My father kept his diploma in a drawer with the spare fuses and the takeout menus.
He was told to go to college. Everybody his age got told the same thing. Learn something useful, get the paper, and you would be set for life. So he learned to run one particular machine in one particular factory. A big grey thing that stamped metal. He was good at it. Thirty years good at it.
The machine was not his. The factory was not his. What he owned, at the end, was the knowing-how. And the knowing-how only had a price inside a building somebody else built and locked up at night.
Nobody sat him down and explained the deal. It came dressed as advice. Warm advice, from people who wanted the best for him. Learn this skill. It will make you employable.
And it did. It made him exactly as useful as the owner needed him to be, and not one inch more.
That is the quiet part of go to college. The skill they tell you to learn is the skill that makes you useful to them. It was never a gift. It was a job posting with the wages left off.
He never questioned it, and I don't blame him. It was true. It fed us. The paper worked the way they said it would, for a while, in a town that no longer makes anything.
I hear the new version of it now. Learn AI. Same sentence, wearing a nicer watch.
It comes from richer people than the ones who talked to my father. Men who own the buildings the machines live in now. The buildings do not stamp metal. They hold rows of computers in a cold room and hum through the night. Every question you ask runs through them, and it costs a small coin, and the coin drops into a pocket that is not yours.
Learn AI. Get good at feeding the machine in the cold building. You will be employable. It is true, the same way it was true for my father. It will make you exactly as useful as the owner needs.
I use the tool. It is on my screen most days and it pays part of what I live on. Turning it down because you can see the trick behind it would just be a slower way to lose.
So this is not about the tool.
It is about the sentence. Every time somebody with money stands in front of people without money and tells them which skill to go and learn, there is a machine behind it, and the machine belongs to the person doing the talking. Go and learn the skill. It is real, it will feed you. Just know that the sentence was written in a room you have never stood in, by people counting something you will never get to see.
I heard it again last week. A café in Chiang Mai, the good kind, a ceiling fan going, an iced coffee leaving a wet ring on the table. Two guys at the next table, mid-twenties, one showing the other a clip on his phone. A man in an expensive room was saying the future belongs to people who learn AI. They nodded at it the way you nod at a thing you have decided to believe before you understand it.
One of them said he would spend the weekend learning it. The other one asked him, learning what exactly. He did not have an answer. Most of the people saying it don't have one either.
I wanted to say something. I didn't. They looked happy, and I was the older guy sitting alone with a coffee, and nobody wants a sermon from that table.
My father retired the year the factory put in a machine that needed one man instead of six. He was one of the five. They gave him a clock on his way out. An actual clock, for the wall, with the company name printed on the face. He hung it in the garage where he could not really see it from the house.
He never learned to use a computer. Not out of pride. He just never got around to it, the way you never get around to some things.
He asked me once what I did all day on mine. I tried to explain it. He nodded the way people nod when they have decided the answer no longer concerns them.
I never found out if he made his peace with any of it. He was not a man who said.
I think about him when someone tells me to learn AI. Same advice he got. Bigger machine. And it still sits in a building I do not own.
Andrew - No Refunds •••