AI this. AI that. AI. AI. AI. More like “Ai yi yi, shut the hell up already, you’re giving me a headache.”
I know there are already scores of sanctimonious dorks in leftist bubbles ready to beat the drum of “boycott the plagiarism machine!” ad nauseam. But for every one of them, there are 5,000 wieners asking ChatGPT to make their grocery list or diagnose that weird spot on their elbow.
And of course, who knows what to buy in such a sprawling and complex venue as Sprouts? What even is a doctor if not a fleshy AI for healthcare? Who cares about our fundamental mandate to solve novel problems that sets us apart from our shit-flinging simian cousins in captivity, the mandate that makes us God’s chosen children? Why not just cast aside the lessons of 20,000 years of civilization demonstrating the fact that our individual trials and errors are what make us, our decisions, our relationships and our art more interesting? There’s money to be made, people!
I promise this unhinged rant wasn’t borne out of nothing, or at least not just the overall abysmal vibes of the current moment. I am contemplating the sense of dread I felt when I recently saw a press release about a for-legal-reasons-unnamed Agentic AI-forward Enterprise B2B Productivity Suite Startup. We’ll call it A.A.F.E.B.Pr.S.S (”AFAB Purse”) for short. At a time when billions of dollars in capital are being infused into our most ghoulish companies to accelerate the development and deployment of generative AI tools, AFAB Purse was brave enough to ask, “How will we make the corporate work force more human through AI?”
You see, the end goal is not to automate out the salaries of their most annoying employees or to cut every conceivable corner for the rest of time, it’s to make us better. (Why, yes, of course! I would like to buy that bridge. Prime real estate, you say? In Brooklyn, you say?)
And look, I don’t want to be called out as some out of touch Luddite imbecile watching modern society pass me by while I scream incoherently at the clouds. Mostly because I am very sensitive and do not like being ridiculed (she said without irony).
But I, in the era of shortcuts and hustle grindsets and the rotten desire to heedlessly indulge in the commodity economy that our Gen X predecessors once railed against in the conformist milieu of the Reagan ‘80s, am longing for authenticity somewhere in this race to the bottom.
So please, I’m begging you. Stop taking our very sapience for granted for the sake of optimization and profit maximization. Use your brain. Save a gallon of water. Blow up a data center. Do something, anything, without asking Claude for instructions. Because you, angel on Earth that you are, were gloriously endowed at birth with the ability to brainstorm on a piece of paper.
