Don't Worship Terminals: AI Is Not an Oracle
AI isn't a deity. Agents aren't spirits. They're a chainsaw with a manual.
The Cult of the Cursor
There's a new religion forming, and its altar is a blinking cursor. Millions of people now approach large language models the way ancient Greeks approached the Oracle at Delphi: with reverence, with offerings (subscription fees), and with the unspoken belief that the response carries divine authority.
It doesn't.
An LLM is a statistical engine. An extraordinarily powerful one — but a tool nonetheless. Treating it as an oracle is not just philosophically lazy; it's dangerous. Because oracles can't be questioned. Tools can.
The Agency Illusion
The word "agent" didn't help. When AI companies started calling their autonomous systems "agents," they imported a century of science fiction baggage. Agent implies will. Will implies consciousness. Consciousness implies authority.
But an AI agent has no will. It has a reward function. It has no consciousness. It has context windows. It has no authority. It has capability — which is a profoundly different thing.
The gap between capability and authority is where most AI discourse goes off the rails. A model that can write legal briefs doesn't have legal judgment. A model that can generate medical diagnoses doesn't have clinical intuition. Capability without judgment is a chainsaw without a trained operator.
The Three Worship Patterns
1. The Oracle Fallacy: "The AI said it, so it must be true." This ignores hallucination rates, training data bias, and the fundamental architecture of next-token prediction. The model isn't reasoning toward truth; it's pattern-matching toward plausibility.
2. The Animism Trap: "My AI understands me." Anthropomorphism is a deep cognitive bias. We see faces in clouds and intent in autocomplete. When a model generates an empathetic response, it's not feeling — it's reproducing patterns from millions of human-written empathetic texts.
3. The Abdication Reflex: "Let the AI decide." This is the most dangerous. Every decision outsourced to a model is a judgment call you've chosen not to make. For low-stakes choices, fine. For hiring, medical treatment, legal strategy, or policy? You've just handed your agency to a function that optimizes for next-token probability.
The Correct Posture
Use AI the way a carpenter uses a power tool: with respect for its capability, full understanding of its limitations, and your hand firmly on the controls.
Ask it to draft, then edit. Ask it to analyze, then verify. Ask it to generate options, then choose with your own judgment. The model is the most powerful amplifier in human history. But an amplifier without a signal just produces noise.
Don't worship the terminal. Read the manual. Grip the handle. Cut precisely.