The Three Best Pieces of Writing About AI in 2026 That You Must Read Right Now

Three generational pieces of writing about AI have come out in the last month. If only for that reason, 2026 promises to be a great year.

You should absolutely read them. If you want to keep up and be ahead of the times, but also if you don’t care. They should be mandatory reading at school, at the office, and in Congress. You should also know that they are all fiction, but, as they say, fiction teaches more about life than reality itself. This quip proves true for all three of these long texts (taken together, they amount to a novella-length commentary on the state of AI, which is long enough that by the time you finish reading it, it’s already obsolete).

Despite their acute hits at the industry—they are dystopian, but for completely different reasons—they all went viral. I’m no longer sure if virality is a by-product of masterful attention-seeking and a willingness to click-bait your readers or if it’s an intrinsic feature of our 21st-century world: whatever you write, if crazy enough to portray the current state of affairs—especially if you add a sprinkle of made-up names—it will have a decent chance at virality.

I have not yet named the pieces because I don’t want you to leave mine too early—at least not before I have had the time to warn you of what will happen to you if you read them (there will be no turning back to your innocent life). I’m not worried that you’ll go look them up either way because no one has the mental stamina to read 20,000 words (half of them AI-generated, no one writes that much by hand anymore). So here you go, in summary form.

The first is Matt Shumer’s “Something Big Is Happening,” which amassed north of 80 million views on X, bringing together the entire timeline in a miracle not seen since St. Paul walked the paths of the old world proselytizing for Christ’s word (the godlike reach of Shumer’s essay can be explained by the fact that the title allows every single person to project the biggest thing in their lives right now as the thing happening to everyone else: we all have main character syndrome, especially myself). To Shumer, the big thing happening is AI, plain and simple, without caveats or nuances: AI is big and AI is happening (it's probably irrelevant that he's ...