I was sitting outside with a Stella, an orange cat, and approximately twelve thousand mosquitoes when a strange thought occurred to me. Everyone says that AI is the future, fine, but the future it’s creating looks suspiciously ancient.

The old gods started dying sometime during the late Roman Empire. It took centuries, but eventually Europe traded Jupiter, Mars, Athena, Odin, and the rest for a very different understanding of reality.

Fast forward a couple thousand years, and now millions of people are consulting invisible intelligent beings daily.

The names are GPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, and whatever Silicon Valley is cooking up next week.

Nobody sees them. Most users don’t understand how they work, and they possess more knowledge than any individual human. People ask them questions about medicine, law, engineering, investments, relationships, and politics.

At some point, I found myself wondering whether we’ve accidentally reinvented a pantheon. Maybe the comparison is ridiculous. Maybe AI is just software, and I’m overthinking the whole thing, which, for me, is always possible.

On the other hand, if a Roman citizen could somehow visit 2026 and watch people consulting their phones like they’re an all-knowing oracle, I’m convinced that he’d think the comparison was not ridiculous at all.

We already talk about them like gods. GPT is wise but occasionally hallucinates. Claude is thoughtful and cautious. Grok likes to start bar fights, and Gemini is standing over there trying to convince everybody it belongs at the grown-ups’ table.

It’s beginning to look less like software and more like a dysfunctional family reunion on Mount Olympus.