Who’s Steering?

When the Machines Start Thinking for Us?

Markets trembled again this week after Michael Burry — the man who once shorted the American dream — revealed a $1.1 billion bet against the companies leading the artificial intelligence boom.
Investors called it contrarian. Philosophers called it inevitable.
Machines said nothing. They were too busy executing trades.

Artificial intelligence, once the obedient intern that drafted emails and sorted data, has quietly become the decision-maker in chief.
It moves capital across continents in milliseconds, reshapes industries before regulators wake up, and increasingly makes judgments that humans no longer comprehend.
The algorithms built to eliminate human error now do something more efficient — they eliminate the human altogether.

And yet the markets remain hypnotised.
Elon Musk, the self-anointed ambassador of our algorithmic age, collects pay packages measured not in millions or billions but in trillions — rewards for building a future where man and machine are meant to coexist, though no one seems entirely sure who will report to whom.
His world looks like a mash-up of I, Robot, Iron Man, and a quarterly earnings call — cinematic, chaotic, and oddly believable.

The resemblance to I, Robot is not accidental.
In that film, humanity built machines to serve it, only to discover that perfect logic tends toward control, not obedience.
Two decades later, the plot feels less like science fiction and more like a business model.
Corporations now compete to automate not just work, but thought — outsourcing creativity, intuition, even moral calculation to neural networks trained on our own indecision.

Still, optimism persists.
The same markets that once feared inflation now fear sentience, and yet the capital keeps flowing — beautifully irrational, relentlessly automated, whispering:

"Relax. The system knows what it's doing."

Perhaps it does.
Or perhaps, as Burry suspects, the machines — and the men who pay themselves to build them — have finally learned to monetise the absurdity of human belief.

Because in the end, whether it's an algorithm trading futures or a robot launching rockets, the question remains the same:

Who's really steering — and who's just along for the ride?