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Published on 17.03.2026
TLDR: This HackerNoon edition examines how AI reinforces existing power hierarchies rather than disrupting them, drawing parallels between William Gibson's Neuromancer and today's hyperscaler-dominated AI landscape. It also covers the unique UX challenges of designing for VR where users can't see their own hands.
The lead article from Elhadj_C continues a series exploring AI through the lens of classic science fiction. The central argument draws from William Gibson's Neuromancer, where power meant corporate power. The article asks the question that the previous installment left open: who gets to decide how the machine changes things, and who doesn't? The answer isn't a villain — it's a system. The hierarchy doesn't break when AI arrives; it upgrades. Through references to Gibson, Westworld, and the hyperscalers, the piece argues that AI systems are being built to serve the interests of those who already hold power, not to redistribute it. The framing is deliberately cyberpunk — treating today's AI landscape as the realization of dystopian fiction rather than the utopian narrative the industry prefers to sell.
The companion piece by Viacheslav Derzhaiev tackles a genuinely interesting design problem: what happens when your user is essentially blindfolded and swinging a golf club? This is the reality of VR design. Users can't see their physical hands, can't reference their keyboard, and can't rely on the spatial anchors that two decades of screen-based UX have trained us to depend on. The article explores the unique constraints of spatial UI design for Meta Quest and similar platforms, including the particular challenge of text input in virtual environments. This is the kind of practical product design thinking that gets lost when the industry focuses on hardware specs and frame rates — the actual user experience of navigating interfaces in three-dimensional space without the visual feedback loops we take for granted on screens.
The newsletter also features a poll asking which will happen first: AI agents become a daily work tool, or people get tired of the buzzword. This captures a real tension in the industry right now — the gap between the promise of agentic AI and the current reality of most implementations still being fragile, expensive, and hard to trust.
Other notable items in this issue include a feature on adversarial machine learning and its role in fooling AI systems, market data showing Bitcoin and major tech stocks, and a reference to a companion article called "AI Is Not Being Adopted. It Is Being Installed." which argues that AI deployment is happening through top-down corporate mandates rather than organic developer adoption — a framing that aligns with the Neuromancer-inspired power analysis in the lead piece.