A satirical hypothesis about bones, bots, and the bravest survivors of all—jellyfish.
Every now and then, people ask me whether artificial intelligence is truly new. My answer is simple: of course not. AI has been here before, and the proof is swimming in every ocean on Earth—jellyfish.
Think about it. Jellyfish have no bones. Why? Because they used to have them, and then they lost them. How? Simple. A long, long time ago, there was a human civilization far more advanced than ours. They invented artificial intelligence. Eventually, robots did everything for them.
Cooking? Robots. Working? Robots. Getting out of bed? Nope—robots handled that too. With no physical effort required, people’s bones slowly dissolved from disuse. Calcium went on permanent vacation, and voilà: boneless humanity, otherwise known as jellyfish.
The robots, being caring and responsible, picked up these floppy ex-humans, carried them to the ocean, and gently dropped them in. “You’ll be more comfortable here,” they said. And thus began the great migration of mankind… into seawater.
For a while, everything went fine. The robots lived happily on land. The jellyfish floated aimlessly in the waves, blissfully unaware they had once been human. Then disaster struck. About 60 million years ago, a meteor wiped out the dinosaurs—and, more importantly, every power station. The robots eventually ran out of electricity and collapsed. The jellyfish, however, endured.
And here we are today, proudly calling ourselves the “first” human civilization. Meanwhile, the oceans are full of our predecessors—boneless descendants of the original humans who invented AI long before us.
So the next time someone asks, “Do you really think AI will replace humanity?” you can answer confidently:
“It already did. Just look at the jellyfish.”
But here’s the irony…
We haven’t even invented true AI yet. What we call artificial intelligence today is basically a giant statistical distillation machine—a Large Language Model predicting the next most likely word. It’s clever, yes. Useful, absolutely. But it’s not thinking, not conscious, and certainly not about to carry us to the ocean.
Then vs. now:
Back then, “real” AI turned people into jellyfish.
Today, our so-called AI just makes the grammar nicer.
If this is the apocalypse, it’s going to be a very well-formatted one.
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