Charles Atlas and the AI bullies - CuencaHighLife

Charles Atlas and the AI bullies

Jul 15, 2026 | 0 comments

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If you spend enough time watching YouTube in Cuenca, a man will eventually appear in your apartment to inform you that your working life is over. He will be standing in front of a Lamborghini, or inside a glass office with Dubai Marina visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows, or beside a giant illuminated sign in blue neon letters that spells out AI, as though he was Tesla and had personally invented electricity. Often there is a blonde woman in the background pretending to work on a laptop, which lends the whole production an air of aspirational prosperity.

There are various messages that vary only in surface detail.

People over fifty are being left behind. Employers are replacing workers with people who have taught themselves AI at double your salary. You can catch up and reinstate yourself by doing a 28-day course for just fifteen minutes a day so that you can learn to use AI ‘tools’ to do three days of work in four hours creating spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations for mysterious entities known as "clients" (if you have any.)

This dire warning tends to arrive while you are trying to watch a relaxing documentary about the Vietnam war, or a video explaining how to download 200 episodes of The Simpsons from a web site in China.

Living in Cuenca, many of us sit at the intersection of four demographic categories that these advertisers like to specifically target: retired people, people with enough unstructured time on their hands to watch YouTube, people with enough disposable income to buy a worthless program on the spur of the moment, and people who have credit cards. We are, to the algorithm, a perfect demographic. We have money from pensions and savings. We have free afternoons. And we may harbor a background anxiety, entirely reasonable and entirely exploitable, that the world has moved on to something called AI and that we are among the pitiful ranks of the Left Behind.

The advertisements imply that somewhere in North America, entire office buildings have already been emptied of middle aged men in suits and replaced by young women with glasses, chest implants, and updos tapping mysterious shortcuts into laptops while passive income accumulates in large green numbers in a small window on the bottom right-hand side of their monitor.

The "four hours" variant deserves its own paragraph, because it is particularly well-designed as a piece of psychological manipulation. It does not say you will get rich, but it says something far more plausible: that the work you already do could be done faster. That you are wasting your employer’s time and becoming a charity case. That someone else, someone who bought the course, is already on the beach in Montanita having finished Tuesday’s workload by nine-thirty on Monday morning.

The reality, as usual, is more mundane than the advertisement.

The other day I found my chica de limpieza on her knees in my laundry room, holding her smart phone up to my washing machine as if performing an exorcism. The machine has one of those control menus translated into fourteen languages by people who apparently hated humanity. The symbols resemble a mix of weather forecasts, Japanese railway signs, and what may be ancient Incan agricultural markings.

She had opened an AI app and was asking it what the buttons meant.

"Mira," she said, with complete calm. "Ropa delicada."

This, I increasingly suspect, is the actual future of artificial intelligence in Cuenca. Not robotic hedge funds or billionaire crypto empires built in a long weekend. Not the elimination of the legal and accounting professions. Just ordinary people trying to figure out what the microwave means when it flashes "E7," or what was lost when the induction cooker instruction manual was hastily translated from Mandarin into Spanish before going through customs inspection in Quito.

The strange thing is that many retirees here are already using AI without recognizing it as such. They use Google Maps for directions to a meeting of the gringo support group. They dictate and translate WhatsApp messages while pacing up and down Calle Larga. They take a picture of a tropical plant to check whether it will poison the cat. They translate the utility bill. They identify a hit song playing in the background in the Coral food hall that they haven’t heard since they were on a date in St. Louis in February 1974.

That is AI helping you to leverage your life. Nobody requires a $497 course of 28 15-minute lessons to get into the swing of things.

These YouTube ads for oldies are designed to induce a panic attack. They rely on the fear that everyone else has already mastered something you do not understand, and that the window for mastering it is about to slam shut on your fingers.

It is structurally identical to those old bodybuilding advertisements from the back pages of comic books. A Charles...