The Dark AI Story Idea

In the near future, the Earth is facing cataclysmic challenges as over population has put us over the edge with a climate crisis.

The main character is a construction worker in a dying industry.  Many of his co-workers found other jobs when all forms of gov assistance ended but many more found nothing.  Militias were forming as people started hording food.  Our main character (MC) thought that things would turn around for an area that was meant for new buildings (an environmentally protected area), but one day his boss simply stopped returning his calls.

He gets an offer through a relative that managed to get in to the "good life" (the highly educated, genetically-favored, rich class.)  It's to work as one of the guinea pigs in a new AI project.

As the world seems to descend in to chaos, the science of AI keeps moving along.  It's progressing faster than ever before.

The project that the relative (TR) is working on is a way to predict the future.  A psychic AI that people plug in to.  It reads their minds, studies their dna, analyzes the history of every person that has similar DNA, see's what you see and every thing you've ever seen.  It uses that information to tell you what you can expect in your future.

The rich love this kind of stuff.  As money could be put in to solutions to the problems we face but the wealthy have given up and are building walled off societies to protect themselves from the eventual uprising.  Instead of helping the poor, they're researching luxury gadgetry, new VR worlds, futuristic drugs, and using AI to see if their love is going to cheat on them.

MC escapes his near starvation and is offered food in exchange for using the machine.

When he enters the VR world, he has conversations with this seemingly all-knowing entity and I'm thinking of trying to write this out like it was prayer.