I feel like Keyrock.

He's also known as Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer: the main character in the 90s SNL skit featuring a caveman, frozen for millennia, thawed out by 1990s scientists, then, in an obvious next step, graduates from law school. In every episode, Keyrock's closing (always winning) courtroom argument hinges on his feigned frightened perplexity over the modern world. 

Only in my case, it's not feigned.

In other words, I'm a troglodyte dumbass. Still, like every other armchair techie out there, I can't resist offering my thoughts on AI. If the title of this post is any hint, the thoughts aren't happy ones.

We’ve all seen the Will Smith spaghetti video and the astounding leaps we've made in just a couple of years from that spastic visual onslaught. Extrapolate a decade, and you have full-fledged AI entertainment studios. Then AI creating limitless AI entertainment studios. Given the virtually no-cost nature of producing this boundless content feed, nearly everything on our screens and in our ears will be largely AI generated: one thousand Scorsese-level movies a day, and Beatles-level music, and Shakespeare-topping sonnets, and on and on.

Those who soothe themselves with phrases like "AI slop" and "enshitification" are merely wishing the future away as a fad. But AI today is Pong. It is the telegraph. It is cave paintings. Its tomorrow is infinite.

AI will indeed beat our brains out.

And as much as imminent future doom at the robotic hands of a technologically superior species makes one glum, it's the looking back at the ten-thousand-year human oeuvre through this new "we are not alone" lens that's the real cause of my acute melancholy. The heaving corpus of human thought and expression through the ages was, pre-2020, a monumental given. While culturally and geographically the museums in our minds may have housed different catalogs of treasures, they were all collectively ours as humans, and ours alone: mine, a celebration of Western culture from Chaucer to Chaplin to Costanza ... maybe yours featuring the Asian, African, Latin canons. Ball it all into a symphony of, well, "us" and how can it stand against what AI will crank out in some not-too-distant afternoon? As we revel today in our collective artistic accomplishments, AI looks over our shoulder and smugly snickers: "How quaint."

Quaint, indeed. Here we sit with our now-quaint little squishy brains.

You, of course, are welcome to react and act how you see fit. Personally, I commit to do my small part to keep the quaint alive.

To that end, I'll do what I usually do, and create a brand around it (several, in fact). The first Garnish Drop of Quaint Brain™ will be an exploration of what my quaint brain can muster, a roast at AI's expense and a celebration of wild and wondrous humanness.

From one human to another, I hope you'll join me.