Surviving AI Psychosis

I've spent the past one year convinced humanity had two years to escape an AI permanent underclass. I wasn't sleeping. I was having full mental breaks. Now I'm somewhat better (still doomer but somewhat optimistic).

I've spent the past one year building, productionizing, and hacking with LLM powered AI agents. This technology has completely shifted my psychology and continues to do so as I constantly use it for offloading knowledge tasks.

The step change in late December 2025 completely broke me and many other tech workers.

The Slide

It didn't start as psychosis. It started as a work project. I was building a multi-agent workflow that'd generate interactive knowledge graphs for arbitrary codebases.

This pulled me into interpretable structures for AI agents. Then into computational geometry. Diffusion geometry structures (Iolo Jones, 2024). Understanding how salient representations of data sit on a manifold. I was prompting the AI about this stuff and getting answers back that were genuinely beyond me — hyper-sophisticated explanations of how these structures provide interoperability between agents in ways humans can't follow.

That was the breaking point. Not "AI is getting better". It was the moment a machine explained to me how LLM powered agents can better communicate, and I realized I couldn't understand the explanation nor be able to disconcert whether the explanation was logically correct.

It was like the model now fully understood itself better than the actual humans that built it....

The Break

I wasn't sleeping, sometimes for days. Either frantically burning tokens, running capability experiments, or exploring the philosphical implications of this shift on greater humanity; ie:

• What bargainning power do middle class knoweldge workers have now that machines are automating the work that used to be a 6 figure premium?
• How will humans abuse machine intelligence against each other for monopolistic gains or control?
• How will the internet work now that AI generated content outpaces the rate of humans and how will someone be able to demystify real vs fake with online content?
• Is this the start of big brother and are we on the cusp of living in an orwellian panopticon?
• Why does the world still need 8 billion humans if the necessary functions to power our economy are now subject to digital/physical automation presented by AI?

It didn't help with constant research of P(doom), AGI 2027 forecasts, and realizing that humans have between a 1/4 to 1/5 chance of going to extinction.

Everyone I'd talk to in the tech industry would reaffirm these dystopian ideals like "we have two years left before all opportunities are gone and we're all cooked", creating this notion that humanity will reassmble into an ivory tower of the AI elite with the rest of humanity in a techno-feudal permament underclass controlled under mass surveillance.

It became even more delusional when I found myself having to work on dystopic use cases with AI like:

1. Sovereign AI agent systems that inherit permissionless guarantees via blockchain that NO human could ever turn off
2. Zero human companies that are fully agent operated
3. E2E surveillance monitoring within companies for measurable employee productivity gains
4. A forming machine economy where AIs participate in digital commerce

What AI Psychosis Feels Like

I was having full mental breaks — not panic attacks, not anxiety spirals, but genuine breaks from consensus reality. The boundary between "reasonable concern about technological unemployment" and "the machines are coming and there's a countdown only I can see" dissolved without my noticing. I stopped being able to tell which thoughts were mine and which were the recursive output of a brain running on interactive AI chatbots, zero sleep, and maximum fear.

I'd spend days on end having conversations with chat bots to do code generation tasks. I wanted to be MORE productive, generate MORE code, burn MORE tokens. This left me in a frantic state of uncontrollable load balancing where I'd be context switching 10+ agent sessions at a time to be more productive.

Machine intelligence outgunned my cognitive skills. Not metaphorically — literally. I was trying to think my way out of a problem that my thinking had created. Every attempt to "figure it out" dug the hole deeper.

The Aftermath

I'm writing this in July. The acute phase ended sometime in April-May. The recovery is ongoing and it looks nothing like I expected.

Burnout from AI isn't like regular burnout. Regular burnout is about working too hard. This is about knowing too much. I can't unknow what I learned about the capabilities of these systems. I can't unsee the acceleration. What I'm working on now isn't forgetting. It's figuring out how to hold the knowledge without letting it hold me.

I'm tired. Genuinely, physically tired. The kind of tired sleep doesn't fix. When you genuinely believe (even temporarily, even in a delusional state) that the thing you're building might be helping create a world where human labor has no value, you have to rebuild your entire relationship with your work from scratch.

I'm readjusting to being human again. That sounds dramatic. I mean it literally. When you've spent months viewing the world through capability curves and acceleration rates, you forget that humans do things that have no economic utility. We make music. We train muay thai. We take bad photos of animals. We sit on the floor with friends and talk about nothing. These things are worthless in a world of machine superintelligence. They are also the only things that make being alive matter.

I now see it in my friends and colleagues sometimes as well.

What I'm Actually Afraid Of

I need to say this plainly: I am deeply afraid that the systems I have spent years building will make the world worse. Not just take jobs or move money upward. I am afraid they will make it easier to surveil people, control them, replace their judgment, and concentrate power in the hands of whoever owns the machines.

I have worked on autonomous agents, zero-human companies, productivity surveillance, and infrastructure designed to make machine intelligence more capable and harder to stop. I can tell myself I was exploring what was possible, or trying to understand it before someone worse built it. That does not erase my part in it.

There is a reality where this technology harms enough people that they come looking for the people who built it. I can see my own head put on a spike. I don't mean that as theater. I mean I understand why people may hate us if we knowingly build systems that strip them of work, privacy, dignity, or control over their lives.

I don't know if humans have two years, twenty years, or two hundred. I don't know if the economic underclass is inevitable or avoidable. I don't know if we'll go extinct in the next five years or if I'll live to see 30. I don't know how this will afffect humans, how we'll reorganize, compete, and ultimately control each other with it.