Last night, I found myself chatting with my wife’s cousin’s son—a brilliant 16-year-old who, instead of spending his time scrolling through social media hellscapes or curating memes, is... developing video games.
Yes. Developing. Not just “thinking about an app” or sketching fantasy maps in a notebook, but writing actual code. In Unity. With frameworks. And shaders. And bugs that make him think. A teenage game developer. Basically if Alan Turing had a Spotify subscription and slightly better skin.
Naturally, I did what any responsible adult would do in this situation: I shamelessly plugged my new book about AI. (Yes, this is the part where I self-promote. I’ve made peace with it. You should too.)
“Read all about it,” I said, handing him a copy like it was radioactive gold.
“Funny you should ask,” I didn’t wait for him to ask.
“This will change the way you think about everything and also help me fund my caffeine addiction.”
He flipped it over with polite curiosity, like a zoologist encountering a possibly venomous frog.
That’s when Kiril—yes, the 16-year-old future game-dev rockstar—dropped this philosophical grenade:
“AI can never be creative. It only knows how to operate within the boundaries of what it knows.”
Now that’s a sentence. A teenager. In 2025. Who understands that creativity isn’t math with flair. It’s madness with a compass.
The conversation spiraled—in the best possible way—into a philosophical free-fall. We discussed AI, creativity, intuition, boundaries, perception, reality. You know, the usual Thursday night small talk.
And somewhere in that caffeinated chasm of thought, I found it: my perfect segue into the Microsoft debacle.
The Microsoft Meltdown (Now With Less Human Input™)
Not long ago, Microsoft—you know, the company that insists on naming features like Bond villains ("Recall" being the latest privacy-paranoia-inducing one)—decided to let go of a sizable chunk of its development team.
And not just any devs. The gaming dev team. If you Recall (wink), this is the very group responsible for some of the most beloved franchises, immersive worlds, and technically audacious game experiences of the last decade. These were the people who made games—that magical, creative, technically intricate art form that has replaced film as the cultural lodestone for entire generations.
Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom efficiency drive, looked at them and said:
“Thanks, but we’ve got ChatGPT now.”
So they fired them.
But don’t worry—they were offered therapy.
With an AI chatbot.
Yes.
They were fired by AI.
Then told to process their grief...
with AI.
Ha.
Fucking.
Ha.
Imagine a company handing you a pink slip with one hand and a link to “BotFeelz 3000” with the other.
“Hey there! I see you’re experiencing a career-ending life event. Let’s breathe in together. Now picture yourself in a calm meadow… full of new job postings you’re not qualified for anymore.”
The Cult of “AI Can Do Everything”™
We’ve convinced ourselves that AI can do everything. It can write copy. Generate music. Diagnose diseases. Explain the ending of Inception.
And sure, it can do many of those things reasonably well. Like an intern on Red Bull and performance anxiety.
But here’s the rub: AI doesn’t create.
It collates. It recycles. It remixes.
It’s a karaoke machine pretending to be Freddie Mercury.
AI doesn’t “think outside the box.” It’s trained on the box. It is the box. Sometimes it reshapes the box into a slightly sexier rectangle, but make no mistake—it’s still the box.
And in a world that increasingly requires asymmetry, intuition, irrational leaps of brilliance—the things that spark revolutions, not just revisions—AI is still just a very fast average.
Creativity: The Last Human Frontier
Kiril nailed it. AI operates within boundaries. Humans don’t.
We leap.
We fall.
We fail with flair.
We get up and build things that make no sense at first and too much sense in hindsight.
AI can write a pop song that sounds like every other pop song. A human writes “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
AI can generate a poem in 12 syllables. A human writes “The Waste Land” and still makes literature professors sweat 100 years later.
In a world increasingly governed by templates, systems, and KPIs, creativity has become the only remaining form of rebellion. It is the one thing you cannot download. You must live it. You must suffer for it. You must make dumb decisions and wild assumptions and somehow turn all that into something beautiful.
No matter how sleek the model, how deep the neural net, how vast the token cache—it will never hallucinate like a human on a deadline.
Microsoft, This Isn’t Bold—It’s Boring
So back to Microsoft. Laying off developers isn’t bold. It’s boring. It’s safe. It’s the predictable corporate maneuver of optimizing for quarterly metrics by strip-mining long-term vision.
Replacing storytellers with sentence prediction engines?
Replacing world-builders with autocomplete?
It’s like firing chefs and letting the vending machine run the kitchen.
Sure, the output might look familiar.
But don’t be surprised if it tastes like regret.
Final Thoughts (and a Shameless Encore Plug)
So yes, I gave Kiril my book. (Which you can still buy. It’s got pages. And footnotes. And jokes. And existential dread. Everything you want in 2025.)
But more importantly, I left that conversation reminded that the next generation already knows what so many boardrooms have forgotten:
Creativity is messy.
Innovation is uncomfortable.
Intuition is irrational.
And none of that can be automated.
We’re entering an era where the human edge isn’t knowledge—it’s weirdness. It’s risk. It’s the willingness to try something no one asked for, and no algorithm recommended.
So be weird.
Be wrong.
Be human.
And please, for the love of God, don’t let a chatbot talk you through getting fired by another chatbot.
Now go make something that doesn’t make sense.
Yet.