The charm of this short essay lies in the fact that it is not really about artificial intelligence at all. It is about a much older phenomenon: the recurring mismatch between technological promises and technological reality.
Every generation has its own version of this story.
In the nineteenth century, one bought a steam engine and discovered that one also needed coal, water, spare parts, and a mechanic. In the twentieth, one bought a personal computer and learned that “plug and play” was mostly an aspiration. In the twenty-first, one asks an AI to transcribe five minutes of speech and unexpectedly embarks upon a pilgrimage through Homebrew, pipx, ffmpeg, command-line incantations, and software documentation.
The author’s real target is not AI but the mythology surrounding AI. We have become accustomed to hearing that neural networks are transforming civilization, replacing professions, and ushering in a new era. Against this grand backdrop, the stubborn reality of spending forty minutes processing a five-minute voice memo becomes inherently comic.
What makes the piece effective is its restraint. The author does not launch into a manifesto against technology. He does not declare AI a fraud, nor does he indulge in dystopian warnings. Instead, he simply reports events with the dry bewilderment of a reasonably competent person who expected a tool and received an adventure.
The funniest observation arrives near the end: the task could have been completed faster by using the operating system’s ordinary dictation function. This reversal exposes a familiar pattern of modern technological culture. We are often so fascinated by sophisticated solutions that we forget to compare them with simple ones. The newest tool is assumed to be the best tool. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it merely has a better marketing department.
Yet there is another layer beneath the humor.
The essay inadvertently reveals something important about the current stage of artificial intelligence. Despite the rhetoric of automation, AI systems frequently function less as replacements for human effort than as generators of new forms of work. The machine may perform astonishing feats, but it often requires supervision, troubleshooting, verification, and configuration. The result is not always labor eliminated, but labor redistributed.
In this sense, the story belongs to a long tradition of technological satire. It recalls the observations of writers who noticed that every labor-saving device eventually creates a new category of labor that nobody anticipated. The bureaucracy of modern computing may differ from the bureaucracy of government offices, but the underlying principle remains strangely familiar.
The closing image of ChatGPT drawing flattering caricatures of itself is particularly apt. It captures the peculiar narcissism of our technological era, in which machines are expected not only to solve problems but also to participate in the performance of solving them. The AI becomes simultaneously tool, assistant, mascot, publicist, and occasionally comedian.
The future, it turns out, has indeed arrived.
It just arrived with a dependency chain.
Mr. Dependency