[Host, wearing a large name tag which says, “Hi, I’m Steve.”]

Welcome … welcome … it’s “remember the Jims” night at the Ditbit Detox Zone. No TEDx here – no intersection of latte art with quantum physics … just a place where – phones are off, right? – there’re spirits and Memorex vibes – are they live, or … ? … Just … who’s this guy!?

[AI-generated Jimmy Hendrix style rift plays loudly on a phone.]

[A geeky looking guy – Henry – stumbles onto the stage, out of breath, holding out a phone.]

[Henry] Steve, Steve … I’m ready to share my new song …”

[Steve] Henry, that’s tomorrow night …

[Henry] But, what if I told you that a machine could feel heartbreak before you do?

[Steve] How’s that?

[Henry] Well, I study the intersection of predictive text transformers and dopaminergic pathways in the human prefrontal cortex.

[Steve] Really … [winks]

[Henry] “Yeah, three years ago, my partner left me. I was devastated. I sat in my studio with nothing but an empty coffee mug and an open API token for Suno AI. I prompted it to write a sad song about a broken dishwasher.

As the AI generated a minor chord progression, I felt a familiar shiver down my spine. That is when it hit me. The AI didn’t write a song. It reverse-engineered my nucleus accumbens.

I’ve got slides … one shows a brain scan of someone listening to Taylor Swift.

[Steve] Hmm … Is there a bottom line?

[Henry] Oh, well, when we teach an algorithm to write a bridge, we aren’t just automating pop music. We are building a digital mirror for the soul.

Because in the end, love is just a generative prompt, and humanity is the ultimate training data.

[Steve] That’s downbeat. How about a rain check? It’s a “no phones” night.

[Henry] Oh, sorry, … Do you validate?

[Steve] Sure.

[Henry exits, doing something on his phone.]

[Steve] Folks, that was Henry, a man with a dream.

[Applause?]

[Steve] Well, Henry’s rift wasn’t by Jimmy Hendrix, of course, but we do have a ‘Jim’ to muse on this evening: Jim Croce. Remember him? From a time when digital was like IBM punch cards and Polaroid moments took minutes to see. Croce wrote a song about talking with an operator on a coin-operated public telephone.

Here’s JP.

[JP walks up to the mike as Steve exits.]

[JP] Thanks, Steve. Jim Croce wrote his song “Workin’ at the Car Wash Blues” before there were ‘gig workers’ in a ‘gig economy’. It was a time in the South Bay when Howard Hughes loomed large, and Hughes Aircraft was on the path to becoming the largest industrial and private employer in California.

It was before the meme “fake it ’til you make it” went viral, before “greed is good” became a tagline for success; and before Silicon Valley powered up screens and social media & slop entered our dreams.

Wiki notes that Croce “explained the song as ‘a story about a guy who thinks he thinks he should be ruling the universe somewhere, but he is really working at a car wash.'”

Perhaps robots will take even those jobs. Is the bottom of the career ladder broken?

Here’s my take on finding a groove where you matter, where you don’t feel like a cog in a machine or a commodity.