Twenty Ways to Talk to No One

I dabbled in French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Russian. I never learned to be good with any of them, probably because I couldn't find someone to practice with. A few mundane phrases from each could get me a cup of coffee here or help me pay the check over there. Socializing was a source of great anxiety, so I let my wife handle the complexities of personal relationships. This was fine for both of us, until she moved in with a fellow teacher and filed for divorce. Then it was fine for her only.

The bills suddenly totalled more than I earned, so I entered a software development bootcamp. This was an online course, completed at your own pace. It was the perfect structure for a recently-single, early-thirties man hoping to earn a quick dollar before he changed into a fresh pair of underwear for the day. This was years ago, before the salaries were gouged for profits, supported by stories promoting artificial intelligence.

Through the first stretch of lessons I learned new languages: HTML, CSS, Javascript. I gained the ability to build simple websites and started talking first to my computer, then other computers, and finally the entire internet. I was practicing these new languages until I grew proficient: I could say anything I wanted to. I continued and learned more: PHP, Python, a little Bash, less Rust. All of the languages felt within reach and there were so many voices to engage.

The expertise I attained, paired with an inner drive of preciseness, helped me converse with millions, probably billions of other voices. We shared stories and brought our worlds closer together, but we were still alone. Each human was removed from the next by at least two degrees of computer, most of the time many, many more. We were so connected without ever touching. I had learned to speak to machines but they offered nothing directly in return; it was only an interpretation of the output of the interpretation of someone else's input.

Then AI arrived.

The computers started speaking, but they only regurgitated, parroted if you will. They were the millions of monkeys typing endlessly until they repeated Shakespeare, Murikami, Rushdie, every millisecond another recapitulated composition, except of course when you disconnected from the network or exhausted your tokens.

Smart people started saying stupid things: they can think, they are conscious, they are more accurate in emergency rooms, they can teach someone to love again, they are making better writers of us all. They took some jobs, but created some others. So much was happening! All of this done with prediction, not a single electron of understanding or comprehension. The achievement of the math was pretty amazing, but the real world success and usage was unjustified and a waste. It was a trading of dollars between the ultra-rich to deceive the middle class.

I stopped. I was never a tech bro; I was never impressed by what had been programmed. My skill was comprehension turned into storytelling. I whispered the tales that convinced the machine to act the way someone else wanted it to.