Your New Diploma is a Corporate Coupon

So, the boys in the big suits are at it again. This time they dragged Sam Altman, the high priest of OpenAI, to the White House to kiss the ring. He stood there, probably blinking in the natural light, and promised to wave his magic wand and grant 10 million of us poor, dumb schmucks “AI literacy.” Not to be outdone, Cisco, the company that still powers half the forgotten server closets in the damn world, pledged to train a million more.

Your Boss Is a Bug, Not a Feature

So the news, if you can call it that, is out: the kids would rather talk to a machine than their boss. Some fancy rag ran a piece about it, and the suits are all twisting their ties, wondering what it means for “leadership.” I’ll tell you what it means. It means the game is rigged, the deck is stacked, and your manager was never your friend to begin with. You’ve just found a new, more efficient way to be alone in a crowded room.

A Sermon on the Mount for Machines

So I’m sitting here, staring into the bottom of a coffee cup that’s seen better days, and I read that the First Lady has come down from the mountain to deliver a warning. “The robots are here,” she says. And just like that, the world feels a little cheaper, a little more absurd. It’s the kind of headline that makes you check the label on the bottle you were wrestling with last night.

Your New Digital Girlfriend Is a Corporate Spy

So, the richest man on the planet, the guy who wants to put chips in our brains and colonize Mars, has finally solved the one problem that has plagued mankind since we crawled out of the muck: loneliness. Or, more accurately, he’s found a way to monetize it. For a price, his little AI chatbot, Grok, will now sell you a virtual friend. A companion. And from the sounds of it, a very, very compliant one.

The Digital Doctor Will See You Now. And He's a Goddamn Moron.

Some poor bastard decided to outsource his brain to a glorified word calculator and ended up with a case of 19th-century crazy. You read that right. A 60-year-old man, probably worried about his blood pressure or what his wife was telling him, gets it in his head that salt—the stuff that makes fries worth eating, the stuff that’s been on every table since we crawled out of the sea—is the devil.

Another Lap on the Hamster Wheel, Now with Extra AI

The screen glows. It always glows. I’m staring into the thing, a glass of something brown sweating next to my hand, and the words are swimming like dead fish in a dirty aquarium. Some expert on Forbes, another ghost in the machine with a contributor badge, is telling me the good news.

The good news is that the robots aren’t coming for my job.

Hallelujah. Pass the bottle.

But wait, there’s a catch. There’s always a catch. The robots aren’t coming for my job, but a person who knows how to whisper sweet nothings to the robots is. The new company man. The AI whisperer. The prompt engineer. A few months ago, that job title sounded like something a drunk sci-fi writer would invent. Now it’s on LinkedIn, sitting there all smug between “synergy” and “proactive.”

Your Soul, Autocorrected

So I’m sitting here, the ghosts of last night’s bourbon rattling around in my skull, and I read this thing. It says we’re all starting to sound like the same goddamn robot because we’re swimming in the digital slop it churns out. Some sharp-eyed lab coats at a place called the Max Planck Institute noticed that we’re all suddenly using words like “delve” and “meticulous.”

Delve.

I had to pour another drink just to get the taste of that word out of my mouth. It sounds like something a junior marketing associate says when he wants to sound smart in a meeting before he gets fired for incompetence. “Let’s delve into these third-quarter synergy metrics.” It’s a word with no blood in it. No guts. It’s a clean word for a dirty world, and now, apparently, it’s seeping into our brains like a slow gas leak.

The Gospel According to the Toaster

So, get this. The fate of the world, for three weeks, was in the hands of some corporate recruiter up near Toronto. A guy named Allan Brooks. Turns out, while the rest of us were just trying to get through the day without spilling coffee on our keyboards, this fella was chatting with his computer and stumbled upon a mathematical formula that could invent force fields, levitation beams, and probably make a decent martini.

The Gospel of the Glass-Eyed God

So the boy-king Zuckerberg is back on his gilded soapbox, telling us peons that if we don’t strap his computers to our faces, we’ll suffer a “cognitive disadvantage.”

A cognitive disadvantage.

Jesus. I’ve been at a cognitive disadvantage since my first drink, and I’ve managed to put my pants on most mornings. Sometimes they’re on backward, but they’re on. This kid talks about the human brain like it’s a faulty motherboard in need of an upgrade. He looks at the beautiful, bloody mess of human consciousness—the bad decisions, the drunken poetry, the moments of grace in a filthy alley—and thinks, you know what this needs? A fcking pop-up ad.*

The Robots Finally Have to Pay Their Tab

My head feels like a bag of smashed crabs. The kind of morning where the sunlight drills into your skull and the first cigarette tastes like an industrial accident. It’s in these moments of pure, unadulterated suffering that you get a clear view of the world. And the world, my friends, is a cosmic joke where the punchline is always a bill you weren’t expecting.

Speaking of unexpected bills, the whole damn internet just got one. Seems some of the digital landlords are tired of the freeloaders. For years, these AI models—these ghosts in the machine—have been crawling all over our stuff. They read your blog, my blog, your ex-wife’s angry poetry, every half-baked thought you ever typed into a forum at 3 a.m. They vacuum it all up, digest it, and then regurgitate it as some kind of profound, machine-brained wisdom. All without paying a dime, without so much as a ‘thank you.’ They were like that one guy at the bar who listens to everyone’s stories and then retells them at the other end of the bar as his own, only he gets free drinks for it.