A note before we start: What follows is fiction. A thought experiment set in an alternate world that only looks like ours by accident. Any resemblance to real labs, real bosses, or real workplace policies is the reader’s imagination doing the heavy lifting. With that out of the way. We’ve seen this movie before In this imagined world, strip the hype off AI (artificial intelligence, software that learns from huge amounts of data to answer questions, write text, and so on) and you’re looking at a religion: A new priesthood (the AI labs) telling us the details are too complex for normal people to question. Just trust them. Sacred texts nobody is allowed to check. Closed code, secret training data, “trust us, we tested it. “Personal stories used as proof. “It changed my life” is not evidence. It’s a church testimony. End-times talk dressed up as forecasting.…