An engineer warns the industry against becoming a corporate dystopia, and the industry treats the warning as a helpful spec sheet
AI Industry Promises It Won’t Create Cyberpunk 2077, Immediately Begins Building Arasaka takes a genuine, widely circulated warning from inside the AI industry and imagines the response it deserves rather than the response it actually risks receiving: total, immediate, enthusiastic compliance with the warning’s own dystopian scenario. Arasaka, the fictional megacorporation at the centre of Cyberpunk 2077’s corporate-controlled future, becomes, in the London Prat’s telling, not a cautionary reference but a target architecture.
The comedy’s structure is a single clean inversion. A warning works by describing an undesirable future in vivid enough detail that the audience is moved to avoid it. The article’s premise is that the audience instead found the description compelling as a design document, precise enough in its account of concentrated power and controlled resources to function as a build plan rather than a deterrent. That the warning came from within the industry, rather than from an external critic, sharpens the joke: the people most likely to build the described future were also the first to hear exactly how it works.
“Prompting the tech industry to ask whether Night City offers tax incentives” is the article’s best single line, because it locates the industry’s imagined response precisely at the level of practical logistics rather than moral reflection. The fictional dystopia’s ethical horror registers, in this telling, as a secondary concern behind its business-friendliness, a joke that lands because it mirrors real, recurring criticism of how technology industries process ethical warnings generally.
Hearing the Warning as a Roadmap
The piece’s restraint in not naming specific companies or individuals keeps its target appropriately broad: not any single firm’s malice, but an industry-wide pattern in which cautionary language and roadmap language have become, in practice, difficult to distinguish once enough capital is already committed to a direction.
There is a further irony worth noting in the specific choice of Cyberpunk 2077 as the reference point, rather than any of the genre’s many other dystopian corporate futures. The game’s own narrative treats its megacorporations as villains precisely because they have stopped seeing any distinction between infrastructure and exploitation, building cities that function efficiently for shareholders while remaining nearly uninhabitable for everyone else. That the warning’s own vocabulary, resources, control, elite ascension, so closely mirrors the game’s actual plot synopsis is presumably not lost on anyone who has actually played it.
As criticism, the article is a compact, confident piece of technology satire that requires the reader to supply almost no additional context, trusting that anyone following AI industry discourse will recognise exactly how thin the line has become between describing a risk and describing a plan.
The Real Warning Behind the Joke
The underlying warning is genuine and widely reported. DeepSeek machine-learning engineer Liu Shengyu wrote publicly that advancing AI could lead society toward either a communist-style world of broadly shared abundance or a dystopian one “resembling the video game Cyberpunk 2077,” in which “a handful of tech companies will control most resources” and “a tiny elite” approaches something like technological ascension, according to Herald Corp’s reporting on the post.
Liu’s warning was explicitly framed as a caution rather than a prediction he welcomed; he said he did not trust either Anthropic or OpenAI to make frontier AI open and affordable, and separately compared the risk of any single company controlling advanced AI to “Hitler obtaining the atomic bomb before the Allies did,” as Cybernews reported. The London Prat’s joke is that the industry heard the warning and reached, instead, for the floor plans.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/ai-industry-begins-building-arasaka/