Solving the problem every student faces in the 21st century, written on an old-timey typewriter.
Ben Taylor (he/him) // Crew Writer
Scarlett Side (she/her) // Illustrator
The biggest problem facing college campuses today is AI (artificial intelligence). As students, our goal in higher education should be to actually learn, not just get some robot to spew answers at us. Those developers over at OpenAI are trying to poison the brains of this generation, to turn us all into robot cogs in their corporate robot machine. But, this goes much deeper than just AI. To get to the root of this problem, we’ve got to go back, wayyyyy back.
Picture this: you and your 11 siblings live on a farm in Pennsylvania. You wake up to the sounds of roosters crowing every morning and the sun shining through the wall’s wooden planks, as you run downstairs to have a delicious breakfast complete with fresh eggs and oats. You do your daily chores: milking the cows, tilling the fields, sowing seeds, etc. In the afternoon, your Pa takes you into town in the horse-drawn buggy to trade fresh eggs for fabric patches to fix Ma’s quilt. Doesn’t that sound nice? Then, one day, the devil personified comes into town, waving around his latest invention to trick you into giving up your honest life. His name: Nikola Tesla. He says he has this new great invention; electricity, but does anyone even understand how it works? I mean, you’re tellin’ me a bunch of invisible energy passes through a big cord and then it makes lights go on? I don’t buy it for a second. But, many do.
Suddenly, all the houses on our streets are filled with blinding fluorescent light, and people no longer go to sleep when the sun goes down, unknowingly cursed with their own artificial sun. One thing leads to another, and pretty soon everyone becomes obsessed with this new ‘technology.’ But, what is electricity really meant to do? Was Tesla just trying to help humanity out of the goodness of his heart? Universities—once places of higher knowledge—are now places full of electricity worshippers. No one even knows how to write with a pencil anymore; everyone is using these magic boxes to do assignments. Not to mention, the place is crawling with these lights. I mean, they are just everywhere. We’ve gone from doing things the way of the land—by hand—to getting machines to do everything for us, in the classroom and on the farm! I posit that Tesla and his electric cronies created electricity to control our minds.
Electricity is the root of all our problems. If we at Capilano University were to shut down our breakers for good, I guarantee there would be an increase in intelligence, livelihood and dark rooms around 7 p.m. AI would no longer bother us in the classroom. We could live the lives we were supposed to live, free from the shackles of electricity. Let’s go back to our roots. Let’s go Amish.
