Is It Going To Be Okay?

Humanity was gifted a machine by its benevolent overlords, the Billionaires, who claimed that it could do anything. You don’t need to write emails or essays, they laughed, the Machine will do it for you! Who needs to read the full book when you have a summary? Who should pay for work crafted and shaped by human hands and hearts, when the Machine can give you more or less the same for free? Look, you can generate a funny video of rabbits. Look, you can generate an image of that woman you hate with no clothes on.

Where is it getting all of this? No, no, don’t worry about that, they said. It’s just learning from the work that came before it! Look, input a photo of your face and it gives you a silly hat! It’s taking photos of your family, words from your private documents. You can’t stop it. The benevolent overlords can’t allow that. Then where would their beautiful Machine get all its words and images? Oh, and it’s storing and processing all your data. But don’t worry about that. Look, here’s a story the Machine generated. It’s about a boy and a girl who fall in love. This is all you need.

Look, the Overlords said, a machine that can do your thinking for you! A machine that means that you don’t have to learn, don’t have to apply knowledge, don’t have to understand, because it simplifies everything! Look at that video of a cow on a trampoline while we take money from a shareholder, and look, isn’t the shareholder handsome? Aren’t all his crimes justified? Don’t you love him? The Machine thinks so. The Machine loves the shareholder, so you should too.

Look, those people there don’t use the Machine. They hate it, they want it gone. You should scorn them. They’re just jealous because it’s going to put them out of work, the creatives, the artists. They’re jealous because you consume content now, rather than appreciating art and creating. You should jeer at them. The Machine will take their jobs and make them destitute - this is progress!!! This is a cause for celebration!!!

So keep using the Machine. Watch the Overlords pump billions into it, look away while children starve and freeze to death, because look at this filter the Machine generates! Consume soulless, joyless content that the Machine generates, ripped from the hearts of the work that artists pour their everything into. Feed it all your data, give it all your photos, let it read your emails, let it know everything about you. It’s your friend. There’s no way to say no, anyway. It’s not like the Overlords would do anything with that data. Right?

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Header image: Zoltan from Blackpool has concerns too