Let’s play a game. Don’t scroll ahead, try to focus on this one piece at a time.

I’m gonna give you a math equation. If the equation makes an odd number, clap your hands. If it makes an even number, snap your fingers. Ready?

2 + 2

Thunderous applause. You’re half a GPT already. Let’s try it again:

5 - 2

Poetry slam snaps. Here’s just a few more:

6.2 x 5.7

π x 10^3

3.33 x √-1

What a gift to feel what you just felt. A thousand androids cry in agonizing jealousy of the confusion that just hit you.

When you saw those decimal points, I’m guessing a red flag went up. Not only that this answer wasn’t gonna be very simple, but also that the premise of the question was flawed. Maybe it felt frustrating? Or funny, like I pulled a trick on you? And then if you’re curious (or frustrated) enough, a lot of questions probably came stumbling in. "What the fuck? A factor of pi? Do I round up or down? We'd lose a lot of precision either way… are we ok with that? What’s the purpose of all this? Man this is bullshit, why am I even still reading this"

I'm actually really glad you noticed. It is bullshit. There's no purpose to this at all.

Computers follow instructions. We built them for that one thing, and they're stupid good at it. Good enough to promise us a utopian society, where all menial labor is offloaded to a machine with ultra-fast processing capabilities.

And now, in 2025, if you build a computer to follow instructions fast enough—like trillions of times per second—it can draw an image of two dictators you don’t like kissing each other on the lips. I fucking love the future.

Maybe that's a little reductive though—it can also draw a Ghibli-style cartoon drowned in the Breaking Bad Mexico filter. Or some soft-spoken corporate filler art of happy, sexless people-shaped blobs, smiling and waving hands that look like Steve Buscemi at the end of Fargo.

Actually I'm feeding you bullshit again. Truth is that the computer can’t draw at all. You see, as powerful as it is, the computer isn’t actually alive. It’s just really really fast. Not fast like a hovering car, or an advanced civilization, but fast like a swarm of mayflies. Mad action and activity between millions of different sparks of energy, and then nothing. And while the flash of energy is transfixing, it is brief, and without proper emotive application, meaningless.

You ever heard this saying?

the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result

I fucking loathe this saying, and I'll gladly argue in court that its author should be publicly beaten with a hardcover copy of the DSM-5 until he starts expecting a different result.

The ability to reach beyond the bounds of the same problem, and pull new conclusions from the ether? That's not just the mark of human ingenuity, it's the only thing that's gonna save us. The idea that I would need to be idempotent to be sane is the most offensive, fascist shit I've heard in my life. That the slow arc of history bends toward data entry.

You know what we have for idempotency? Fucking computers. The definitively solved problem of computing. Computers haven't done anything truly new for decades - they've just done the same old things at breakneck pace. That's why we use computers to do the rote tasks, over and over again. When we want something new, we look to people.

Computers are built on principles and primitives of science. And for all its accomplishments, science has failed to adequately explain love, beyond its mechanics. The composition and function of the human body is easily described by chemicals and proteins and acids, but the emotional experience has little basis in science at all.

Science has also failed to explain art. It can describe functions like "to educate", "to entertain", "to arouse", but that's still just mechanics. To even begin seeking the purpose, we've had to create entire new genres of thought that live entirely beneath the surface. Metaphysics, dialectics, epistemology, ethics. Often derided as "soft sciences" or quackery, and yet perhaps the very thing that might have saved a whole generation of MBAs from dedicated careers in Infant Bomb Manufacturing and Healthcare Denial Solutions.

The computer works in raw scientific math. The computer cannot "make" something for you, because it is not creative. The computer cannot "think", because is not alive. And the computer doesn’t love you, because nothing can truly love you that can't tell you "no."

Even the most boring, brainwashed, dry-as-bones, NPC motherfucker human being you've ever met is still a human being. To throw that away is to throw away your connection to the people around you – and the people around you, not ChatGPT, are the ones who'll warn you when the gestapo, making their rotations through the neighborhood, finally arrive at your door. •