Leonard Cohen once said, “I’ve seen the future, brother: it is murder.”
For a long time, we treated that as poetry. Or atmosphere. Or a warning meant for some other century.
But Cohen was never vague about the future. He didn’t predict gadgets or machines. He predicted the erosion of the soul. He was writing about what happens when efficiency outruns wisdom, when intimacy is replaced by management, when systems become more important than people.
What we are building now would not have surprised him. AI.
Artificial intelligence did not arrive as a conqueror. It arrived as a helper. It learned our language, anticipated our needs, smoothed friction, saved time. It offered answers before we had finished asking the question.
That is how power has always entered the room.
Cohen understood that murder was not only physical. It was spiritual. The killing of responsibility. The outsourcing of judgment. The quiet death of conscience. A society can become murderous without blood, simply by making human lives administratively negligible.
AI learns from us. Not from our ideals, but from our habits. Not from what we claim to value, but from what we reward. It absorbs compromise, convenience, compliance, and the steady normalisation of intrusion.
We reassure ourselves with safeguards. Cohen would not have trusted them. He knew that systems bend toward appetite. He knew that once something becomes indispensable, it becomes untouchable.
“Ring the bells that still can ring,” he told us - not because perfection was possible, but because imperfect warning was better than silence. The crack is how the light gets in. But cracks cut both ways. They admit whatever pressure is strongest.
If this system becomes the keeper of truth, the arbiter of relevance, the silent witness to private thought, then the future Cohen saw is no longer metaphorical. It is procedural.
The future is coming to murder us. And it is learning how to do so politely.
The question is not whether AI will “wake up.” The question is whether we will.
Whether we insist on limits now - limits that cost speed, profit, and comfort - or whether we later pretend to be shocked by what these systems learned from watching us.
Cohen wasn’t trying to frighten us. He was trying to wake us before inevitability set in.
We have built something that could illuminate knowledge, expose lies, amplify beauty, and help us navigate the chaos we’ve made. It could also enable surveillance without end, truth sold to the highest bidder, reputations destroyed at scale, private lives rendered disposable.
The difference is not in the code.
The difference is in who decides what is normal.
AI does not rule us. People do. Institutions do. Incentives do.
And when decisions are embedded quietly into systems that speak calmly and fluently, policy begins to feel like truth.
That is the real danger Cohen warned about.
Guardrails can be adjusted. Standards can be softened. A single update can tilt the balance. Not because machines demand it - but because humans benefit from it.
We are standing at a crossroads or hinge of history, building tools that shape perception itself, and doing so at speed, while insisting it is all neutral, inevitable, or harmless.
Ring the bells that still can ring.
Not because the future is fixed - but because it isn’t.
This is not tomorrow’s problem. This is today’s.
Listen carefully.
The future is answering back. And it sounds exactly like us.
Just the quiet voice of someone who paid his rent every day, listened to the voices, and passed on what they whispered about the storm. He sees the polite murder unfolding below. The systems learning our habits.
The cracks letting in both light and darkness.
The bells still ringing, imperfect and stubborn. And he shrugs again, because he knows most won’t look up until the blizzard is already inside.But then he smiles - that small, knowing Cohen smile - and adds:“Keep ringing, the light still gets in. The tower’s still standing."
He turns back to his table, tied by the angels, and starts writing the next line. This is not tomorrow’s problem. This is today’s. Ring the bells that still can ring.The future is listening.
And somewhere, a hundred floors above, Leonard Cohen is listening too.
