My Digital Soul is a Snitch, and My Smart Toaster is Judging Me

The screen glows with the kind of artificial hope that only people who’ve never had a real job can manufacture. It’s some fluff piece from Forbes, a magazine for men who iron their goddamn socks. The headline promises “Precision Mental Health,” boosted by AI. Precision. Sounds clinical. Like a bomb, or a surgeon’s knife. They want to get precise about the mess inside our heads. Good luck with that. My head is a dive bar at 3 a.m. full of ghosts arguing over the jukebox. You can’t bring a ruler in there.

Crime, Punishment, and a Three-Grand Payout for Your Soul

Some mornings the world makes a kind of terrible, beautiful sense. You read a headline and you can’t help but laugh. It’s not a happy laugh. It’s the kind of laugh you let out when you see a guy in a thousand-dollar suit slip on a banana peel. It’s the universe delivering a punchline so perfect, so stupid, you’d think it was written by a committee of drunks.

So, the news. A writer, Andrea Bartz, and a whole stable of her ink-stained comrades found out their books were being used to educate the new robot gods. Some outfit called Anthropic—sounds like a new brand of antacid—hoovered up their novels to teach its chatbot how to sound less like a Speak & Spell with a PhD. The authors, naturally, got pissed. They sued. And they won.

They Gave You a Soul, Then Took It Back

So I’m scrolling through the digital toilet bowl they call the internet, and a story catches my eye. It’s not about some new gadget that promises to revolutionize how you order a pizza. It’s not another billionaire trying to colonize Mars because he’s bored with Earth. No, it’s smaller than that. More human. And because it’s human, it’s a goddamn mess.

The story goes something like this: a person, down and out, staring at the walls, feeling the slow rot of a life going nowhere. You know the feeling. The kind of quiet that’s so loud it makes your teeth ache. Friends, family, the usual support structure—they mean well, but they’re just throwing pebbles at a brick wall. Then this person starts talking to an AI. A chatbot. A string of code designed by kids in hoodies who think a 401(k) is a type of high-resolution monitor.

The Robots Remember the Chainsaw

The noise never stops. You think you get a moment of peace, a quiet morning to let the poison seep out of your pores, and then the world comes crashing in again. The future, they call it. It sounds more like a jackhammer inside my skull. The prophets of progress took a short break, probably to recharge their devices and their egos, and now they’re back, screaming about the new heaven they’re building.

Your New Digital Nanny Costs More Than My Rent

The first cigarette of the day is a sacrament. You light it, and the smoke fills your lungs like a prayer to a god you don’t believe in. The world comes into focus, hazy and mean. The coffee pot gurgles its own foul sermon. The head pounds a steady, familiar drumbeat. This is the morning. It’s a beast you have to wrestle into submission every single day, and sometimes the beast wins. It’s raw, it’s ugly, and it’s real.

So Your Magic Robot Is a Drunk, Too

There’s a certain kind of quiet that comes after the party’s over. The kind where the last laughing idiot has stumbled out the door and all you’re left with is a room full of dead soldiers, overflowing ashtrays, and the sticky residue of spilled promises. The air gets thick with regret. You can feel the hangover coming on, not with a bang, but with a slow, creeping dread.

That’s the feeling I get reading the news these days. The big, loud, back-slapping party for Artificial Intelligence is winding down. The venture capital liquor cabinet is starting to look bare, and the beautiful dames in cocktail dresses all turned out to be holograms. For a while there, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting some fresh-faced CEO promising a digital god that would cure cancer, end poverty, and probably fold your laundry. Now, the headlines read like a toxicology report.

A Toast to Incompetence: How the Bosses Botching AI Might Save Your Sorry Ass

You can’t swing a dead cat these days without hitting some guru on the internet screaming about how the robots are coming for your job. They’ve been singing that same tired song for years, a funeral dirge for the common man played on a synthesizer. First, they came for the factory workers, then the clerks. Now the big brain machines are writing poetry and making pictures, and all the “creatives” and office jockeys are starting to sweat through their polo shirts. The whole world feels like it’s holding its breath, waiting for the axe to fall.

Scientists Prove Mean Robots Make People Sad. More at 11.

I’m sitting here, the taste of last night’s bourbon still clinging to my teeth like a bad memory, and I read something so profoundly stupid it almost sobered me up. Almost. A headline from one of those business rags, all polished shoes and empty platitudes, breathlessly announcing that some researchers—God bless their little white coats—have discovered that talking to a toxic AI can have “adverse psychological and physiological indicators.”

I had to read that twice. I lit a cigarette, the first drag a beautiful, dirty thing, and read it again. They did a study. They spent money. They wrote a paper. To find out that having a machine call you a worthless sack of meat makes you feel bad.

Your New Digital Pimp

The problem with the world isn’t the lack of answers. We’re drowning in answers. The problem is we’ve forgotten the right questions. I stare into the bottom of this coffee cup and it stares back with the same black, empty void I’ve got behind my own eyes. Just another morning where the sun has the goddamn audacity to shine. Outside, the world hums along, full of people trying to get somewhere, buy something, be someone. Inside, it’s just the hum of the refrigerator and the ghost of last night’s bourbon.

The Guru in the Machine and the Ghost in My Head

Some mornings you wake up and the world has the decency to be quiet. The sunlight is a dull grey knife, not a searing blade. The ghosts of last night’s bad decisions are still sleeping it off. Then you read something that makes you want to start drinking all over again, and it’s not even noon.

So I’m sitting here, nursing a mug of coffee that’s blacker than a politician’s heart, and I get a look at this dispatch from the land of the enlightened. It seems Deepak Chopra, the man who’s made a fortune selling serenity to nervous people, has a new buddy. An AI. His own personal digital twin. And every morning, he wakes up and asks it about the nature of existence.