Like a fool, I used to resist, but no more. In the past, I railed against the rise of AI. I preached small-minded sermons to students who had to sit through my tirades to get a passing grade. I used to curse and mutter at the head of the class, as the commercial for Grammarly played when I tried to show a YouTube clip about permaculture. Now, I search for the Grammarly commercials, show them in their entirety, then try to convert any students who, somehow, remain unconvinced of AI’s absolute utility.
I call such pitiable souls The Lost. Some of them are still writing their own essays, if you can believe that. Some of them even aspire—and I promise you that I’m not making this up—to write an entire book at some point in their life. Thankfully, there is still hope for The Lost, and it comes, now as ever, in the form of embracing salvation, which looks like this:
All students, for all assignments, should use ChatGPT to complete each task. Why would you waste your time writing a paper? We now have a tool that can do that for you. And all professors will save massive amounts of time and energy by using ChatGPT to grade all those papers. Isn’t that great? I mean, what an educational revolution.
Hey, what’s in that bag? Are those books?! Get rid of those. You do not need to read books. Just feed the PDFs to ChatGPT and let it spit out a summary that you can read in class if needed, or a brief analysis or response to a post to an online discussion where your bot will talk to your classmates’ bots. Stop wasting your time reading.
Oh, you’re a fine arts major? You should have generative AI draw those nudes for you, and your fellow arts majors will use machine vision to look at your work, and Chat GPT will write up much better criticism than any nineteen- or twenty-year-old brain could have ever come up with, and will do it much more efficiently.
Dance? You mean, like, moving your body vigorously while producing nothing? Wait? Humans are still dancing? Why? We have robots that can dance. Do you know how inefficient it is for human bodies to dance? The energy you waste by jumping and spinning across a stage or any space, rather than just walking across it, or better yet, riding a solar-powered Segway or a hoverboard? Wheels are much more efficient than feet. This is proven. It’s science.
And don’t even get me started on student athletes.
(Too late.) What the hell are you doing still playing sports? The endless calories consumed, then expended pointlessly, the pain and suffering of training, the injuries, the burden on our medical professionals to try to repair your achilles, your hairline fractures, your battered brain.
People, wake up. We have video games of every sport ever invented. Stop wasting resources on the field, in the pool, on the court, in the gym.
No, don’t tear down the field house. We’ll need it. We might even need to expand it. The number of incoming freshmen on e-sports scholarships will likely increase once the next generation of students exclusively plays sports on VR headsets. The NCAA will convert every competition into a virtual event, and your parents will watch your avatar throw the javelin as they sit comfortably in their own home—no need to travel halfway across the country to see you compete at nationals.
Matter fact, why even go to college or live in a dorm when you could stay in your mom’s basement for four years, and have ChatGPT complete and upload all of your assignments? It would be so much more efficient than what we’re doing now.
Come to think of it, who needs a mom? Have you chatted with Siri or Alexa lately? All the nurturing, encouragement, and comforting words a child would ever need can be easily generated by these neural nets, and with more effective, research-based phrase selection than—I don’t even like saying this phrase, it’s so obsolete—a “human mother” could ever produce. All the most effective therapy talk will be infused into AI mothering from birth, saving so much time and money later, when adult children don’t need to go to a therapist to fix things about themselves, because there was no human mother there to cause damage in the first place.
See how beautiful, how efficient that is? By the time these children come to college, they’ll actually be ready to learn, rather than spending all their time navigating their anxieties and emotional hang-ups.
Regrettably, many publishers still are not interested in work composed by AI, and so this piece was written by me, a human. Hence, the wordiness, ineptitude, and inefficiency of the prose. And yet, I remain a typist, for I have vowed to spend my days in service of this message, with the hope of ushering my students into a world of endless artificial intelligence. A world of solutions. A world, finally, that delivers to humans the infinite leisure they have sought since the Beginning.
Now, at last, we can see, as we move toward a truly efficient future, that the greatest gift we ever received was being forced to exit Eden. To leave the garden behind.
