I was sitting on Swamp Rabbit’s porch, annoying him with a new complaint. 

“The traffic was bumper to bumper. I was trying to get to the Schuylkill Expressway entrance, but the FedEx van next to my car wouldn’t let me switch lanes. I rolled down my window and shouted to get the driver’s attention, but the van kept creeping forward, and I realized there is no driver, just an empty driver’s seat and a steering wheel that had a mind of its own. There was no one to shout at.”

“Lucky for you,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Road rage don’t help nobody get nowhere.”

“I wasn’t raging, I was trying to communicate. But it’s impossible to reach the artificial intelligence network that controls driverless vehicles, just like it’s impossible to get past the customer service robots on the phone when you have a problem with your cable bill or phone service or whatever… AI rules.”

He told me to chill but I was just getting started. The No. 1 priority for corporate overlords is to maximize profit, and one way to do this is by replacing human customer service with AI. You don’t have to pay bots and they’re unaccountable for their lousy service. It’s much cheaper to hang a customer in a phone tree for an hour or refer her to a FAQs site (they never address the right questions) or a chatbot or a “help desk” than to provide live human help.

“Have you ever tried to get help from Microsoft Word? ” I said, still ranting. “What a scam.”

“What’s your point, Luddite?” my tipsy neighbor said. “What’s all this got to do with them driverless cars?”

The point is that driverless vehicles are the next frontier, I told him. In the not-too-distant future those sixteen-wheeler on the highways will have phantom drivers, and so will Uber taxis. AI is even writing code, taking the place of human programmers. It writes pop songs and novels and term papers. It’s perfecting Japanese sex dolls. It has already replaced most supermarket cashiers, even as food prices keep rising.

“Humans are on the way out,” I said. “Pretty soon ninety percent of them won’t be good for anything but picking apples in California — if there are enough immigrants left after Trump’s purge, that is — or emptying bedpans in nursing homes.”

Swamp Rabbit poured himself a shot of Grand-Dad and said, “You’re depressing me.”

“You depend on me for that,” I said. “It gives you an excuse to get plastered.”

Footnote: I think Jeff Bezos has used AI to replace the editorial board at Washington Post. What else could explain the board’s 180-degree shift to endorsing much of the MAGA agenda?

Follow-up: I’ve been trying to trying to find someone at FedEx who might confirm the presence of a driverless van on Philadelphia-area roads. No luck so far. Swamp Rabbit says I must have been hallucinating.

Another: And don’t tell me that jobs created by construction of AI data centers will make up for the damage these monsters will do to the environment, or for the jobs being lost elsewhere.