I recently watched Akira on the big screen, and it felt strangely relevant to the AI era. It brought back the idea of “high-tech, low-life”: technology becomes extraordinarily advanced, yet ordinary people do not necessarily become safer, freer, or better off.
AI does not look like traditional cyberpunk. It arrives through clean chatbot apps, subscriptions, and productivity tools rather than neon streets and decaying megacities. But beneath that polished surface is a familiar unease. Writers, artists, programmers, and even mathematicians are wondering how long their work will remain secure as automation improves.
There is an especially unsettling reversal in this moment. Many of us imagined that automation would take care of chores and physical labor, leaving people more room to create, think, and make art. Instead, AI is learning to write, draw, and reason while people still have to cook, clean, and handle much of the everyday drudgery of life.
The most cyberpunk part is the gap between what AI can do and how secure people feel. A society may become capable of producing enormous abundance, but that abundance will not feel real if people lose jobs and income without gaining time, security, or a meaningful share in what the technology produces. If ordinary people cannot participate in the prosperity, who will be able to buy all the new products that prosperity makes possible?
That is why the central question is not simply whether AI will create wealth. It is whether people will have the income, agency, and stability to live within that wealth. Polished technology can still conceal concentrated gains and widespread anxiety. In that sense, the future does not need to resemble old cyberpunk visually to reproduce its deepest condition.