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.
The setting is perfect. A round table in the East Room, a place usually reserved for dusty portraits and state dinners. And there she is, Melania Trump, looking like she was sculpted from ivory, surrounded by the high priests of the new digital religion. The heads of Google and IBM. Sam Altman, the boy-king of OpenAI, sitting front and center, probably trying his best to look like he’s learning something. And she reads from a binder, telling these guys—the very men building the goddamn things—that “our future is no longer science fiction.”
It’s a beautiful piece of theater. You couldn’t write a better scene. The creators of the monster, sitting patiently while a former model in an ecru suit lectures them on parental responsibility. “It is our duty to treat A.I. as we would our own children,” she says. I had to light a cigarette on that one. Imagine these code-monkeys as parents. Their idea of “watchful guidance” is an algorithm that monitors your ad preferences. Their idea of “empowering” is giving you a chatbot that can write a college essay so you can spend more time staring at your phone. These are not nurturing souls. They’re building tools to sell you more crap, not raising a digital child.
But here’s the thing, she’s apparently been on this wavelength for a while. A techno-futurist, they call her. She’s got her own memecoin, for Christ’s sake. A memecoin! Nothing says “I am a serious thinker about the future of humanity” quite like attaching your name to a piece of digital confetti that’s probably already worthless. She even used an AI to narrate her own audiobook, which is a level of beautiful, self-aware vanity that you almost have to respect. It’s like hiring a robot to tell you how great you are.
She’s talking about first-generation humanoids and self-driving cars and the future of war, all in this serene, detached voice. It’s like a scene from a bad European art film. The beautiful, inscrutable woman speaks in riddles about the coming apocalypse while the powerful men nod along, pretending to understand, all of them secretly just checking the stock price of their own particular apocalypse-in-a-box.
The whole production is a masterpiece of unreality. But then, just when you think the story can’t get any better, her husband enters the picture. And that’s when the whole thing transcends from simple absurdity into high art.
Two days earlier, he’s in the Oval Office, rambling. Someone asks him about a video of bags being tossed out of a White House window. His immediate, gut-level response? “That’s probably A.I. generated.”
Forget responsible stewardship. Forget treating it like a child. Forget the future of our species. Here is the real, authentic, gut-bucket human reaction to powerful new technology: it’s an alibi. It’s the ultimate dog that ate your homework. The press office had already confirmed it was just a contractor doing maintenance, but that doesn’t matter. The truth is boring. The truth is mundane. Blaming a rogue algorithm is so much more interesting.
He practically lights up with the idea. “If something happens really bad, just blame A.I.” he says. Then, a moment later, the gears really start turning: “If something happens that’s really bad, maybe I’ll just have to blame A.I.” You can almost see the thought bubble forming over his head. This isn’t just a tool; it’s the greatest get-out-of-jail-free card ever invented.
And that, right there, is the whole story. It’s not about the machines. It’s never been about the machines. It’s about us.
You’ve got the two poles of the modern condition in one household. On one side, you have the wife, putting on this polished, high-minded performance about our “duty” and our “responsibility,” turning the future into a lifestyle brand complete with memecoins and a book tour. It’s the clean, sterile, corporate-approved version of the future. It’s AI as a TED Talk.
On the other side, you have the husband, who cuts right through the bullshit with the instincts of a cornered animal. He doesn’t see a grand technological dawn. He sees a tool, a trick, a scapegoat. He sees a video of himself aging and it scares him, not because it’s a technological marvel, but because it reminds him of his own mortality. He’s not thinking about Philip K. Dick; he’s thinking about how to get through the next news cycle. It’s AI as a blunt instrument.
And you know what? He’s the one who’s closer to the truth.
All these tech wizards in their pristine offices, they talk a good game. They babble about ethics and alignment and making the world a better place. But at the end of the day, they’re building what sells. And what sells is convenience, distraction, and plausible deniability. The husband gets it. He understands the grubby, selfish heart of the matter. The rest is just marketing.
So Melania warns us that the robots are here, and she’s right. But she’s looking in the wrong place. The real danger isn’t some walking, talking machine that will rise up to enslave us. The real danger is us. It’s our own vanity, our own greed, our own bottomless capacity for self-deception that will get us in the end. The AI is just a mirror, and we’re so busy admiring the frame we don’t want to look at the ugly mugs staring back at us.
The whole thing is a goddamn circus. A First Lady selling crypto and a President who thinks AI is a magic eraser for his mistakes. This isn’t science fiction. It’s just another Friday in a world that’s fresh out of good ideas.
I think I’ve had enough of the future for one day. The present is looking a lot more appealing, especially the part of it that comes in a glass.
--
Chinaski
Pour me another.
Source: Melania Trump Has a Warning for Humanity: ‘The Robots Are Here’