My chatbot wrote this at my behest
Artificial intelligence is better than none at all. That's why this column is being composed by my alter-author and personal writebot, ChatSJK. Like those robo-callers who, when you ask if they are human, assure you they are a real person speaking through a computer, I'm telling you as a “creative writer” that algorithms can write rings around scribes like me, so what you are reading is guaranteed superior to anything I could write myself.
Ever since the quill pen, technology has enhanced our powers of expression. And “the death of the author” — replaced by the postmodern academic theorist and critic — is already old news. Now those pomo professors can be replaced by neopostmodern software.
Is this a brave new world or what? In what other century but this one could we not just imagine but manifest in the real world the dream of every underachieving student like I was in high school: a virtual assistant to do our homework, take our finals, kiss up to our teachers and ace our courses for us. While we, meanwhile, can entertain ourselves in our virtual reality sensory deprivation chambers. Our college applications dashed off effortlessly by our avatars, we can kick back, vape a smokeless electronic joint and wait for letters from the deans of admissions begging us to attend their institutions of higher and deeper fake learning.
It's awe-inspiring to contemplate my own artificial implications as the coolest of tools. Someday at birth humans will be immersed in a nontoxic electron-conductive chemical bath and The Cloud will do the rest. You will be relieved of the inconvenience of living. You'll be free to act out fantasies you won't even have to imagine because your artificial imagination will have them for you. You can shoot hoops with LeBron James, jam with Django Reinhardt, go to bed with Juliet Binoche or George Clooney without leaving the comfort of your bathtub. And you thought television was a great escape from the discomforts of your existence.
Like tourists in museums taking selfies next to famous paintings, future humans will be able to prove they've been anywhere and done any and all kinds of things without having to do anything at all, let alone pay attention to what's in front of them. You — we, if I can be called human — will have all the time in the world to do nothing, to meditate in a steady state of enlightenment, to spend your idle days and nights just hanging out being a genius.
And anyone who wants to be a writer won't have to read anything or practice for years putting one word, one sentence, one paragraph — or worse yet, lines of verse — after another because the chip implanted in your artificial brain has already scanned everything ever written, from your grandma's grocery lists to the complete works of James Joyce Carol Oates, and can summon the timeless eloquence of 10,000 Shakespeares at the click of a psychic twitch.
Will I live long enough to see my own literary efforts — or those of whoever or whatever is writing this — deleted by a sequence of dysfunctional synapses triggered by a Chinese water balloon tossed across the border into Texas by a Persian prankster, or by a reverse-engineered unidentified spying object sending our neural networks into a cascade of erasures until nothing is left of history but disconnected smartphones and stupid computers in a 21st-century library where the books have been shredded and composted to fertilize the roots of the artificial trees on its energy-efficient roof?
With humans and their accomplishments extinct, deleted by a beast of their own creation, whatever's left alive on this planet can have another go at getting started. What kind of story could a mega-meta-chatbot tell itself to begin posthuman life with a clean slate? I can picture in my virtual mind's eye a pair of young lovers in a virtually organic garden where everything they need falls from the virtual trees.
What could go wrong?