The high priests of Silicon Valley have finally run out of worlds to conquer, or perhaps they’ve simply realized that the average human being is too exhausted to resist one more layer of useless complexity. Having already atomized our social lives and turned our political discourse into a screaming match between bots and the lobotomized, the tech sector has now turned its predatory gaze toward the last remaining bastion of analog human interaction: the simple act of buying things. They call it ‘AI in retail.’ I call it a desperate, onanistic attempt to justify a decade of overvalued venture capital by shoving a neural network into places where the sun—and common sense—rarely shines.

According to the latest reports, tech firms are currently ‘persuading’ retailers to integrate artificial intelligence into every conceivable corner of the consumer experience. It is a masterclass in the protection racket: first, you convince a legacy retailer that their business model of ‘having goods and selling them’ is a fossilized relic, and then you sell them the digital life-support system required to survive the very obsolescence you’ve manufactured. These tech firms are no longer just selling software; they are selling an escape from reality to retail executives who are terrified that if they don’t have a chatbot to explain the nuances of a luxury handbag, the ghost of Jeff Bezos will manifest and personally bankrupt them.

Consider the sheer, staggering absurdity of the scale involved here. We are told that AI is now being used to sell everything from high-end fashion to hay for horses. One must pause to appreciate the intellectual bankruptcy of a civilization that believes a large language model is necessary to facilitate the purchase of dried grass. Is the horse’s palate so refined that it requires a predictive algorithm to determine the crunch-to-fiber ratio? Or is it simply that the people selling the hay have been convinced that without ‘deep learning,’ they are merely simpletons tossing forage in the dirt? It is the democratization of the grift. Whether you are a socialite in Manhattan looking for a $5,000 clutch or a farmer in Nebraska looking to feed a mare, the tech industry wants to ensure that a server farm in Virginia is extracting a fraction of your soul in the process.

This isn't about efficiency; it’s about the total surrender of human intuition. The retailer, desperate for ‘engagement metrics’ to show a board of directors who haven't stepped foot in a store since the Reagan administration, buys into the lie that AI will personalize the experience. This is a polite way of saying the store will now track your every movement, analyze the micro-dilations of your pupils as you look at a price tag, and then use that data to nudge you toward a purchase you didn't want and don't need. It turns the shopping floor into a Skinner box where the rewards are overpriced consumer garbage and the shocks are the relentless, vapid ‘recommendations’ from a machine that thinks it knows you because you once hovered over a link for orthopedic shoes.

And what of the consumer? The ‘end user,’ in the dehumanizing parlance of the trade. We are expected to welcome this intrusion as progress. We are told that an AI-powered kiosk is more ‘convenient’ than a human being who might actually know where the lightbulbs are kept. In reality, it is a cost-cutting measure disguised as a miracle. It is the replacement of a living wage with a cooling fan. The tech firms aren't making shopping better; they are making it more predictable for the algorithms and more miserable for the inhabitants of the physical world. They are building a world where your choice isn't a decision, but a statistical inevitability calculated by a machine that has never tasted food, felt the fabric of a coat, or understood the simple, quiet dignity of being left alone while you browse.

Ultimately, this push to put AI everywhere is the final stage of the corporate conquest of the mundane. When every transaction is mediated by a ‘smart’ interface, we lose the last vestiges of our agency. We become data points in a global experiment designed to see exactly how much digital friction a person will tolerate before they simply give up and let the machine choose for them. The retailers are happy because they get to fire the staff; the tech firms are happy because they get to harvest the data; and the rest of us are left standing in a barn, staring at a screen, waiting for a computer to tell us if the hay is good enough for the horse. It is a pathetic, neon-lit end to the age of reason.