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.
The air fills with the smell of cheap perfume and expensive promises. They call it closing the “AI skills gap.” I call it what it is: the grand opening of the new company store.
I’m sitting here, the blinds are drawn against a world that’s already too bright, and I’m reading about this spectacle. A little bourbon helps the words go down easier. They trot out this feel-good story about some marketing analyst in Ohio. Poor bastard was probably sweating bullets, figuring his job was about to be fed to the algorithm. But wait! Through a magical “pilot program,” he learned the secret handshake—“prompt engineering”—and now he’s a goddamn team leader.
It’s a beautiful story. It’s a fairy tale. They want you to believe this is the new American dream. You, too, can go from the chopping block to the corner office. All you need is a blessing from Saint Sam of Altman. They sell you the apocalypse, then they sell you the ticket to the bunker. And what a bargain.
Let’s get one thing straight. This “AI literacy” they’re peddling isn’t about making you smarter. It’s not philosophy. It’s not art. It’s about teaching you how to operate their new machinery. It’s vocational training for the digital assembly line. They’re creating a whole new class of workers who are fluent in exactly one thing: the proprietary language of their corporate ecosystem. They’re not giving you an education; they’re giving you a user manual and calling it a diploma.
Congratulations, you’re now certified to push the right buttons on our magic box. Don’t ask what’s inside the box. Don’t think about who owns the box. Just keep pushing the buttons, and maybe you’ll get a promotion. Maybe. For every one marketing analyst from Ohio who gets a gold star, there are a thousand others who are just getting faster at making themselves obsolete.
And the government? The White House? They’re just clapping along like seals. It’s a beautiful admission of defeat. They’re basically standing on a stage, shrugging, and saying, “Hell, we don’t know how to handle this. These tech guys broke the economy, so let’s have them fix it.” It’s like asking the fox to redesign the henhouse and being surprised when the new blueprint has a private entrance for him and a goddamn dining room.
The whole thing is a masterclass in vertical integration. Step 1: Create a technology that disrupts every job on the planet. Step 2: Stoke the public’s fear that they’ll all be replaced by robots. Step 3: Sell them the “solution”—a certification program that turns them into loyal, dependent operators of the very technology that threatened them.
It’s genius, in a stomach-turning kind of way. You don’t just own the product; you own the labor force trained to use it. You become the new gatekeeper of employment. Forget LinkedIn. Sam Altman wants to build the digital equivalent of a union hall, where the only way to get a job is to have his company’s stamp of approval on your forehead.
And here’s the dirty secret about this whole “skills over degrees” mantra they love to chant. I’m no fan of universities. God knows they’re bloated, overpriced country clubs that sell you a piece of paper and a mountain of debt. I’ve met more idiots with PhDs than I have in any dive bar. But at least the university system, for all its flaws, pretended to give you a broad education. It was supposed to teach you how to think, even if it usually failed.
This new model doesn’t even pretend. A “Cisco AI Certification” doesn’t teach you how to think. It teaches you how to do a specific set of tasks on Cisco’s platform. An “OpenAI Professional Certificate” makes you a better customer, not a better citizen. You’re not learning a trade; you’re learning a brand.
We’re swapping one set of ivory-tower gatekeepers for another. The new gatekeepers are just more efficient, less regulated, and own all the data. At least a university professor had tenure and could, in theory, tell his boss to go to hell. Try telling that to an algorithm that determines your “employability score.”
They say 40% of work tasks could be “reshaped” by 2030. That’s a nice, clean, corporate word. “Reshaped.” Like a piece of clay. It sounds so gentle. What it really means is that millions of people are going to find their livelihoods vaporized. Their skills, their experience, their years of grinding it out—all of it rendered worthless overnight. And the solution being offered is to go, cap in hand, to the very people who lit the fire and ask them for a bucket of water.
The thing that really gets me, as I pour another glass and light another cigarette, is the sheer audacity of it all. The gall of these people to frame this as some kind of noble, civic-minded project. It’s a power grab, plain and simple. It’s about creating a permanent state of dependence.
Sure, history is full of corporate training programs that promised the world and delivered nothing. They’ll trot out the press releases, take the photos, and a few years from now, we’ll find out only a fraction of the people were ever reached. But I think this time is different. This time, they have the technology to enforce it. They’re not just building the curriculum; they’re building the infrastructure that jobs will be posted on, the tools that work will be done with, and the metrics that workers will be measured by.
And what about the rest of us? The ones who can’t be “reshaped”? The painters, the poets, the drunks, the carpenters, the people who work with their hands and their hearts? The messy, unpredictable, beautifully flawed human beings who don’t fit neatly into a data set? I guess we’re the skills gap. We’re the rounding error in their grand equation.
They want a workforce that runs as smoothly as their code. Predictable, efficient, and easily updated. They don’t want the human element; they want a flesh-and-blood interface for their software. They’re not upskilling people; they’re downgrading humanity to the role of a peripheral.
So yeah, let them have their parade. Let the suits in Washington toast the boy kings from the coast. They’re building a brave new world. I’ll be over here, in the dark, with my typewriter and a bottle. Because when the machines are doing all the thinking, being a thinking, drinking, failing human might just be the last radical act there is.
Now if you’ll excuse me, this bottle isn’t going to empty itself.
-H.C.
Source: OpenAI, Cisco, And The White House Race To Close The AI Skills Gap