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I am sitting pretty, ducks in a row, sevens and elevens, aces and eights, pure luck of the draw, and had the time of my life Saturday in Spokane, and all because I was not bright enough to go into a technological field — my math skill ended with the multiplication of fractions — so instead I majored in English, which prepared me for a career in baggage handling. But now A.I. has come along and changed everything to my advantage. A.I. is an ace with numbers and it is El EstĆŗpido when it comes to language.
So A.I. is going to take smart people's jobs first — the 4.0 straight-A honor students who got their doctorates in physics and economics and computer science are going to be out on their keesters, lining up at the soup kitchens, living at Dorothy Day, and those of us schooled in irony and humor, metaphor, hyperbole, are going to be in the money, driving Bentleys and Caddies, living in mansions behind iron gates, while the geniuses panhandle with outstretched Phi Beta Kappa caps to catch the small change of sympathetic strangers.
These paragraphs were not written by a robot. ChatGPT is incapable of creating them. When it comes to a language as rich and layered and tonal and intimate and exquisite as English with its multicultural seasonings and borrowings from French, Yiddish, Spanish, ChatGPT is a child in the Sistine Chapel.
See how artfully I enticed you to read three whole paragraphs of balloon juice simply by employing excellent English? When did you ever read three whole paragraphs of your Microsoft Word instruction manual that was written by engineers for other engineers and now those Micro nitwits are looking for work picking avocados and I am living with my gorgeous wife in our exclusive condo apartment in Manhattan where our meals are delivered to us by unemployed mathematicians on kick-scooters, wearing their old Harvard and Yale sweatshirts, their horn-rimmed glasses repaired with grip tape, as they hand us our delicious dinners and we tip them a couple bucks and send them on their way, poor things.
The elevator guy in our building has a Ph.D. from Columbia and wrote his thesis on A.I. and Large Language Models and now, three years later, his thesis is less relevant than the Dead Sea Scrolls and the poor noodge is wearing white gloves and being mannerly to us humanities majors.
Massive bunkers under Nebraska packed with gigantic gazillion-gigabyte self-reprogramming self-managing computers are running science and technology and the economy, the judicial system, and all of Academia, Congress, online influencers, people in big office suites on the 44th floor — they are purely ceremonial figures, holding pretend meetings, issuing proclamations that the Nebraska control centers laugh at and put into proclamation shredders.
Everything is run by A.I. except your church, baseball, your newspaper, and your humor columnist. In my church, anyway, we still recite the Nicene Creed and haven't switched to anything nicer, and the Mets are still a losing ballclub even with one of the highest payrolls in the majors, and the newspaper, though a dying institution, still calls things as it sees them, and the columnizing business has been very good to me.
Dave Barry used to be paid more but now I earn six-point-five times what Dave does because your laptop has a teeny camera the size of a pinhead that records your eyelid movements while reading columns online and Dave's readers, almost twenty-six thousand at last count, only read an average of five paragraphs before they hit Delete and here you are reading along happily and showing no signs of uninterest. My readership is thirty-seven million and climbing and it includes Bonnie Raitt, Bernie Sanders, Marco Rubio, Taylor Swift, Novak Djokovic, and Barron Trump.
The popularity of this humor column in a dark world has enabled me to launch a singing career and its explosive success has turned the recording industry upside down. Music critics have ignored it because music criticism is entirely ChatGPT generated these days but three weeks of sold-out Hollywood Bowl shows have shot me to the top of the charts and my song ā€¯Imagineā€¯ is No. 1 on Spotify.
Imagine there's no physics,
So my sweetie and I have bought a thousand-acre compound on Mount Olympus with a hotel and water park and we are taking reservations for 2028.
Thanks for reading.
Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality. His latest book is "Cheerfulness". Buy it at a 38% discount! by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.
No mathematics too.
Imagine what you imagine
Is absolutely true.
Imagine we're all very nice
And transfixed by this tune.
Hope someday you'll join us
Living on the moon.