Faced with absurdity, Camus rejected both suicide and false hope. Instead, he proposed lucid rebellion, conscious resistance without illusion. Freedom, he argued, isn't found in divine truth but in choosing to act responsibly in a world without ultimate guidance.
This is our stance toward AI. Not passive optimism. Not apocalyptic fear. But clear-eyed resistance to its misuse. We must fight for transparency, demand accountability, and protect what Squid Game represents through its most powerful symbol: the child the hero saves. That child embodies innocence, vulnerability, hope, everything worth defending in a world consumed by algorithmic optimization.
The Illusion of Intelligence, The Reality of Extraction
Let’s be clear: AI is not conscious, and it is not free. It doesn’t invent. It doesn’t imagine. It generates based on patterns and probabilities from data we gave it. Even "unsupervised learning" is just mathematics operating on vectors, the structure, goals, and data all human-designed.
AI doesn't dream of progress. People do.
And the people building today's AI aren't philosophers, artists, or ethicists. They're corporations racing to own the infrastructure of tomorrow, the digital oil fields of the 21st century. They've convinced us we're witnessing natural evolution while systematically looting humanity's intellectual heritage.
The Stakes: Economic and Moral Collapse
The unchecked race to deploy AI is not just technical. It's economic, political, and deeply moral.
What happens when:
• Tens of millions of jobs vanish while profits flow to a select few
• Education becomes dependent on tools that monetize our children's data
• Small businesses face extinction from billion-dollar algorithmic competitors
• AI becomes addictive, essential, monopolized, with no exit ramp
This isn't distant dystopia. It's happening now. The world's largest AI firms are building walled gardens, locking in users, reshaping civilization under the banner of inevitable progress.
Like Squid Game, the winners already designed the system. Everyone else just plays along until they can't.
Tools in the Wrong Hands Become Weapons
Make no mistake: AI is just advanced DOS, a tool constrained by the logic, mathematics, and code we give it. But tools wielded by predatory capitalism become instruments of extraction and control.
We need regulation that prioritizes human welfare over shareholder value. We need democratized development, not monopolized power. We need transparency, not black boxes. We need guardrails, not hype.
Above all, we need to remember that AI exists to serve humanity, not replace it, exploit it, or hollow it out for corporate profit.
The Future Depends on Our Choice
This is the moment for lucid rebellion. Not against AI itself, but against the system that transforms humanity's greatest tool into another mechanism of inequality.
We must protect the vulnerable: artists whose creativity feeds the machine, workers whose skills become obsolete overnight, children whose futures are being decided in boardrooms they'll never enter. We must defend those without equity in a game they never chose to play.
If we fail to resist now, we'll inhabit a world optimized for efficiency, profitability, and control but stripped of freedom, empathy, and truth. A society where algorithms make decisions and humans follow orders.
Take Back the Tool
AI is just DOS with superpowers. Like any tool, it reflects the values of those who wield it. Right now, those values are extraction, monopolization, and the systematic conversion of human knowledge into private wealth.
But tools can be reclaimed. Systems can be redesigned. Games can be rewritten.
The question isn't whether AI will reshape everything, it's whether we'll have a voice in what it becomes. The child in Squid Game represents our future: still innocent, still possible, still worth fighting for.
The game is rigged, but it's not finished.
The revolution begins when we stop playing by their rules and start writing our own.