Sometimes a dog just needs to bark at a train going by in the night. Way far away. But the dog has to bark.

One of the reasons I can confidently predict that there will be a transformative change (for good or for evil) in our civilization very soon is that I have a functioning memory, and I can see things and note the changes through time. For example…

When I was 14 in 1981, I had a job bussing tables at Pojos, a classic diner in Odessa, Texas. I remember how things were then – how people behaved and how they interacted – and I have noticed and noted the changes from then until now. Of course, the customers at Pojos in 1981 didn’t have electronic devices that they stared at all day. If they were sitting at a table reading, it was a newspaper they were reading. But most people sat and talked with one another. People could conversate. Maybe it was inane or mundane conversation, but they were able to engage one another in discussions and ideas.

The ability to ideate – to conceive of a thought or idea about something and express it – was universal. Everyone wasn’t neurodivergent and “suffering” from some mental affliction that excused unsocial or antisocial behavior. I’m not beating up on the people of today, I’m just, in a very meta way, noticing something and expressing my opinion about it. (Do you see what I did there?) This is not to say that people were “righter” back then, it is only to say that people had opinions (most people) that they were forced to form for themselves and to express them openly. I mean, if you went to lunch at Pojos with a friend, you couldn’t just sit and stare at them if they asked you what you thought about the Ayatollah said.

Don’t take this as a “things were better back then, and everyone today is stupid and get off my lawn” speech. It’s not that. Well… it’s not ONLY that. My point is that the mass man today does not have the capacity for ideation. His ideas and opinions are given to him – poured into him from outside by idea people, meme mills, and opinion factories. His ideas are based on what channel he watches, and the influencers to whom he listens. He has had no recourse or instruction in expressing those opinions other than to copy/paste and/or hit the “share” button to express himself. He has opinions about sports or politics or fashion or music, but mostly these opinions do not have their fountainhead inside of him. They came at him and he has repackaged them and shared them. You say, “that ain’t me,” but if I speak generally of 95% of the population, 75% will say “that ain’t me” and the other 25% will admit not understanding what I’m saying. If you give people a 1% out, they will all take it.

So, at Pojos in 1981 the old folks were talking about Reagan getting shot, and his recovery, and whether it was really the Russians or the CIA behind it, but what they thought or how they expressed it generally came from their own brains. There was news, but the news was mostly about what happened, and only the Sunday shows were opinions about what happened. Somewhere along the line, the Sunday opinion shows became the news, and everything from sports to music became opinion factories. It’s not about the beef between two rappers, now you get “what to think about it” with the music and the latest news about it.

The information most people have has been given to them in memes. They laugh or cry or emote in some way, then they hit “share” or “block” and the virus imbedded in the meme is now in their brains. They think they are thinking, but they are not. They are a receptacle of other people’s ideas and thoughts, and the number of people producing ideas and thoughts is getting smaller every day. AI will finish off all of them.

The result is that people have become zombie terminals, obediently copy/pasting memes and opinions formed for them by someone else.

And here is where I’ve been going with this. This trend will multiply at an exponential rate now that whatever we are calling “AI” exists and is available as a handy button on every page and text box.

I hope the Brownwood News people aren’t reading this, but… they won’t need me anymore. I don’t use AI to write what I think, or to clarify it, or to rewrite it. I don’t put search terms into OpenAI or whatever and have it write my articles for me. I don’t plagiarize things I’ve seen online and copy/paste them as my own. Why would the Brownwood News or anyone else pay me to ideate and opinionate when they can put “write a 500-word non-offensive article on why downtown revitalization is cool, and please do not insult people or call them stupid” into a search box and the result, though full of stolen material, most of it likely wrong, will fool 99% of the public?

And how does this steamrolling fact indicate that we will soon see a transformative change in our civilization? Because a nation – a world – of useless, idea-less, thoughtless idiots is exactly what the devil wanted in the garden. By promising humans that they will “know good and evil”, which is to say, they will be able to determine on their own what is good and evil without some deity forcing a moral code on them, the serpent knew that man would go about for as many millennia as necessary trying to dethrone God. The only way to accomplish it is the same way Napoleon hoped to rule the world. You need one guy or a handful of oligarchs in charge, then build an army of thoughtless, idea-less automatons who will follow instructions and invade Russia in winter even if it is a bad idea.

I might have digressed, but you get the point. Or do you?

Our civilization – Western Civilization – was designed for thinking people. By contrast, the autocracy being foisted on us was designed for prison populations – for people made willing to stamp license plates for room and board. The room and board are just nicer.

Those people eating eggs sunny-side-up at Pojos in 1981 weren’t geniuses, but they could tell you what they thought about the Soviets even if they were wrong. They could read a book, and they did.

Now, someday soon, even the ideas they get poured into them will be congealed and pirated nonsense slapped together by software and gate-kept by walking blue-haired tattoos who operate presidents like puppets. Presidents will parrot what is on the teleprompter and even if they do it wrong or poorly no one will care.

I’m the canary in the mineshaft, Y’all. AI wants my job, and one day Skynet will be the one behind the keyboard.

Listen, God is still in charge, but that doesn’t mean I can’t bark at Babylon’s fall.

Y’all have a great day.

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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear on Wednesdays and Sundays on the website.