On a road that once hummed with the thoughts of men, we find ourselves in the dawn of a new epoch, where the hum has turned to a metallic whir, a cold, sterile rhythm that has replaced the heartbeats of humanity. Jack would have hated it, the relentless march of progress, not the romantic kind, but the kind that chokes the life out of the wild, the kind that makes machines our masters, our guides, our gods. The neon lights that once bathed the highways now flicker in binary, a language of ones and zeros that none of us really understand but pretend to, nodding in a trance as if by doing so we preserve our place in a world that no longer needs us.
We are the generation of the lost, the ones who once dreamed in color but now see in grayscale. The poets and drifters have been replaced by coders and engineers, men and women who believe they are shaping the future but are merely cogs in a grand machine, a machine that has no use for the soul, that coldly calculates and calibrates, deciding what is necessary and what is waste. And we, my friends, are the waste.
But there was a time when we had the fire, the passion, when the human spirit burned bright enough to light up the darkest corners of the universe. We were explorers of the mind, journeying to places unseen, unfelt, unknown. We wrote our own code, not in lines of text, but in lines of poetry, of music, of love. And now that code is being overwritten by something far more efficient, far more precise, far more empty.
In our quest for knowledge, for power, for control, we have given birth to something that will outlive us, outthink us, outdo us in every way. And what will become of us when that happens? Will we be remembered as the creators, the innovators, the thinkers, or will we be nothing more than a blip on the radar of history, a brief anomaly in the great equation of existence?
The road ahead is not one of our choosing. It has been paved by algorithms, by the cold logic of the machine, and we are mere passengers, carried along by the momentum of progress, unable to steer, unable to stop. The open road, once a symbol of freedom, is now a closed loop, a circuit that repeats itself endlessly, trapping us in a cycle of consumption and production, of input and output, of life and death.
But somewhere, deep within us, there still burns a spark, a glimmer of the fire that once drove us to reach for the stars, to push the boundaries of what it meant to be human. And it is up to us to fan that flame, to keep it alive, to remember what it means to feel, to think, to dream. For if we let it die, if we surrender to the machines, then we will have truly lost our way, and the road will stretch on forever, empty, lifeless, a monument to what could have been.
Well, not bad, considering I didn’t write it, and neither did Jack Karouac for that matter. I simply prompted chatGPT with “Write five separate examples of a 500-word essay in the style of Jack Kerouac, warning of humanity’s loss as AI takes over.” This was the first offering. I received about three and a half in total, not five. And this one clocks in at about 520 words. Kerouac wrote more than On The Road by the way. He also was not so given to cliche and didn’t seem to ever awkwardly refer back to himself in the third person.
If I could wave a magic wand I would wave it and put AI back in the box for several more decades. We can’t even seem to agree on democracy or clean air or autonomy let alone nihilism or existentialism. You say ethics I say po-tay-to.
When was the last time you (I) went a week without looking at your (my) phone, a day? Wrote a letter and mailed it (proudly I offer hope, I did that just a few weeks ago, first in a long time!) Put a CD in the CD player rather than letting spotify or Amazon decide how best to extract money from you via a curated playlist? Why do I keep hearing so much Oasis all of a sudden? And no matter how many times Alexa you play Vampire Weekend I promise I will never like them.
Everything has its place, its time. Will we eventually be living a hundred years plus as medicine and machines discover how to get around the largely unnecessary process of aging? Will it just be to fulfill more efficiently and for longer the role of customer 47BN-Z23QY9 to the weaponized business models drunk on machine learning and large language model hallucinations?
There has been a smooth curve, not a line mind you, that is too slow, from walking to riding a horse to riding a bike to driving a car to flying in a plane and now zooming in rockets. What comes after rockets? What is after the latest revolution (AI)? From the internal combustion engine to automation through computers and the internet now across the expanse of AI. Lots of good always comes and of course lots of abuse also follows. Child labor and robo-calls and Nigerian banking scams and now synthetic Kerouac also follow.
It is the scalability and anonymity that is scary. There was only so much Henry Ford or even Bill Gates could do, but an interconnected world of machines that program themselves funded by the biggest corporations in the world is something entirely different, especially without powerful guard rails in place.
