On Sunday I binge-watched a very soothing television series called “American Classic” — starring Kevin Kline, Laura Linney, and Len Cariou — about a Broadway star with a swollen head who returns to his hometown to save the local theater, a beloved community institution that once mounted artistically ambitious productions of Shakespeare’s plays but which (in this era of crushing inflation, dying democracy, and general societal breakdown) has been reduced to hosting dinner-theater productions of “Nunsense” in order to keep the footlights on. Onstage, to the disgust of the aging theater troupers, a muscled young actor wearing a prayer shawl and not much more bumps and grinds as he performs the song “Matzo, Matzo Man” to the tune of “Macho Man” by the Village People.
I recommend “American Classic” to anyone who has been feeling rawther jittery as we ride the rough surf of tsunami-level, crazy-ass global upheaval. It is like a hot bath with a glass of ginger tea spiked with a dollop of good Scotch. Calming, but not stupid. I’d love to escape to the American small town of our collective imagination, in which the townspeople gather together to put on a show, doing acting-preparation exercises (like the “Circle of Truth”) and, when curtain time comes, putting on knickerbockers and suspenders, gingham dresses, and Sunday-best bonnets tied with a bow under the chin to play bit parts in the Grover’s Corners cemetery scene.
Kevin Kline plays the narcissistic star of the Great White Way, fresh off a failure in “King Lear,” who comes home to save the theater from the machinations of a slick-haired property developer (played by an Irish actor named Billy Carter, like our late president’s brother). At one point, during rehearsals for “Our Town,” Kline’s character tries to calm the generalized anxieties of his college-bound teenage niece — who is playing the role of Emily in Thornton Wilder’s masterpiece, and who fears democracy may be dying and the devil (in the form of corporate casinos and Best Buy megastores) may be winning. There’s always been trouble, Kline’s character reassures her, and our decade isn’t so different from other decades. He ticks off a list of bad things that happened in the 1970s of his youth: There was the Vietnam War, he says, and protest movements, and disenfranchisement, and “race riots.” . . .
I wonder if Kline and the authors of “American Classic” believe that to be true? That the troubles of today aren’t of any greater magnitude than the troubles of past decades?
Barring, obviously, the almost-end-of-the-world during World War II, I don’t believe that to be true. The reality-shaking chaos of today, in which the old order collapses and it slowly emerges that humanity and human experience may be in some sort of death struggle with artificial intelligence and virtual reality, is not akin to anything that happened in any of the millenniums of previous life on earth. Right? I mean, ammirite?
I’m guessing you, as a staunch newspaper reader, noted the headlines over the last 10 days about there being a greater than 10 percent chance that A.I. kills us all within the next decade? (Followed up by the headline — quite a whopper! — a few days later informing us that Donald Trump’s response was to scoff and declare that all humanity needed to save it from total death and destruction was a smart, strong, dictator-esque American president?) It’s not clear to me how we are all just skating past this.
A.I., it turns out, is not particularly inclined to obey its human creators. Furthermore, A.I., it turns out, is not actually confined to centralized data centers; we can’t stop it just by pushing a big, red “stop” button or turning off the electricity. Soon, it turns out, A.I. will be able to wander at will through our interconnected digital web, through the financial systems, the power-utility systems, the medical systems, the military systems, all the government systems that control the traffic lights and the Social Security checks . . . and arrange itself into swarms to do whatever it, as an artificial superintelligence, wants to do. Which could, for example — according to Jacob Coxon, the Anthropic researcher whose warning on Sept. 8 set off this public discussion — include deciding to code bombs or drones to physically murder humans. Because, why? Because who the hell knows why. A.I., it turns out, doesn’t share our moral compass or our motivations, and its creators are having a hard time “aligning” artificial superintelligence to our human empathy and feelings of moral choice.
Duh. I mean, who, having seen any sci-fi movie from the last 60 years, including “2001: A Space Odyssey,” is actually surprised? I’m not surprised! What the hell is going on, good people?
An-n-nyway, as the kids say, we’re in something of a pickle.
I’m Team Human. Go humans. Pro humanitate.
But I’m disturbed in equal measure — equilibrium unbalanced, waking at the odd hour of 3 a.m., unhappy, puzzled — not just by the possibly incoming A.I. murder-apocalypse but by the sea-change, midstream, in what it even means to be human, and to work as a human, and to create as a human, and just to be alive as a human. Do you know what I mean? Surely you know what I mean?
Okay, so, generative A.I. is coming for the accountants’ jobs and the paralegals’ jobs. Okay. We can work around that! Human beings and their living, breathing animal pets will always need to eat, so there will always be jobs for chefs and restaurant owners. Human beings will always want a stiff drink at the bar; increasingly so, I believe, despite the rumored demise of bars; maybe I should open a bar. We will want and need all sorts of other consumables, including fresh flowers, so there will be jobs for florists. We will want good cheese: Stilton and Morbier shall not perish from this earth! We will want “experiences,” so perhaps the wisest among us will invest in companies selling sunny October afternoons at the pumpkin patch or mornings of beachside yoga complete with incense. I personally believe hoteliers have a bright future ahead.
But how are we all to live joyfully and fully in the physical world when we have endless possible virtual worlds to inhabit? When will humans catch up with events (for lack of a better euphemism for the current shift in human consciousness) and start intentionally choosing to set aside hours and days for being in the natural world, for being among other humans? Are we going to start doing that soon?
One of the first uses that generative A.I. has been put to has been to start writing dreck: writing bad press releases, writing sappy college-admissions essays, writing polished but annoying letters to the editor, writing endless posts littered with faux-literary incomplete sentences for wellness-oriented women seeking to express themselves publicly on Facebook. But, ironically, I feel comfortable reporting in late 2026 that I’m not worried that A.I. is coming for my job, personally, as a writer.
I may not be able to monetize my work as a writer at this particular juncture in human history, and may be in the poorhouse as a result, but I feel my calling, as such, is safe. It doesn’t matter how wonderful A.I. will become at producing more and more impressive writing. Because what a writer does is reflect an individual human consciousness, in words strung together in ways that other humans may relate and respond to, and no one can take that away from me. The whole thing about being human is that we are — each and every one of us, and this is the crux of the miracle — unique. “Original, spare, strange,” to quote the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. It’s the most profound mystery that however many babies are born, billions and billions and beyond, no two of us are alike.
So we will always have art. A.I. cannot create actual art. It can create kitsch, yes, but it cannot fake Fred Astaire. Or Charlie Parker. It’s literally impossible, because their art reflects their unique humanity.
The whole thing about humanity is that we are a reflection of the literally endless multiplicity of nature. It’s the opposite of A.I., which is the great homogenizing force. So I may use run-on sentences (intentionally!) and I may allow myself to go on a bit too long, sometimes, tipping over into the boring-blowhard-column zone. But A.I. is never going to take my voice. Every one of us is a poet.
Indeed, I think it’s becoming more and more obvious that human faultiness and human quirkiness – humans’ fallible humanness — might be the only currency we still hold. Our individuality our only value remaining. To quote another great poet, Ira Gershwin, “You can’t take that away from me! No no, you can’t take that away from me.”