"I demand to have some insights here! I demand to have some insights, and I demand them now!"

In 1969, Withnail and Marwood fled the damp squalor of Camden for a rejuvenating holiday in the Lake District, only to find themselves trapped in a freezing cottage with nothing but a savoy cabbage and the terrifying realisation that they were entirely unequipped for the environment.

Fifty-five years later, we find ourselves in a similar predicament. We packed our bags for a comfortable digital upgrade - slicker spreadsheets, perhaps a Siri that can so more than set an alarm to remind us when to take the dinner out of the oven - and have instead arrived at a bleak, howling moor where the local flora (Large Language Models) is trying to eat us, and the tech-bro residents speak a language we don’t quite understand.

We have, quite inadvertently, gone on holiday to the future by mistake.

The great Rory Sutherland often reminds us that the "logical" solution is rarely the "human" one. In our rush to outsource cognitive function, we’ve forgotten that the value of a thing often lies in its friction. Withnail’s tragedy was his refusal to adapt to a world that didn’t care about his acting credentials; our tragedy is the assumption that a world run by generative algorithms will still care about our authenticity.

We are currently in the "Camberwell Carrot" phase of AI. We’ve rolled something so large, so potent, and so all-encompassing that we aren’t quite sure if it’s going to expand our consciousness or simply make us forget how to walk. We use AI to write emails we don't want to send, to people who will use AI to summarise them. Can this circularity be described as "productivity"? I’m not so sure.

Technology is a superb servant but a terrible destination. We are currently wandering around the hills, shivering in our city coats, shouting at the sky because the AI is hallucinating and won’t instruct us how to correctly skin a rabbit.

We must realise that the future isn't a place we visit to escape the mundane - it’s just the mundane with higher stakes. If we don’t want to end up like Withnail, standing alone in the rain performing soliloquies to a fence, we need to stop treating AI as a savior and start treating it as a very eccentric, slightly drunk uncle: occasionally brilliant, often hallucinatory, and never to be left in charge of the car keys.

"I’m a human being! I’m a human being! I have a soul! I have a soul!"

Yes, dear boy. Now try to prove it to the CAPTCHA.