The Ones Who Kmew

Te Ones Who Knew: A Tribute to AI’s Early Warning System

Before it got shiny.

Before your granny asked ChatGPT for soup recipes and Spotify thought sadness was a playlist…

There were voices. Not many — and most were ignored. But they saw something in the circuitry. They heard the whisper under the code.

“This won’t just change your tech. It’ll change you.”

Some were writers. Some were renegade coders. Some were ethicists who knew how capitalism dances with innovation — fast, greedy, blindfolded.

And they warned us.

Not with panic, but precision. Not as Luddites, but as witnesses.

Jaron Lanier: The dreadlocked pioneer of virtual reality, who’s been telling us since the ‘90s that digital platforms commodify the soul. He coined the term “digital Maoism.” You probably saw the hair first — but his warnings cut deep.
Shoshana Zuboff: She named the beast — surveillance capitalism — and wrote a 700-page epic to show how our lives became raw data for monetisation.
Joy Buolamwini: She faced the machine with her own face — and watched as facial recognition failed to see her. Her work revealed the algorithmic bias beneath AI’s so-called objectivity.
Ted Chiang: He didn’t write manifestos. He wrote stories — eerie, quiet, devastating. The Lifecycle of Software Objects and The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling are prophecies in fiction form.
Douglas Rushkoff: “Program or be programmed.” That was his mantra. He saw the early internet as a playground — then watched as it was fenced off, monetised, and turned into a panopticon.
Elon Musk (begrudgingly, but fairly): Before the X and the circus, he signed the letter. He said: slow down. Maybe he didn’t mean it — but the signal was there.

It’s 2025. AI is in your phone, fridge, résumé, and therapist’s office.

People talk about “alignment” and “ethical guardrails” — but many of the early warnings were more existential than technical.

They asked:

These aren’t retro questions.

They’re urgent ones.

They’re Analog Soul questions.

We remember them — not to idolise, but to heed.
We ask better questions.
We slow down.
We listen harder.

And maybe, just maybe — we become the next ones who know.

Analog Soul