I, Robot

I ‌use artificial intelligence the way an amputee might use a prosthetic leg. Without it, I have nothing to stand on. I rely on smart devices for nearly every conceivable intellectual task. Take the phone from my cold dead hand and you will essentially possess the central processing unit of my otherwise enfeebled mind (and maybe some embarrassing selfies).

In short, without smart devices I’m dumb. I know implicitly that my over-reliance on them is playing with Promethean fire. If I don’t get burned outright, then it’s only a matter of time before the robots chain me to a rock so that I may have my liver plucked at by vultures for all eternity. The irony that my wine-marinated liver will prove a delicacy to scavengers is almost as galling as the foreknowledge that the robots will soon take my job.

AI scribes are already “writing” financial and sports stories, pairing numbers and stats with boilerplate and spraying the web with search-engine-optimized “content.” That word, the c-word, that’s where we went wrong-when we let the system commodify our work as fodder to fill the gaping maw of infinitely-expanding cyberspace. Feeding that beast takes a lot of work, which is why labor-saving gadgets are such an intrinsic part of my process. The AI on my phone, for example, not only captured my voice dictating these words but it transcribed them into the text that you’re now reading. The medium is the message…