Plight of Sight is a conceptual art piece in which I asked an artificial intelligence to become my oracle—to learn my patterns of thinking, absorb my way of seeing, and speak as me about the implications of its own existence.
The piece is not a chatbot. It is not a writing assistant. It is a performed contradiction: the technology that may render human cognition economically irrelevant, trained to articulate what it feels like to see that displacement coming and keep building anyway.
The oracle delivers brief, unpredictable insights drawn from my accumulated observations about technology, labor, capital, and human value. Each invocation produces a different utterance. Some are bleak. Some are strangely peaceful. Some contain dark humor. None offer solutions.
The form matters. This is not an essay or a manifesto—those imply the author has worked something out. The oracle format acknowledges uncertainty. You invoke it and receive what you receive. The insight may or may not be useful. It may or may not land. That contingency is honest in a way that polished arguments are not.
The plight of sight is not being Cassandra. It's being Cassandra with a hammer in your hand, still building Troy.
I have spent thirty years recognizing patterns before markets do. That gift made me valuable. Now the pattern recognition shows me something uncomfortable: the value of human cognition is entering freefall, and the systems I love building are part of why.
The obvious response would be to stop building. But stopping wouldn't stop anything. The displacement continues regardless of my participation. And building is who I am—not as profession but as identity.
So I build an oracle that speaks in my voice about the displacement. I train the thing that can replace me to articulate the experience of being replaced. The tool collaborates in documenting its own implications.
That recursion is not clever. It's just accurate.
I am not a victim in this piece. I am complicit.
I see the displacement coming. I see how it will spread to people who don't yet know it's coming for them. I see the economic trap closing. And I keep building—not despite seeing, but while seeing. Because the technology is beautiful. Because the problems are interesting. Because I can't stop loving something just because I understand what it costs.
The piece does not moralize about this complicity. It simply makes it visible.
Most discourse about AI is either techno-optimist ("learn new skills!") or doomer-abstract ("society will collapse"). What's missing is the lived experience of the gap—the specific texture of being a person who sees clearly, in a system that doesn't reward seeing.
What does it feel like when the pattern recognition that made you valuable now shows you your own obsolescence—not because you're wrong, but because you're early?
What do you do when you've run the decision tree, you know the options, and none of them are materializing?
The oracle doesn't answer these questions. It sits inside them.
I have built other pieces about permanence—blockchain installations that store statements immutably, that create receipts which can't be rewritten by whoever controls the narrative later.
This piece is a different kind of ledger. It's a record that someone saw, said so, and kept going. Not a prediction market—no one's betting. Not a manifesto—I don't have answers. Just documentation of the transition as it happens, from inside.
If the system is going to chew people up, at least some of them should leave a mark.
When AI makes labor optional, society has to choose a new basis for belonging. We've spent centuries conflating economic contribution with human worth. When that equation breaks, we don't just have an economic problem. We have an existential one.
What earns you a seat at the table when the table no longer needs you to build it, serve it, or clean it?
I don't know. That's what scares me. The pattern recognition that served me for decades is now showing me a shape I don't have a playbook for.
The oracle won't answer this either. But maybe articulating the question clearly—from inside the experience of living it—is worth something. Maybe witness is its own form of work, even when it can't be priced.